If I am speaking English as a second language or foreign language and I say, “My car breaked down, can you help me,” no English speaker would profess incomprehension b/c I said “breaked” instead of “broke”. Yet on FL tests in school so much is made of getting so-called irregular verbs and irregular plurals correct that significant points can be lost for missing these. The message to the student is that learning a FL is all about getting details like “broke” vs “breaked” down and not much else, like proficiency, communication.
That’s why when my French teacher wanted a member of her class to go visit a newly arrived French family, she sent the best student in the class and me, the former as a reward and me so one of us would talk to them.
Pat’s Polemics
On-going brilliance
