I find myself thinking of scenarios where most choices would be correct. I play ____ the soccer team.
Pleased to meet you. I am an active sporty guy and 'I play in the soccer team'.
Pleased to meet you. I am a tick, a playful little parasite. I like to jump from person to person in small groups. Today, 'I play on the soccer team'.
Pleased to meet you. I am a playful infectious disease. 'I play inside the soccer team'.
Pleased to meet you, I am Lot's son. As you may have learned in a famous bible story, my mother turned into a salt statue while taking a casual glance at the destruction of Sodom. Less known is that she belonged to a soccer team and the whole team also turned to stone while in the middle of an important game. Today, the team has become a famous landmark and the grounds for a soccer school to which I belong. 'I play at the soccer team'.
This has to be best best comment I've seen about the project yet! You mind if I use this as an example for my students? (I mean, I will anyway. I just want to know if you mind.)
I thought the same, then decided to answer the questions with the assumption that I didn't require a tortured situtation to make something grammatical. There's always an edge case, but the quiz was looking for common use.
Also, where I am, a sporty person can either play 'in' or 'on' the soccer team, no parasite required.
15. Skipped this one due to a double-click, too much coffee
16. Even more lexicon stuff
17. Lexical selection, or 'what kind of thing needs a determiner?'
...okay this is tedious. My point was going to be that a lot of these, especially the syntactic construction ones, seem very specific. I don't know of any dialects of English for example that switch the assignment of roles (A speech delivered Bill, eg) so freely as some of these questions suggest, and I thought all dialects had passive construction and it-clefting. Maybe I'll go through again and answer all the wrong things and see where it thinks those features are from.
Anyway, this was interesting. If this sort of thing also interests you, waste the rest of your day on The World Atlas of Language Structures! [1] It's a ton of fun.
I noticed an instance where a collective noun had were after it rather than was. I.e "Apple were the largest NASDAQ company" rather than "Apple was the largest NASDAQ company". This is typical of British English[1].
Keep in mind that with surveys like this, especially online ones, it is important to have trap questions that will indicate if the responder is answering randomly and/or jokingly. So you may be correct that some answers are just wrong for everyone.
Interesting case study here: I got very different results in my two attempts at the quiz, based on how I use school grammar and generative grammar rules in answering the questions.
In my first attempt, the algorithm guessed that my English dialect was 1. Singaporean 2. US Black Vernacular 3. American (Standard), and it guessed that my native language was 1. Vietnamese 2. Chinese 3. English.
Then I turned off my school grammar, including some generative grammar rules (from linguistics) in my head, and just truly went with my guts. This particularly affected the answers I gave to later questions. The second time the algorithm guessed that my dialect was 1. American (Standard) 2. Canadian 3. US Black Vernacular and that my native language was 1. English 2. Norwegian 3. Dutch.
This second set of results was very much off the mark but conformed to what I intended my answers to be.
My background: a native Thai speaker, born and raised in Thailand, started learning a bit of 'real' English at about eleven, lived in the US for two years when doing my Masters. I'm currently in Thailand but I mostly read and write in English for about fourteen years. My everyday spoken language is still Thai, but most of the movies, music, multimedia I consume are in English.
Possible implications:
1. Over-application of school grammar could result in unnatural use of language.
2. With enough exposure to proper language materials, non-natives can get pretty close to the native speaker in grammatical knowledge, even fairly subtle ones, at least according to the short and incomplete quiz here.
If any American English native speaker has time on their hands, I'd be grateful if you can tell me the differences between my writings (you can click on my username for more samples) and those of an educated native American English speaker.
So in skimming your comment history, I'm no english teacher; your use of past tense seems almost forced.
While as far I'm aware correct grammatically, your last paragraph gives plenty of hints that you're non-native: "If any American English native SPEAKERS HAVE [picky] time on their hands, I'd be grateful if you COULD tell me ("let me know of" maybe) ANY differences between my WRITING [big one here] (you can click on my username for an archive of my comments) and THAT of an educated native American English speaker.
There may be subtleties in your sentence structure that you'd be better off asking a linguist about; but you definitely come off as both educated and non-native in skimming.
With respect to the sister comment, I'd have gone with writing not writings. Also, the sentence "I'm currently in Thailand but I mostly read and write in English for about fourteen years." doesn't strike me as quite right. There a tense switch from present to past without modifying the verb. I'd have probably written 'I've' instead of 'I'.
That said, your written English is excellent and I probably would not have noticed anything if I hadn't been looking for it.
Yeah, it told me my dialect is Singaporean and that I'm a native English speaker. Both off the mark, I started learning English when I was 8 and I've only lived a year in London when I was 26.
One of my favourite things to do in online forums such as Stack Overflow, where there are many non-native English speakers, is to determine where a person is from based on which grammatical errors they make. It’s more subtle than accent or other cues, but it is remarkably consistent.
I followed Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course on Coursera. The course itself was great, but halfway through I realized he had to be from Malaysia or Singapore, because he started talking about "alphabets" instead of "letters".
My old boss was once setting up a patient when he asked where she was from, "as I have a good ear for accents, but I can't tell if you're from Rhodesia or South Africa". Her response was "It is good - halfway through my childhood, we moved from Rhodesia to South Africa"...
I find it really easy to tell people who are native german speakers, based on learning german for years, and having had grammar drilled into me. I dont think there's been a time when I've picked up on it, and been wrong
One question in particular got me thinking that this quiz could also identify people with a scientific background, who read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, or in general people not inclined towards future shock:
They appear to list three guesses for variety of English for everybody who takes the quiz. They correctly spotted that I'm a native speaker of American (standard) English and listed the other two possibilities as Canadian (I do listen to radio from Canada, by rebroadcast on Minnesota Public Radio) and ebonics (which everyone in the United States hears sooner or later).
The guesses for my language background were spot on too. Like many Minnesotans, I have a few dialectal usages that reflect Scandinavian influence, and besides English as a first language, the other two languages guessed for me were Norwegian and Swedish. I have Norwegian ancestry (in part), so I come by those dialect habits honestly.
Hm. It guessed Finnish, Greek and Russian for my native language (German in reality) and a South African/Singaporean/New Zealand accent, where I have no idea how that could have happened – certainly not because I spent any amount of time in these countries (I didn’t) or consumed primarily content originating in these countries (also not the case, maybe apart from LotR…).
Finnish, Greek and Russian also don’t appear to have any connection to other Germanic languages…
Counterdata: I've lived in California my entire life, my only other language exposure in day-to-day life is Spanish, and I have no Norwegian ancestry or local connections. It still thought my second- and third-most likely native languages were Swedish and Norwegian. I'm guessing those languages have ease picking up "native" English.
Why would Australians say this? Is it because for them an exam is a "she"? (disclaimer: not a native English speaker myself, though the test guessed "American English (Standard)").
I clicked "She'll be right!" just to test if this was true and none of the results guess me to be Australian. I had originally thought the same as you did but was pleasantly surprised.
I finder interesting that they don't do a good job at breakin up no American English. We ain't just one big ole' dialect, ya know?
I hail from downeast Maine (downeastah) and it thought I was a native dutch speaker, some fucking horse sh## right there, let me tell ya.... My linguist friends can do a much better job at pinnin me, spot down to the county, after college and WITHOUT my tryin. Aight.
Seriously, might want get some pronunciation questions in there—at 314M people the US is a pretty big chunk that they group into only two (that I saw) dialects, ebonics and standard. Of course being a youngin and gone to school, I've probably picked up one or two outa townah habits in my talkin.
FYI I'm ampin it up, if haven't noticed; but I do talk this way around my "muddah" so I don't get muckeled up one side down the otha—still no idea what that means but it doesn't sound nice, maybe a slapping, bitching, no idea... but holy hell do I need a translator to understand my grandparents are saying, this isn't American standard down here (and why is it always down?)
The same is true of the other dialects as well, even good old Mother England's. Compare the ways in which the upper class and the chavs talk. North versus south. Different vernacular, different grammar types, innit?
That was very interesting for me, an Australian living in the US. Phoenix specifically. I'm constantly amazed at how quickly American's can spot that I'm an Aussie.
I've gotten pretty used to the obvious different words between Australia and the US; rubbish = trash, car boot = trunk, pram = stroller, take away = carry out / to go, etc.
However this quiz highlighted a bunch that I wouldn't have been aware of, such as no one in the US knowing what soft-drink is and nature strip wasn't even on the list for "the grass beside a road".
It was absolutely spot on for me. I grew up speaking native (Canadian) English in a Cantonese-speaking home in a Portuguese neighbourhood, and it picked up on all three of those exactly.
>Up the audience's expectations, the critics built.
I just got that sentence on asking if it were grammatical or not. I believe that is referred to as yoda grammar?
>Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
>1. Canadian
>2. American (Standard)
>3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
Number 1 is correct. However I would admit to speaking american, and I did listen to a lot of rap growing up, so ebonics might be reasonable? But I am a white kid from the rich suburbs, so it's a bit odd but possible I suppose.
Other: impossible to complete on iOS due to insane drop down boxes that don't allow one to make or even view the proper selection. So, I suppose, I'm in the entitled American group. Finally, popular.
edit: dead I guess? If anyone has showdead on and sees this, I'd be much obliged if you could take a gander at my history and theorize as to what got me banned. Email in profile. Thanks in advance.
None of the top three guesses are correct in my case, not even close. I wonder if this is because they have more data for Chinese and Portuguese (Brazil) speakers.
Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. South African
2. Welsh (UK)
3. New Zealand
Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. Chinese
2. Portuguese
3. English
I've noticed that prepositions seem to change usage over time in different regions. For example, "different to" has become common in British vernacular, even though "different from" is still typical for formal British English and in American vernacular. Sometimes I hear "different than" but I'm not sure where it is commonly used.
Is there really a significant population that self identifies as speaking Ebonics?
That whole methodology seems rife with biases. The instructions are in standard american english. The pictures are confusing. The input controls are broken on mobile. I reject written sentences ad ungrammatical even though I hear and speak them fine.
The instructions ask you to choose what feels right, not what you learnt at school to be grammatical. So you should expect poor results if you rejected right-feeling sentences.
Worked very well for me, correctly guessing my dialect which is spoken by relatively few people (not one of the 'standard' ones). I definitely found this surprising, especially considering I haven't lived in my home country for the better part of a decade. Very cool.
I'm from Australia. It thought I was Welsh. Apart from a strong sheep segment in the economy and being considered second-class by the English (and who isn't?), there's not much in common between the two countries... :)
[+] [-] bemmu|11 years ago|reply
Pleased to meet you. I am an active sporty guy and 'I play in the soccer team'.
Pleased to meet you. I am a tick, a playful little parasite. I like to jump from person to person in small groups. Today, 'I play on the soccer team'.
Pleased to meet you. I am a playful infectious disease. 'I play inside the soccer team'.
Pleased to meet you, I am Lot's son. As you may have learned in a famous bible story, my mother turned into a salt statue while taking a casual glance at the destruction of Sodom. Less known is that she belonged to a soccer team and the whole team also turned to stone while in the middle of an important game. Today, the team has become a famous landmark and the grounds for a soccer school to which I belong. 'I play at the soccer team'.
[+] [-] gameswithwords|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prof_hobart|11 years ago|reply
I'm British and I would play for the soccer team (well the football team, but I'm not going to quibble about that).
[+] [-] jpd|11 years ago|reply
Pleased to meet you. I am an active sporty guy and 'I play on the soccer team'.
Also, the last variation, would be 'I play at The Soccer Team'. Landmarks are (usually) capitalized.
[+] [-] vacri|11 years ago|reply
Also, where I am, a sporty person can either play 'in' or 'on' the soccer team, no parasite required.
[+] [-] WaxProlix|11 years ago|reply
1. Passive alternation
2. It-clefting (simply `clefting` in some circles)
3. Another it-cleft?
4. It-cleft + possible scope ambiguity
5. Quantifier scope ambiguity (do you get quant raising, basically)
6. More clefts? Don't recall, but maybe they're mixing it up with the overt complementizer (`that`).
7. Ditto above
8. Passive construction again
9. More quantifier scope stuff
10. Lexicon inventory (modal shall is antiquated in most (all?) dialects)
11. Idunno, phrasing. Not-quite-collocate decisions
12. Aspect-tense interaction, I guess...
13. 'Conjugation', or how do you express tense?
14. Lexical selection/wh-feature spellout (does `+person` override the 'incorrect' case-marked `whom`?)
15. Skipped this one due to a double-click, too much coffee
16. Even more lexicon stuff
17. Lexical selection, or 'what kind of thing needs a determiner?'
...okay this is tedious. My point was going to be that a lot of these, especially the syntactic construction ones, seem very specific. I don't know of any dialects of English for example that switch the assignment of roles (A speech delivered Bill, eg) so freely as some of these questions suggest, and I thought all dialects had passive construction and it-clefting. Maybe I'll go through again and answer all the wrong things and see where it thinks those features are from.
Anyway, this was interesting. If this sort of thing also interests you, waste the rest of your day on The World Atlas of Language Structures! [1] It's a ton of fun.
[1] http://wals.info/
[+] [-] xmodem|11 years ago|reply
This is a complete guess, but perhaps this exists to identify english-as-a-second-language speakers from languages where this form exists?
(English is my first and only language and I know very little about languages. The test guessed correctly that I am Australian)
[+] [-] Moto7451|11 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/words/matching-verbs-to...
[+] [-] anywhichway|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nopinsight|11 years ago|reply
In my first attempt, the algorithm guessed that my English dialect was 1. Singaporean 2. US Black Vernacular 3. American (Standard), and it guessed that my native language was 1. Vietnamese 2. Chinese 3. English.
Then I turned off my school grammar, including some generative grammar rules (from linguistics) in my head, and just truly went with my guts. This particularly affected the answers I gave to later questions. The second time the algorithm guessed that my dialect was 1. American (Standard) 2. Canadian 3. US Black Vernacular and that my native language was 1. English 2. Norwegian 3. Dutch.
This second set of results was very much off the mark but conformed to what I intended my answers to be.
My background: a native Thai speaker, born and raised in Thailand, started learning a bit of 'real' English at about eleven, lived in the US for two years when doing my Masters. I'm currently in Thailand but I mostly read and write in English for about fourteen years. My everyday spoken language is still Thai, but most of the movies, music, multimedia I consume are in English.
Possible implications:
1. Over-application of school grammar could result in unnatural use of language.
2. With enough exposure to proper language materials, non-natives can get pretty close to the native speaker in grammatical knowledge, even fairly subtle ones, at least according to the short and incomplete quiz here.
If any American English native speaker has time on their hands, I'd be grateful if you can tell me the differences between my writings (you can click on my username for more samples) and those of an educated native American English speaker.
[+] [-] danielsju6|11 years ago|reply
While as far I'm aware correct grammatically, your last paragraph gives plenty of hints that you're non-native: "If any American English native SPEAKERS HAVE [picky] time on their hands, I'd be grateful if you COULD tell me ("let me know of" maybe) ANY differences between my WRITING [big one here] (you can click on my username for an archive of my comments) and THAT of an educated native American English speaker.
There may be subtleties in your sentence structure that you'd be better off asking a linguist about; but you definitely come off as both educated and non-native in skimming.
[+] [-] bradleyjg|11 years ago|reply
That said, your written English is excellent and I probably would not have noticed anything if I hadn't been looking for it.
[+] [-] StavrosK|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evincarofautumn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yen223|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onethree|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|11 years ago|reply
> Fill in the blank. Check all correct answers.
> The sun is in ________.
> ☑ the sky
> ☑ a sky
> ...
[+] [-] zachrose|11 years ago|reply
At first I was like, "They're kicking off a deferred job for that?"
And then I was like, "Oh, they just want me to answer questions."
[+] [-] tokenadult|11 years ago|reply
The guesses for my language background were spot on too. Like many Minnesotans, I have a few dialectal usages that reflect Scandinavian influence, and besides English as a first language, the other two languages guessed for me were Norwegian and Swedish. I have Norwegian ancestry (in part), so I come by those dialect habits honestly.
[+] [-] claudius|11 years ago|reply
Finnish, Greek and Russian also don’t appear to have any connection to other Germanic languages…
[+] [-] lmkg|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skeoh|11 years ago|reply
> She'll be right!
I feel like this question is cheating. This could be the only question in the survey and it would be able to identify Australians.
[+] [-] the_af|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aashaykumar92|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MetallicCloud|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tcheard|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wluu|11 years ago|reply
It guessed correctly that I was Australian.
[+] [-] Fuzzwah|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Schwolop|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielsju6|11 years ago|reply
I hail from downeast Maine (downeastah) and it thought I was a native dutch speaker, some fucking horse sh## right there, let me tell ya.... My linguist friends can do a much better job at pinnin me, spot down to the county, after college and WITHOUT my tryin. Aight.
Seriously, might want get some pronunciation questions in there—at 314M people the US is a pretty big chunk that they group into only two (that I saw) dialects, ebonics and standard. Of course being a youngin and gone to school, I've probably picked up one or two outa townah habits in my talkin.
FYI I'm ampin it up, if haven't noticed; but I do talk this way around my "muddah" so I don't get muckeled up one side down the otha—still no idea what that means but it doesn't sound nice, maybe a slapping, bitching, no idea... but holy hell do I need a translator to understand my grandparents are saying, this isn't American standard down here (and why is it always down?)
[+] [-] vacri|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erichurkman|11 years ago|reply
It got both mine and my spouse's hometown area dead right.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/...
[+] [-] Fuzzwah|11 years ago|reply
I've gotten pretty used to the obvious different words between Australia and the US; rubbish = trash, car boot = trunk, pram = stroller, take away = carry out / to go, etc.
However this quiz highlighted a bunch that I wouldn't have been aware of, such as no one in the US knowing what soft-drink is and nature strip wasn't even on the list for "the grass beside a road".
[+] [-] yen223|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamthepieman|11 years ago|reply
For english dialect I got:
1. Singaporean 2. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics 3. American (Standard)
and for native language I got:
1. Swedish 2. Norwegian 3. English
I'm 100% native English
[+] [-] victorvation|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sirdogealot|11 years ago|reply
I just got that sentence on asking if it were grammatical or not. I believe that is referred to as yoda grammar?
>Our top three guesses for your English dialect: >1. Canadian >2. American (Standard) >3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
Number 1 is correct. However I would admit to speaking american, and I did listen to a lot of rap growing up, so ebonics might be reasonable? But I am a white kid from the rich suburbs, so it's a bit odd but possible I suppose.
[+] [-] obituary_latte|11 years ago|reply
edit: dead I guess? If anyone has showdead on and sees this, I'd be much obliged if you could take a gander at my history and theorize as to what got me banned. Email in profile. Thanks in advance.
[+] [-] laurent123456|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] witty_username|11 years ago|reply
1. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics 2. New Zealand 3. Singaporean Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:?
1. German 2. Dutch 3. English - See more at: http://www.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish/done.php#sthash.i...
#3 (Singapore) is a little bit close and #3 is correct.
[+] [-] emp_|11 years ago|reply
1. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
2. Singaporean
3. American English
Native:
1. Dutch.
2. American
3. Greek
[+] [-] neonscribe|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] judk|11 years ago|reply
That whole methodology seems rife with biases. The instructions are in standard american english. The pictures are confusing. The input controls are broken on mobile. I reject written sentences ad ungrammatical even though I hear and speak them fine.
[+] [-] Yardlink|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Osmium|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hargup|11 years ago|reply
Our top three guesses for your English dialect:?
1. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics 2. Singaporean 3. English (England)
Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:?
1. Russian 2. Turkish 3. Polish
[+] [-] bane|11 years ago|reply
Native Language
(#1 is correct, interesting about the other 2)