One interesting thing to me I the comments to the original article was the mentioning of the weird "have got" instead of just "have" you learn in European schools. I hadn't thought about it since I started learning English I school in Germany many, many years ago. I think even the teachers dropped that in later classes. But I remember always having to say stuff like "I have got an apple" instead of just "I have an apple". I live in the US now and have never heard that and also don't recall ever having heard that in the UK either. What's up with that? Sounded like BS even to my fifth grade self who knew nothing about English.
Wow. You have made me remember that I also learned it like that at school. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that since school (maybe once in a blue moon, but it seems to be really infrequent), so I just forgot about it and say "have". It would be interesting to have the opinion of native speakers on this.
For the record, I'm now learning some Mandarin Chinese and apparently this kind of phenomenom is even stronger in that language (I say "apparently" because my Chinese level is still very basic, but that's what people who know more say). The first word you learn when studying Chinese as a foreign language is 你好 (nihao) for "hello", but apparently no one says that in China in real life, and the same goes for 你好吗？(how are you). There is also a controversy about a tone which is taught as a falling-rising tone but it doesn't actually rise unless the syllable is pronounced in isolation (and you hardly ever pronounce a syllable in isolation in real life...)
Weird stuff. I wonder what similar absurdities foreign students of Spanish (my native language) are subject to :)
People do say "你好" in formal, like "How do you do?" such as greet someone who just met for the first time. "Hello" is more like "嗨", casual greeting.
Having said that, learning spoken and writing English are hard for countries that have complete different language system such as Japanese and Chinese, Korean etc. Two reasons:
First, there’s no argument that they all have completely different style of writing and pronunciation. Nothing to piggyback on like Dutch or German. The English teacher in my school doesn't even speak good English, more like "Chinglish" as we mostly emphasize in writing. Many do write English well but have hard time communicate verbally. That’s a BIG problem.
The second thing is that the in the old days, kids don't get to learn English until in middle school. The best time to learn language is when one is still very young. It then becomes a second nature rather than a skills to master later in life. I think that it's different now. Kids are learning English early in school now. However, they don't get to practice outside of school.
No one would ever say "have got", it's the sort of redundancy that naturally gets distilled down to the minimum required in everyday language.
I imagine this sort of focus on technically correct but functionally useless things is pretty common when studying languages. I took a few years of German in school, and literally 25% of our time was spent memorizing the various forms of der and matching nouns to them. I haven't been to Germany, but my understanding is that you won't get laughed out of too many rooms if you use die when you should have used den.
I didn't keep up with the language, and I can barely understand even basic German at this point. I do still remember my der/ein charts though. I'm not really convinced that was the best use of my time.
I never say "I have got an apple", but also hardly ever say "I have an apple". I virtually always say "I've got an apple", or even "I got an apple" if talking really quickly and informally. I'm from New Zealand.
Now that you contract it like that I think I hear people say it all the time in the US and also use it myself, but never the non=contracted form. It's amazing how much of language usage is outside of our awareness. I guess it's all "system 1" as Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow would call it.
What? "Have got" is used all the damn time! What do you think "gotta" is short for? Most of the time you say "got", there's a "have" in front, especially in things like "I've gotten older".
