- Let's talk a little bit about
when incorrect grammar is actually
more correct.
(upbeat music)
Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening,
depending, my friends,
where in this big, wide world
you happen to be right now.
It's been a while since I said that.
I'm Julian Northbrook,
and this is Doing English.
Grammar, grammar, grammar.
Today, I'm gonna talk about
somewhat of a controversial topic.
Keep an open mind here,
and maybe you will learn something very, very useful.
So we're going back several years here,
but in one of the emails that I sent
to the Doing English daily newsletter,
the daily email newsletter tips thing
that I send out, well, every day, daily,
I wrote an incorrect chunk of English.
Oh my God.
I said in one of my emails,
"Something, something, something,
"there's people something, something, something."
I completely forget what the email was about.
What I was talking about, or in fact any of it.
All I remember is that I used the chunk,
"There's people."
A blatant grammar mistake.
(sighing)
Julian, you're not only a native speaker,
but you're an English teacher.
How could you?
And of course, and of course,
somebody, whose name I have now long since forgotten
felt the need to reply to that email
and point out my little typo.
"It's a mistake!" they cried,
"It's not 'there's people.'
"Are you really a native speaker?
"It should be, 'There are people.'"
Yeah, yeah, keep your pants on.
First off, we'll ignore the fact
that rather prestigious linguists
at the University of Michigan
did a great big study
on people like this who point out typos,
and found them to be of the, in their words,
of the "less agreeable persuasion,"
i.e. they found people who point out typos
to be twats.
We'll ignore that fact.
No, no, nothing, not holding anything against you.
But this is an interesting topic,
but like I said, it's somewhat of a controversial topic.
I want you to listen to this with an open mind.
Again, if you keep an open mind, you'll learn something,
and it'll help you to learn grammar,
to use better grammar, and to speak better generally
if you can, again, keep an open mind,
and keep this in your head.
If, again, you're the kind of person
who is absolutely convinced
they fucking know everything about English,
even though you can put together
a single sentence when you're actually speaking,
well, you're wasting your time here.
But first, let's go back to this mistake that I made.
There's people.
You see, this is interesting,
because if you look in your grammar books,
you'll see that the rule is pretty clear.
Is before or after singular,
are before or after plural.
Yeah, I mean it's straightforward.
There's people, there are people.
Well, people is plural, therefore we put are
before or after people,
i.e. it'll be there are people,
there are people is the correct chunk of English.
However, there is a problem here,
a rather interesting problem to be sure,
but a problem.
You see, people like me
who are engaged in linguistic research
have at our fingertips a very useful tool
called language corpora.
Language corpora are essentially
huge, massive data banks of language,
and the ones that I'm using are around about
500 million words each.
That's a lot of data.
And this is really useful,
because we can look up certain patterns of English
and check for trends in how the language
is actually used by real people.
So what will happen if we look up
there's people versus there are people?
Well, if we look it up in American English,
this is what we get.
You see this little graph?
Interesting, right?
You can see straight away
that there's people is way more frequent
than there are people.
In fact, it's 24 times more frequent in American English
than there are people.
The incorrect there's people is 24 times more frequent
than there are people.
Perhaps this is, you know,
something to do with American English.
Perhaps Americans can't use grammar properly.
Sorry, Americans.
Is that the case?
Well, let's look it up in British English and find out.
Here we go, oh yeah, exactly the same pattern.
In British English, the incorrect there's people
is 32 times more common than the correct there are people,
and before you ask, yes, yes, yes,
this is exactly the same for all varieties of English.
Canadian English, Australian English, New Zealander English,
they all follow the exact same pattern,
the exact same distribution
of there's people versus there are people.
So what exactly does this mean, then?
That native speakers all can't use grammar properly?
Well, you could look at it like that, yeah,
but what you've gotta remember is that native speakers
for the most part aren't speaking
using grammar rules and vocabulary.
We store frequent chunks of language
in long term memory and retrieve them as is,
that's how we speak so fluently and so naturally,
and therefore to say that there's people is a mistake
doesn't actually make much sense.
We clearly can't put our foot down
and say there's people is incorrect,
because we very clearly see that actually,
statistically speaking, native speakers prefer
the incorrect there's people
to the correct there are people,
and herein lies the problem with grammar,
the way that it's taught,
and the way that people understand it,
and I'm gonna talk about this in detail
again in another video,
about how schools approach grammar,
and how that's really kind of screwing with your perception
of how grammar should be learned and used.
But it is extremely rare
that we can say something is correct or incorrect.
The reality is that there is almost
no correct or incorrect grammar rules, grammar patterns.
The reality is that grammar, correct and incorrect
actually lies on a gradient scale,
where we have things that are all
in this fuzzy grey area
of could be correct, but might be incorrect,
but actually people use it,
but it's technically not correct
according to the grammar books.
Again, it's very, very fuzzy.
Now, don't get me wrong.
First, I am not trying to defend typos
and to justify my own typo in my email all those years ago.
Typos happen.
My book, Master English Fast,
has three typos that I know of.
Look for them, consider it a treasure hunt,
but just realise that it is what it is.
We all make typos.
I mean, a lot of the emails that I send out
have typos.
My most recent book, Magnetic Chit Chat,
somebody already found one typo that I need to correct.
It happens, don't use it as an opportunity to get all,
"Ha, I'm amazing, I found this typo,
"and you're stupid, 'cause you made a typo.
"Look at me, I am so superior,"
'cause that just makes you look like a twat.
The other thing that I really wanna say here is
I'm not advocating learning incorrect grammar
or incorrect English at all.
Despite everything that I have just said,
I would still recommend that you learn
and use there are people
instead of there's people,
even though most native speakers
do actually use the incorrect version
far, far more than they use the correct version.
Why?
Because there's no point in going out of our way
to learn incorrect grammar.
I mean, it serves no purpose.
At the end of the day, there's people,
there are people, who gives a shit?
I mean, they mean exactly the same thing.
It makes absolutely no difference.
Neither sounds better nor worse than the other,
so you might as well just learn the proper one,
yeah, and use it.
I'm not trying to advocate learning incorrect grammar,
I'm not trying to persuade you that it's okay
to speak with incorrect grammar.
You should be striving to speak
in the most accurate, natural-sounding way as you can,
but the important this is is to know
that grammar ain't black and white.
It ain't right or wrong, correct or incorrect.
It doesn't work like that.
I'm gonna do some more videos on grammar,
'cause this is quite an important topic.
I think in the next one, I'm gonna talk really
about should you learn grammar,
and then about how you should go about learning grammar,
because I can guarantee that what 99.9% of you
have done, and are doing,
is not the effective way to go about improving your grammar.
In fact, what you are doing now
if you are learning and using grammar rules
or studying grammar rules,
you are probably making your English worse.
You are probably making your life much more difficult.
Anyway, that's gonna be a topic
for future video slash videos plural, we'll see.
Before I go, I talk a lot about this stuff
in my book, Master English FAST:
An Uncommon Guide to Speaking Extraordinary English.
If you are an intermediate to advanced English learner
struggling to speak more fluent,
more natural-sounding, or accurate English,
and sound, you know, extraordinarily amazing when you do it,
you're gonna wanna pick up a copy of this.
It's available as a paperback,
it's available on Amazon,
you can read the first chapter for free,
and regardless of how you get it,
it comes with a complete audio version.
Link in the description,
or head over to MasterEnglishFast.com.
This, then, is me, Julian Northbrook
signing off from another video.
If you've found this useful, go ahead,
give it a thumbs up, leave a comment,
tell me what you think,
um, but, well,
oh actually, leave a comment, tell me what you think.
I was gonna say if you've got opinions,
keep them to yourself, 'cause I don't give a shit,
but oh, leave a comment, leave a comment,
I don't care, do whatever you want.
If you didn't find this video useful,
God knows why you bothered to watch it
all the way to the end,
but go ahead and bash that thumbs down button.
Now, if you're new to the channel,
subscribe, why not?
I publish a new video every day at 8 a.m. JST,
that's Japan Standard Time.
Uh, yeah,
we're done, goodbye.
(guitar music)
Before I go,
do you wanna know how to make
the passive grammatical knowledge
that you've already got in your head
active and usable when you actually speak English?
Check out this video, which will show you
step by simple step how to do just that,
and check out this video,
where I talk about which of the tenses
native speakers use the most frequently.
Go ahead, click away.