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Anonymous Posted 19 years ago
Grammar
"one of the terrible things of/in the war" - wrong?
Help me please. I'm an Assistant Language Teacher in a school in Japan, and a Japanese English teacher has run into a test-marking problem to which I'm not sure of the answer.
A question involved looking at a sentence in Japanese and entering the correct word into the parentheses:
That's one of the terrible things ( ) the war.
Students had already learnt this sentence in the textbook, where the appropriate word was "about". However, many students translating literally from the Japanese sentence, which (correctly) uses the possessive, have written "of". Some have also written "in".
I explained that "in" should probably be marked wrong since it involves the time-space boundary of the war rather than anything connected with it, but this is far too complicated to explain to junior high school students. In the students' answers I can't tell the difference between an educated guess, a literal translation of Japanese and a complete guess.
Whether or not to mark "of" or "in" as correct somewhat seems to be a matter of opinion, but I'd really like to hear someone else's. So, onegai shimasu.
A question involved looking at a sentence in Japanese and entering the correct word into the parentheses:
That's one of the terrible things ( ) the war.
Students had already learnt this sentence in the textbook, where the appropriate word was "about". However, many students translating literally from the Japanese sentence, which (correctly) uses the possessive, have written "of". Some have also written "in".
I explained that "in" should probably be marked wrong since it involves the time-space boundary of the war rather than anything connected with it, but this is far too complicated to explain to junior high school students. In the students' answers I can't tell the difference between an educated guess, a literal translation of Japanese and a complete guess.
Whether or not to mark "of" or "in" as correct somewhat seems to be a matter of opinion, but I'd really like to hear someone else's. So, onegai shimasu.
Top answer
Just go with 'about'-- it is the natural preposition here. If you start conisdering all possible answers in a Japanese English test, you'll go nuts.
- Just go with 'about'-- it is the natural preposition here.
- If you start conisdering all possible answers in a Japanese English test, you'll go nuts.
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2 Answers
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Just go with 'about'-- it is the natural preposition here. If you start conisdering all possible answers in a Japanese English test, you'll go nuts.
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