IMO, to be fluent is to purposely use incorrect grammar

This should be “Which school did you attend?” or perhaps “To which school did you go?” But the entire reason that native speakers say “Which school did you go to?” is because “To which school did you go?” sounds like a one-time occurrence where you walked to a school, whereas the phrase “go to” is understood as a habitual attendance.

I do remember being taught some rather dated or pedantic grammatical things in school like not starting sentences with conjunctions (for example “But I didn’t do it”) or not splitting infinitives like the famous (to nerds like me) “to boldly go” from Star Trek. But I don’t think I ever got explicitly marked wrong for anything, and I also once had a professor erroneously try to correct me on my use of the word weaved - he thought it should be “wove”, but it’s actually more common to use “weaved” when talking about moving side to side while “wove” is used for weaving as in fabric. So I was actually right on that one. :stuck_out_tongue:

In any case, I think this really is more a matter of how you determine something is correct or incorrect to begin with. Languages are constantly evolving, and as others have pointed out there’s a difference between formal writing and casual speech. I think learning how to speak naturally is definitely a long process. Slang phrases have very specific connotations and situations where they feel appropriate, and while as native speakers of a language we have a strong understanding of that, as learners of another we typically don’t…

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Meant to do the second one. Thanks for catching that. Fixed.

Looks like the phenomenon is referred to as ら抜き言葉.

She’s not speaking “incorrect Japanese.”

What you learn in textbooks is not “a language,” it is a standardized dialect of that language. The “incorrect” speech that you’re talking about is also following linguistic rules – but they are rules for other styles or dialects of the language which you don’t learn in your textbooks. Native speakers know these rules even if they can’t verbalize them. You don’t, so you mistakenly think they are getting away with doing something wrong.

Here’s an example that’s (hopefully) less controversial than yours:

Standard textbook English:

Speaker 1: I didn’t do anything, I didn’t go anywhere, I didn’t see anyone.

Breaks textbook English rules but still sounds like something a human would say:

Speaker 2: I didn’t do nothing, I didn’t go nowhere, I didn’t see nobody.

There’s that robot again:

Speaker 3: I did do anything, I did go anywhere, I did see anyone.

Why are we okay with #2 but not #3?

Answer: #2 is still following grammatical rules! They are not textbook English, they are rules of a spoken English dialect that is very common in America.[1] Speaker #3 is trying to be cool and “break the rules” like #2, but #3 doesn’t know the dialect rules so they just come out sounding unnatural.

[1]Not relevant to the discussion, but the dialect is called African American Vernacular English, if you’re curious.

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“This is the kind of sentence up with which I will not put”
Not actually Churchill, but usually attributed to him.

That one really needs to be beaten out of people…

Like, “never split an infitive” (which is also not a rule)?

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Same with mixing up “your” and “you’re”, sigh…

Maybe: wrote “should of” => got banned from TikTok for a week would teach kids some grammar :smirk:

You know what they say about rules - you need to know them to break them.

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Indeed. In Japanese casual speech, you generally omit as much as you can from the sentence so long as it still makes sense. However, in order to understand the sentence, the listener needs to know enough grammar to know what was omitted.

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Can we use the same rule for people who say “literally” to mean “figuratively,” cuz we’re losing a really useful word here! If I tell someone I’m literally dying, I want them to call an ambulance, not say “haha yeah that was pretty awful, wasn’t it?”

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Hmm, I think it depends on the context. In your example it can be used as an exaggerated reaction to a good joke. Literally can’t be replaced with figuratively here.

I guess it’s hard to find a situation when you’d write “I am literally dying” and mean it.

But yeah, this word can be abused.

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Gets back from lunch to a bunch of notifications on post.

Awesome, I wonder what other common slang things people have heard.

Read through posts.

Oh. Must’ve accidentally posted in the English grammar forum. Oops.

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You accidentally used an English grammar example. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Yeah, I regret this entire post if we’re being honest. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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The OP reads more like a commentary on general fluency rather than Japanese fluency in particular

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One idea of fluency I’ve always had is “the ability to ramble.” If you can start a sentence without knowing how you’re going to finish and still finish it fine, you’re probably fluent.

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Unfortunately, it’s too late for that. It’s been used that way since at least 1769:

And it’s made it into the OED as a colloquial use of the word:

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I forget the actual name of it but as someone else pointed out “go to” in this case is a complex verb phrase meaning “attend”.

Which school did you attend? Which school did you go to?

A similar question came up when my friend was asking me about the grammar be-verb + “going to” + infinitive verb, future tense, and be-verb + “going” + to, preposition, present progressive tense.

I am going to eat lunch at Sukiya. I am going to Sukiya.

In the first example, “am going to eat” is a verb phrase meaning the future tense of eat. While the verb phrase of “am going” of the second sentence. The ‘to’ isn’t apart of the verb phrase in the second example. It is the start of the prepositional phrase “to Sukiya”. While the forms are similar they have different meanings in this case.

Also the never split the infinitive rule comes from latin and doesn’t hold up in English.

Sorry for being long winded.

Aye, but to confuse matters, it can also mean “I plan to eat at”.

Well I mean that is also true. The future isn’t set and it can change current plans.

How ever if you really want to get into the weeds of it, English doesn’t have a future tense.

Let’s all of us remember that linguistic rules are descriptive and not prescriptive. Gammar rules are a suggestion and you only have to look at poetry in any language to see that. Of course you have to learn the rules before you know what you can get away with. All that matters is if you’re understandable. And that can vary wildly by region. Grammar and vocabulary are alive and evolving constantly.

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