Responsibilities Form English: Fill & Download for Free

Either some complicated temporal pronoun magic or, more likely, none of them.This isn’t as straightforward a question as it looks. Grammar, as I’ve covered before, isn’t limited to the bastardized English-class sense of pre- and proscriptions like “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” or “use whom”; no, it’s more than that, it’s better than that: it’s every rule in a language that tells you how to use its words, whether they be as obvious as “say ‘I eat food’, and not ‘Eat I food’ or ‘Food eat I’”, or as inexplicable as whatever it is “the” means. Grammar is the blueprints to vocabulary’s bricks and mortar.What we want, what the question asks for, is the least useful of these rules. This is a fuzzy request, but I’ll interpret “most useless grammar rule” as the rule that conveys the smallest amount of information.First, we can’t consider uncommon grammar rules useless simply because they’re uncommon. There are twenty answers to this question; many supply “whom”, the logic being that, since it’s no longer widely used, it must be useless. This is neither how language change works nor a good criterion for uselessness: “whom” does carry quite a bit of information, telling you whether the thing you’re talking about is doing or receiving the action. If it’s doing the action (e.g., “He’s the man who saw me”, the man is doing the seeing), you use “who”; if it’s receiving the action (e.g., “He’s the man whom I saw”, the man is being seen), you use “whom”.(If you want to be fancy, you can flavour that description with words like “antecedent” and “accusative” to taste.)Second, inversely, we can’t consider grammar rules useless because they’re nonstandard or not used in formal language. Take, for instance, “gonna”, which is not a contraction of “going to” - or, rather, it is, but only when “going to” is used to mean “will”. You can say “I’m gonna do this”, or “I’m gonna do that”, in the same way you can say “I will do this” or “I will do that”. But you can’t say “I’m gonna the store”, or “He’s gonna the movies”, because in those contexts “going to” refers to literal movement, not to a future action.This means there exists a distinction between “gonna” and “going to”. A real, live conversation I once overheard between two athletes went as follows:Person A: I’m going to practice now.Person B: Oh, where?Person A: No, I’m going to practice. I’m gonna practice at practice.Had Person B correctly interpreted Person A’s distinction between “going to” and “gonna”, there would be no misunderstanding. Accordingly, “gonna” vs. “going to” is a useful rule, because it contains as much, if not more, information as “who” vs. “whom”.(This, by the way, is why there’s little support for the argument that one should use “whom”, or any other particular bit of grammar that’s on its way out of the language, purely because it helps distinguish meaning. If you’re to accept “who/whom” on that basis, you must also accept “gonna/going to”. Not many in the former camp are willing to adopt the latter.)Third, and finally, just to make things interesting, we need grammar rules that really are part of English. “Don’t split infinitives” may well win this title, as it imparts no meaning and in fact creates ambiguity, but said rule never existed in English, having been introduced by overzealous fans of Latin, where infinitives cannot be split because they are one word: “to eat” is edere; “to be”, esse. The rule was put into place top-down, so it never properly took hold, and so I’m going to disqualify it and similar rules.There we are: we want a grammar rule, formal or informal, which is in active use in English, and which was at some point actually a part of English grammar, that conveys the least amount of information. Now we can get to the part you wanted to know about.Let’s go through other answers to see what they have to offer:By far the most common responses are “Don’t end sentences with prepositions” and “Don’t split infinitives”. These are both great candidates for useless grammar rules, but as per the third rule which I just made up, they do not count as English grammar rules for the purposes of this question.One person answered “Never begin a sentence with a preposition” (emphasis mine), which may either be counted as a typo or as a member of the previous category.A lot of people described spelling rules, especially “I before E, except after C”. These are spelling rules, not grammar.A number for “who/whom”, but, as per its description in Rule #1, it doesn’t apply here.Three didn’t answer the question. One replied that they didn’t care about the question and to stop asking her about it. Another said “All grammar rules are useless”, to which I refer the reader to the first link in this answer.“Using the singular ‘they’”. Singular ‘they’ does contain information: it tells you that the gender of the person referred to is either unknown or unimportant, and, unlike “it”, that the referent is human. It’s hardly useless.A couple had “less” vs. “fewer”. These tell you whether the following noun is singular or plural: not necessary, no, but not without information. We move on.Someone just said “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”, which isn’t really an answer.There was “shall” vs. “will”, where “shall” tells you it’s either me or us doing the action and “will” tells you it’s someone else. This isn’t necessary, either, hence why the distinction is rarely recognized nowadays, but it’s not useless.And then that third-person singular verb ending “-s”, as in “He runs”, came up a few times. This tells you the one doing that verb is neither you nor the person you’re speaking with, and that there’s only one of them doing the action. Information! Yay!The one really good one comes from Robert Morrison, who offered the rule where pronouns require their oblique forms when the predicate complement of a copula. This is a healthy serving of techno-babble word-mélange; essentially, it means that a pronoun - “I”, “he”, “we” - turns into its object (“oblique”, if you want to be fancy) form - “me”, “him”, “us” - when they come after some form of the word “to be”. You say “It’s me”, not “It is I”; “That’s him!”, not “That is he!”.Specifically, these are the unmarked forms of these pronouns, i.e., the forms you use when you don’t have a particular role to assign a pronoun to. In most European languages, the unmarked forms are the same as their subject forms: you say “I go to the store”, where that I is the pronoun’s subject form; and you say “It is I” or “I too”, where those I’s are the unmarked forms. English used to have a similar system, and some still use it, but for most it sounds awkward and old-fashioned.No, gone are those days when every anglophone used a pronoun’s subject form for the unmarked. We’ve slowly been switching over to using the object form for unmarked pronouns: you say “The dog bit me”, where that me is the object form; and “It’s me” or “Me too”.The rule Robert describes is the rule where pronouns use their object forms as their unmarked forms instead of using their subject forms. “Me too”, not “I too”. And he is right. It conveys no information: what is made clearer by saying “It’s me” instead of “It’s I”? There’s little reason to say “Me too” instead of “I too” - except, of course, for that there is.What we’re seeing in this shift is English’s gradual complete loss of cases: word-forms, like “I” and “me”, that tell you what a word is doing in a sentence. English once had four cases across every word in the language; before that, it had eight. Today, we have just three cases, and only in our pronouns (“I”, “me”, “my”; “he”, “him”, “his”), and maybe the odd ‘s for possession. We’re slowly losing our cases. In another millennium, in another few centuries even, we’ll have none left.“Me too” may have no meaning on its own, but it has meaning - in the existential sense, not the dictionary sense; in the sense as that of your purpose as a human being, rather than of your occupation - beyond, when put with others of its kind. It’s one example of a glacial change towards an analytic English of no cases or verb endings. Its uselessness is its use: that simpler meaning is English’s future.Perhaps you don’t like this idea. You wouldn’t be the first. But English isn’t turning to verbal mush: it’ll become more like Chinese, where each word-bit stands on its own, so you literally say “Him go to the store”. Chinese, being spoken by well over a billion people, does appear to be a functioning language, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it.But that word-mush bit is interesting. You’ll sometimes hear that Chinese has no grammar. This is silly. It has grammar aplenty, but relating more to word order than to the European Latin-and-Greek grammatical tradition of prefixes and suffixes and every word made of lots of word-bits. Chinese never got rid of its grammar, and neither will English. Every faucet of English’s grammar pours useful rules; any that aren’t so useful, like “Don’t split infinitives”, have no place in the language, and so are strained out.Which, albeit unsatisfyingly, is the answer to this question. There is no useless grammar rule: all rules have meaning, or else we wouldn’t use them. You can’t come up with one that doesn’t convey some amount of information, however small, or else we wouldn’t use it. It’s why “Don’t split infinitives” et alia never took hold: they didn’t do anything useful, so we didn’t use them. Even something as superficially pointless as unmarked object pronouns has a use, that of loosening case distinction and bringing English closer to its future form, because, if it didn’t, we wouldn’t use it.If you want a quick answer, sure, them split infinitives’ll do it; if you want the real answer, unfortunately, there isn’t much of one.Thanks for asking!

They are not offended AT ALL. I speak fus ha wherever I go and I get nothing but respect and everyone understands me.It's true that sometimes people respond in dialect and it's tricky to understand them. But learning a dialect only helps you with that specific region.If you use one dialect in a different region, that is more likely to cause offense and sometimes confusion and they may not even understand you. Fus ha is universal. It is recommended to start learning a dialect after you're a strong upper intermediate in fus ha (standard Arabic). That will help you to understand people. Dialects are close to fus ha so when you learn the dialects you'll pick it up very fast and understand how they work and what their relationship is to fus ha.For example. Lee matha is why in fus ha. It's lish in eastern dialects and alaash in western dialects. Both of these words derive from Ala ayyi shay in fus ha Arabic.You'll piece the dialects together quickly and you can speak in fus ha and understand anyone's responses regardless of where they are and whether they speak back in fus ha or dialect.No-one will ever think bad of you for speaking fus ha. I have ten years experience.Also learning a dialect first is not the correct approach to learning a language. Would you start learning English by learning cockney London dialect or a Liverpool Scouser accent? We would find any foreigner bizarre if they started with a dialect. You start with the standard version of the language. That's the universal form.English had such success partly because it's one standard form of a language the whole world can use. So it creates a medium for people to communicate. For Arabic to thrive in the same manner it requires one standard form that everyone learns. Focusing on dialects will not increase the popularity or practicality of Arabic.From a learner perspective it's disheartening to find there are lots of dialects. And very off putting. Many learners avoided learning Arabic because of the prevalence of dialects.

Hey there, Rachel. Love Quora, though I came to it late. Riffiti is a mobile-only product, conceptually similar to Quora, but is different in these ways:-Like Quora you post a question or a topic in the form of a question typed on Riffiti. But the responses to the question can be posted only via 20-second videos directly from the app.-Anyone and everyone can post the response and together all such responses form a sort of a continuous stream of video riffs, as a riff stream. Each riff stream is anchored to its associated question (same as in Quora.)-The core idea behind Riffiti is to create a place where people can provide personal perspectives with quick, easy to digest, 20-second video responses, with emphasis on elaboration in their own words.-Riffiti is not meant for answers that you can Google, though there's nothing that prevents one to do that.-I'd say one of the most important features of Riffiti is that even if one doesn't know English language, one can use it (video doesn't care what language you speak, right?). So if you'd rather speak in Spanish or Chinese or an Indian language, you can do it on Riffiti and someone in the stream will usually help translate it for the English-speaking community. That should do it for now. Thanks!