Wow, thank you. Ignorance fought.
Much simpler than the Wikipedia explanations of “non-finite verb form”, “a verb’s action noun”, “present participle (ending in -ing) and can behave as a verb within a clause”… whaaaa?!
I wish I could remember that. That, and how to multiply matrices. I just can’t remember which values go where. I use both enough that it’s annoying to have to look it up, but not enough to have it stamped in my brain.
I basically suck at learning by rote (or maybe I’m just too lazy), which is probably why I had such a hard time learning foreign languages. The only foreign language I’m any good at is English, and that’s more or less just because of American films & TV shows, and that when I was learning programming, the only decent books available were in English (or German, but mostly English).
It took me two hours to go through 15 problems with my daughter last night. I think she is going to be the same as you. She just doesn’t get long division.
Unfortunately, that’s wrong. It actually means 5, 6 times.
Is this an academic subject?
The internal combustion engine.
Seriously.
I have had NUMEROUS mechanically-inclined significant others and friends and acquaintances take me out to my car, open the hood, and spent the next hour or so explaining how this part works with this part and they both make THAT part do THIS thing…
It sticks for about 15 minutes, and then poof, like magic (or the gasoline in the internal combustion engine, I suppose) it vanishes.
Makes me a sucker for auto repair places, I’m sure.
I guess I never though of it that way, but the result is still the same. I just remember the elation of discovering that “times” actually could be applied in a way that made sense.
If you’re wondering about the distinction let me illustrate (with variables!)
6 * x can be written as “six times x” or “x, six times”, sure multiplication is commutative and you could write “x times six” or “six, x times” but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
“x, six times”:
x + x + x + x + x + x
“six, x times”:
6 + uh… wait, what?
(Of course, this is meaningless when using constants, 6x5 is the same as 5x6 in result)
“six, x times” makes just as much sense. It’s the sum of some number of 6s. How many, exactly? Well, it’s left unspecified; we’ve just called it “x”. It’s no problem that it’s left unspecified, any more than it’s a problem that the actual quantities being added in x + x + x + x + x + x have been left unspecified.
Maybe you could reversible placeholders for the “6” and “x” if instead you use summation (∑ sigma) notation. In the second example, the “x” would go on top of the ∑ and the “6” would go to the right. However, I’ve never seen a summation with just a constant on the right so don’t know if that is valid notation.
I simply don’t ‘get’ a lot of higher maths. There’s a simple reason for this - I stopped going to school when I was 12, and only went back when I was 16 - and then it wasn’t school, but sixth-form college, where I could choose which subjects to study. I passed GCSE maths, but that’s as far as I go. I don’t even really know what trigonometry is.
Have you ever tried the ‘beat it out on the table method?’ Uh, for syllables, I mean. 
How many times would you beat the table for the word ‘enough’? Syllables is just another way of saying ‘beats.’ Can you beat out a tune on your desk? Can you beat out the tune of the song line ‘I just can’t get enough’?
Of course, those are mostly good example of words that aren’t gerunds.
They help with spelling, music, creative writing and learning foreign languages.
Well, the first and third explanations are wrong, so it’s no wonder they don’t help!
I don’t get a lot of higher maths either. Or the middle maths. Or the lower maths. Basically, what I’m saying is I kind of suck at the maths.
I was simply illustrating the distinction, what you said is true but I was just showing why “5, 6 times” and “6, 5 times” aren’t the same concept with a convenient method to have to “accidentally” say “oops” in the explanation. It may not be EXACLTY true, but ti helps illustrate (just a little).
Yes, it’s perfectly valid (no point crippling general notation to prevent it from being used in trivial ways). But Jragon has clarified that his purpose was merely to help illustrate the distinction between “5, 6 times” [5 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 5] and “6, 5 times” [6 + 6 + 6 + 6 + 6].
<Raises stun gun and points it all the math people>
Don’t make me use it. <snarls>
6x5 or 5x6 is still 30. GO AWAY with the rest of it. Chances are the poster will never need to appreciate the fine distinction. <fondles stun gun>
That’s for sure. I am, if I may say, awesome at grammar, but I was sometimes hampered at it just by the terminology. I could show you exactly what was wrong with the sentence but not what it was called. I got better, but it seemed to be more of a hindrance than was necessary.
I got accepted to an MA program in English without knowing what a dependent clause was. I knew what a subordinate clause was; what I didn’t know was that they’re the same thing.
Wikipedia articles on grammar are absurdly complicated. Everything in that article’s true, it’s just the third-year-college version where what most people need for this stuff is the straighforward normal-human version. There was some other concept in English I looked up once - I don’t remember exactly what it is - and the Wikipedia article, and other resources I found online, left me more confused than I’d started.
Here is the Wikipedia opening paragraph for “Noun”:
Now I’m not sure I know what a noun is.
It’s a tangent, but academic writing is quite often the worst writing you’ll ever encounter, every bit as terrible as l33tsp33k. Last year my alma mater, Queen’s University in Kingston, launched a controversial program called the “Intergroup Dialogue Program.” The jist of it was, according to the news reports, that students would be trained to intervene if they heard students saying anything objectionable about a race, gender, etc. As you can imagine, some were screaming “Thought police!” and some were saying “No, it’s not like that.” So I went to the Queen’s website, to the pages explaining the program, to see for myself.
I didn’t understand them. None of them. I am an educated man with way above-average skill at reading and writing English. My job requires me to be very precise in reading and understanding English at many levels of complexity. I’m no Einstein, but I know my English. I’m telling you right now it was absolutely indecipherable jabber; I honestly could not gather what the Intergroup Dialogue Program was. I assumed the problem was mine and went back a few times, and finally concluded that the pages had either been cobbled together by a committee of the dumbest sociology grad students in the world, or that they were deliberately written to defy understanding.
They read EXACTLY like Wikipedia articles on grammar.
I wonder, honestly, how many people in this thread have just never had things explained simply to them and think they’re dumb when in fact the person explaining it was dumb.
(Regrettably the program was terminated and the pages taken down because I’d love to link to them to show just how bad academic language can be. They were indescribably terrible.)
This is why http://simple.wikipedia.org is so good sometimes. Here’s their definition of a Noun:
Hooray! Something Jim in Accounting can understand! What simple wikipedia lacks in nuance and depth it more than makes for in being able to, you know, actually understand something. Wikipedia has gotten all kinds of bad, my old Biology teacher (who has a doctorate in some related field) wouldn’t even touch wikipedia pages on his subject because of how dense and unparsable they are.
Oddly enough the computer science articles seem to be better, and that’s not just because I know comp-sci fairly well.
Check out:
The definition may be a bit dense, but there’s not much you won’t understand if you scroll down to “Fundamental concepts.”
Well, as I’ve argued several times here, defining “noun” as “person, place, or thing [or quality, or idea, or what have you]” is both wrong-headed in its focus on what the word means, and so fuzzy as to be useless [Isn’t “hungry” a quality? Isn’t “multiply” an idea? Is there anything which isn’t a thing?]. The thing is, parts of speech are abstract syntactic concepts (which the layperson has little actual need for), not semantic ones; to determine a word’s part of speech, you don’t look at its meaning, but at where it can occur in a sentence. You don’t need to know what the word “masgord” means in “Well, the masgord is cause for concern” to see that it is a noun. The Wikipedia article on “noun” can be rather offputtingly abstruse, but I think the thing to do is to try to say the same thing more clearly, rather than resort to a popular but broken alternative definition on grounds of simplicity.
Funny, though. The distinction is really a grammatical/linguistic one, not really a mathematical one.