Indian grammar

I copied this thread to Story Research forum just in case any of the regulars there can answer. (The two threads can always be merged later.)

-Derek

I'm not sure how well I could do this, but if you let me know how long it is and want me to take a look I'll see. I'm not usually around Indians, but I have quite a bit of experience deciphering foreign English, so I might be able to at least lend a hand. As long as they're not to long (or you don't need them tonight) I can see what I can do. Just throw me a PM.

The problem isn't Indian grammar vs English grammar. The problem is that Indians are never taught English grammar; they're only taught conversational English.

I know this because I'm a tech writer for a company that, a year ago, sacked half the Western tech writers and moved the jobs to India. One of my primary job functions suddenly became supporting writers with a significant absence of key skills.

I have a team of one, and she and I have an exceptionally good relationship, so I have the privilege of asking her questions I'd be hesitant to ask just any Indian person. (Their culture is different, and you really need to have established a good relationship with someone before you can ask questions that have any kind of implied negativity.)

My teammate has a Master's degree in English Literature and was formerly a university lecturer in the subject. And she never, ever, not once...NEVER...in her entire education had the chance to take a class in English grammar. This wasn't because she didn't want to but because the subject is simply never offered, not even optionally. She (like many writers) has an innate interest in language and grammar, so she's done some self-study. But even her writing is very flawed in the area of grammar.

Anyway, as far as grammar goes. I asked her about the virtual absence of articles in Indian writing (within a corporation, I'm talking about). I mean, I see it all the time in specs written by Western programmers and technical sorts of people, too, but most of them still use articles in other contexts (such as writing e-mails or instant messages). So it doesn't surprise me that Indian programmers and technical sorts of people don't use articles in specs and such.

But even our Indian writers have a hard time seeing that the articles are missing when they copy-and-paste from a spec, and they don't add them in the way the Western writers do. They also often leave them out when writing from scratch. I asked my teammate if the native Indian languages have articles, and she said 'yes', which makes it even more mystifying to me why Indian writers miss them out.

It all comes down to education. If someone isn't taught to do something correctly, the chances of them doing it correctly are hugely diminished. Further, they won't recognise that they're not doing it correctly, so can't (ahem) correct themselves.

Obviously, there are Indian writers (fiction, nonfiction, even technical!) who do learn proper English grammar. I imagine that there are probably even some Indian universities that DO offer courses in English grammar. There is a ton of marvelous Indian literature written in English on the market. But when reading something from an Indian writer who hasn't achieved a professional level yet, you simply have to expect loads of grammatical errors.

If I were in your shoes, I wouldn't make the corrections in the manuscripts. Instead, I would make a list of the kinds of errors the writers are making and refer them to study English grammar, beginning with the rules for the errors you noted. This falls into the category of teaching someone to fish; Indian writers who want to break through in the Western market simply must learn the grammar rules so that they can be successful. Learning the rules and following them is going to serve them much better than having to rely on beta readers or pay professional editors to do the work for them.

ETA: Sorry, Stijn, I missed the part where you're on deadline, so this isn't as helpful as I meant it to be. I'll leave it, however, as I think it provides historical context to the problem.

Articles are also one of the last things mastered by foreign language speakers in general, which is why they are such a problem. I remember a teacher once showing us all the different grammar rules for when to use the word "the" and it's just insane. And memorizing the rules is just nearly impossible because you get so caught up in figuring out which rule/exception applies that you never get anywhere. It's something you have to pick up innately more than anything, and a lot of foreign speakers never get there, even when they have the training. I work with Japanese people who have studied English for years, lived in English speaking countries, and who still regularly mess up this aspect. Even if they have articles in the native language, they aren't necessarily used the same way with the same rules as the ones in English are.

I think it depends on which Indian language you're speaking of, and what kind of schooling the people you mention had.

Most Indian languages *don't* have articles. There is no referent for "a", "an" or "the". It's learned as part of learning English.
(Actually, what Hindi has is the use of "one" for "a" - so "one dog was sitting in the grass" would translate as "A dog sat in the grass." And "that" can be used for the definite article. But neither is used in quite the same was as in English.)

Many schools that use English as a language of instruction *do* teach English grammar (usually in 4th-7th grade); but the fact is, that's not how you learn to write grammatical English. You learn it from reading, writing, and hearing it spoken. And from people caring about it... which many people do not. In the corporate world I met a lot of senior people who wrote badly in the one language they knew, spelled worse, and were effective nonetheless.

My English, for instance, is quite grammatical; my Hindi is not, despite my having taken it for ten years in school, and being taught Hindi grammar. I just didn't use it enough.

The thing to remember is that for most Indians, English is a second language. It's India's lingua franca, but it's probably not the language they speak at home. So it's possible your MA English friend had studied English as a second language. Some people do that, and come up with excellent grammar. Others don't.

I'd be interested in knowing which Indian language she said had articles. (Did she understand that you meant "parts of speech" and not "essays on a particular topic"?)

Terie said:

The problem isn't Indian grammar vs English grammar. The problem is that Indians are never taught English grammar; they're only taught conversational English.

I know this because I'm a tech writer for a company that, a year ago, sacked half the Western tech writers and moved the jobs to India. One of my primary job functions suddenly became supporting writers with a significant absence of key skills.

I have a team of one, and she and I have an exceptionally good relationship, so I have the privilege of asking her questions I'd be hesitant to ask just any Indian person. (Their culture is different, and you really need to have established a good relationship with someone before you can ask questions that have any kind of implied negativity.)

My teammate has a Master's degree in English Literature and was formerly a university lecturer in the subject. And she never, ever, not once...NEVER...in her entire education had the chance to take a class in English grammar. This wasn't because she didn't want to but because the subject is simply never offered, not even optionally. She (like many writers) has an innate interest in language and grammar, so she's done some self-study. But even her writing is very flawed in the area of grammar.

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Keyan said:

I'd be interested in knowing which Indian language she said had articles. (Did she understand that you meant "parts of speech" and not "essays on a particular topic"?)

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I can ask her which is her native language, but since the topic of the discussion was explicitly why the Indian writers in our department (herself included) have such trouble withmissing articles in the technical documentation they submit for edit (that is, it was clear from the context of my questions that I was asking about parts of speech), I'm sure she knew EXACTLY what I was asking about. She even told me that afterwards she did a mini-training session with the rest of the writers on the proper use of articles.

She also told me (and I heard the same thing from another Indian tech writer of my e-acquaintance whose written English is exquisite) that the tech writing programmes in India don't teach grammar; they focus almost exclusively on tech writing software (FrameMaker, RoboHelp, and so on), with virtually no instruction on grammar, information design, audience analysis, and so on.

So while I have no doubt that there are some places here and there that do teach English grammar, I've heard from a number of Indians from different parts of the country that even people training to be professional writers aren't getting the instruction they need to be properly fluent in the written language. I can only assume that they are telling me the truth, because what point would there be in lying? (Not to mention that my sources for this information are people who don't know each other.)

Perhaps it's your experience rather than theirs that's exceptional.

BTW, I'm sadly monolingual and admire anyone who can speak and write in another language. But I have taken classes in two different foreign languages, and students were expected to contruct sentences properly, regardless of how different the grammar was from English. For example, German has 16 different versions each of definite and indefinite articles, and when you use the wrong one, you get corrected.

So I don't actually buy an argument that people who want to get paid for writing in English should get a pass because articles are different or non-existent in their native language. Believe me, if I moved to Germany and wanted to get paid to write in German, I would master all those many, many articles; I wouldn't expect an employer or publisher to excuse my poor writing because German isn't my native language.

I teach English (and studied second language acquisition in grad school) and one of the big things we try to do is discourage counting off for article mistakes. I actually cringe anytime I see someone do it.

I remember talking to a couple of teachers once (slight tangent here) because they had a test where the answer was "president" (lower-case). Some of the students had put it down as an upper-case letter, and the teachers were debating on which was correct. I explained that it depends on context and told them how to know, and said that it was something even native speakers have problems with. What really shocked me was that after this debate in which four teachers with years of training didn't know the answer, they were actually going to count off the students who got it wrong! I have no standing whatsoever, but you can bet I was standing up saying, "Don't you dare count them off for that!"

Anyway, point being language learning happens in stages, with some skills acquired sooner than others. Now, for very basic sentence construction yes, you can probably expect a student to get it right because you are taking a basic sentence and changing a few minor parts. But once you start getting a bit more complex, it gets much harder. In an ideal classroom, a student would be deducted for getting wrong what's being covered in class and extra errors would not really factor in. Ideally, you wouldn't even want to focus on correcting those things too much until the students were at a higher level. When kids are stuck trying to remember how to conjugate the word "to go," making them figure out if an answer should have a "the" or an "a" or an "an" just seems unfair.

I'm not saying that it should be excused for professionals necessarily, but even a foreign speaker with the best grammar is not likely to get this right every time. And it takes so much study to get things right (something like eleven years). Heck, I've been learning Japanese for six years, living in the country for four, and I still screw crap up all the time no matter how careful I'm being. If the only real problem is messing up "the" and "a", I'd think of that as an easy fix on edits?

Wow, we sorta derailed this topic.

The only way I know to do this is to write notes. "If you mean this (and you spell it out very clearly, in short sentences with no pronouns), then say XXX. If you mean that, then say YYY."

For instance, "If you mean Bobby loves Edward, and Bobby wants Lisa to be jealous, say it this way. If you mean Bobby loves Edward, and Lisa wants Edward to be jealous, say it this other way."

I run into this fairly often. Sometimes I have to go on the internet to find out if a certain technical term is a noun or an adjective! My brother teaches ESL to students who need to write engineering resumes and stuff, and that's pretty much what he does, also; except for telling them what to write. Since he has his students right there with him, he can ask whether they mean this or that. You can't do that, but maybe you can give them a choice.

kaitie said:

I'm not saying that it should be excused for professionals necessarily, but even a foreign speaker with the best grammar is not likely to get this right every time. And it takes so much study to get things right (something like eleven years). Heck, I've been learning Japanese for six years, living in the country for four, and I still screw crap up all the time no matter how careful I'm being. If the only real problem is messing up "the" and "a", I'd think of that as an easy fix on edits?

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Bolding above is the main point. Someone getting paid 3/4 million rupees per year to write in English for an English-speaking audience (US, Canada, UK, and Australia) ought, IMO, to be able to write in fairly standard English most of the time and not be 'still screwing crap up all the time'. (I don't get the idea Kaitie is trying to get paid for her Japanese writing. )

And the only real problem is far from regularly leaving out 'the' and 'a'; that's just one of many. Our Indian colleagues often can't achieve subject-verb agreement, don't punctuate correctly, misspell many words, write run-on sentences or fragment sentences, misplace modifiers, and so on. One of our better Indian writers average around 20 edit fixes per page, and that's being generous (that is, only fixing the most egregious of things). By comparison, the Western writers average less than one error per page, and those errors are mostly typos or bollocksing up on house-style, not plain ol' bad writing.

When someone whose native language isn't English corresponds casually, such as here or in e-mail or newsgroups and so on, I couldn't care less how correct their writing is. As long as they successfully convey what they're trying to say, I call it successful communication and am the last one to get pissy about it. I admire anyone who can do it, because I sure can't!

But if someone wants to get paid for their writing -- no matter what language, no matter if it's their first, second, or fifteenth -- I hold that person to a higher standard. If you want to get paid to do something, you have to do that thing at a competent level. No one would pay me for, say, carpentry, plumbing, or programming code.

Since I'm assuming that the editing Stijn is doing is for someone who either is or wants to get paid for their work, I do think this is somewhat relevant, tho, granted, it doesn't really answer his initial question. (I also saw in the other thread that some folks posted helpful web resources for Stijn, so I don't think it's necessarily wrong for us to take this off tangent a wee bit.)

I agree; people should either learn English thoroughly before they start to write in it, or they should learn to write well first in their native tongue. Except, of course, those for whom a sloppy, careless English learned from inattentive listening to street speech, TV, and movies is the standard. They simply need to learn English first.

I have an e-friend in India. In his forum I totally let my grammar pants fall off, so I don't sound like a shnob.

Nice derailation thread

Terie said:

Bolding above is the main point. Someone getting paid 3/4 million rupees per year to write in English for an English-speaking audience (US, Canada, UK, and Australia) ought, IMO, to be able to write in fairly standard English most of the time and not be 'still screwing crap up all the time'. (I don't get the idea Kaitie is trying to get paid for her Japanese writing. )

And the only real problem is far from regularly leaving out 'the' and 'a'; that's just one of many. Our Indian colleagues often can't achieve subject-verb agreement, don't punctuate correctly, misspell many words, write run-on sentences or fragment sentences, misplace modifiers, and so on. One of our better Indian writers average around 20 edit fixes per page, and that's being generous (that is, only fixing the most egregious of things). By comparison, the Western writers average less than one error per page, and those errors are mostly typos or bollocksing up on house-style, not plain ol' bad writing.

When someone whose native language isn't English corresponds casually, such as here or in e-mail or newsgroups and so on, I couldn't care less how correct their writing is. As long as they successfully convey what they're trying to say, I call it successful communication and am the last one to get pissy about it. I admire anyone who can do it, because I sure can't!

But if someone wants to get paid for their writing -- no matter what language, no matter if it's their first, second, or fifteenth -- I hold that person to a higher standard. If you want to get paid to do something, you have to do that thing at a competent level. No one would pay me for, say, carpentry, plumbing, or programming code.

Since I'm assuming that the editing Stijn is doing is for someone who either is or wants to get paid for their work, I do think this is somewhat relevant, tho, granted, it doesn't really answer his initial question. (I also saw in the other thread that some folks posted helpful web resources for Stijn, so I don't think it's necessarily wrong for us to take this off tangent a wee bit.)

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I totally agree, and yet I'm embarrassed because I was the tech support analyst for all 'Latino' countries, Haiti and Canada at a very large corporation. My Spanish and French aren't professional enough! But this was compared to them having to go through their own translators, and they preferred my bad grammar to that

Good times I wasn't paid for the extra languages, btw, so there's also that

backslashbaby said:

I totally agree, and yet I'm embarrassed because I was the tech support analyst for all 'Latino' countries, Haiti and Canada at a very large corporation. My Spanish and French aren't professional enough! But this was compared to them having to go through their own translators, and they preferred my bad grammar to that

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Ah, but that's completely different. Your job title was 'tech support analyst'. Writing is a natural part of that job, but it's not the number-one requirement. If one's job title is 'technical writer', the ability to produce written material at a competent level in the language in which one was hired to produce it is critical. In your case, it sounds like your skills were a 'bonus' -- for which you probably (and unfortunately) didn't get paid a monetary bonus, eh?

Not a cent No matter that problems were solved/found very quickly with our fast, unidiomatic communication, which is the point of tech support!