Of nouns and adverbs

I know only one language. I really, really wish I could speak a second language, but my innate sense for languages is even more poorly developed than my sense of rhythm. I have tremendous respect for anybody has who speaks more than one language.

For those of us who grew up speaking English as our first language, many of the rules of language are simply caught and don’t need to be taught. In all my years of teaching in The States, I never had to teach a lesson on ‘fewer’ verses ‘’less.’ No, no, Johnny. It’s not ‘fewer money’, its ‘less money’. ‘Fewer coins, but less money.’ Confusing, I know.

My colleague Fabian Tan speaks four languages: English, Mandarin, Malay, and Cantonese. As a Chinese boy growing up in Singapore he had to master English in order to get into college in The States. The difficulty of learning English for non-native speakers was driven home afresh for me during a recent conversation I had with Fabian. I don’t how we got on the topic, but we ended up talking about the order of adjectives. Despite the fact that I am English teacher, I had never really put much thought into adjective order.

But when you put together a string of two or more adjectives, there are rules governing their order. You successfully follow the rules every day even though you probably aren’t even aware that there are rules. For example, as a native English speaker you would never say “red big car.” It is always, “big red car” because one of the eight rules is "size before color."

Come up with some sample sentences that use multiple adjectives and see if you can deduce the rules. Go.

Okay, okay, I’ll save you the trouble. Courtesy of Fabian, the sequence governing adjective order are:

1) determiners (the, several)
2) judgments (lovely, boring)
3) size (big, tiny)
4) shape (round, square)
5) age (ancient, new)
6) color (red, chartreus)
7) origin (British, Sumerian)
8) material (silk, copper)

Without looking back at the rules, put these three adjective together in front of the noun. Brown. Big. Old. Book.

Did the order you put them in conform to the rules? Of course they did.

Can you image being a fourteen-year-old boy growing up in Malaysian and in between worrying about that new zit on your cheek and figuring out how to strike up a conversation with that cute girl in third period algebra without sounding like the biggest doofus in your class, you have to now memorize the eight rules governing the sequence of adjectives.

No wonder I’ve never picked up a second language, I am too busy still trying to figure out the first one. Hats off to all my Chinese friends and students who speak English way better than I could ever hope to speak Cantonese.

Hats off to my Chinese friends and students who speak English way better than I do.