So here I am slogging through German class. It's a difficult language with a lot of rules (and just as many exceptions to those rules), and I'm sure I'll be discussing (OK, railing on) this some more in future posts. Due to its sentence structure being completely different than English, our teacher spends a lot of time talking about grammar. OK fair enough, but what trips me up is those terms-- you know, "possessive pronoun," "predicate" and stuff like that. Everybody uses pronouns and predicates in everyday language, but outside of copy editors and language teachers who remembers the exact meaning of the terms? Certainly not me, and I'd like to think I have a reasonably decent handle on the English language. Stuck for a good nuts-and-bolts resource, I called up the power of the interwebs and headed straight for my original teacher in such matters: School House Rock. For those of a certain age, this was education craftily disguised as entertainment beamed into the house every Saturday morning during cartoons, and I can think of no better or longer lasting lessons in numbers, history or grammar. I mean, who doesn't remember "Lolly Lolly Lolly Get Your Adverbs Here?" So I pulled up "Rufus Xavier Sasparilla" to brush up on my pronouns, and "The Tale of Mr. Morton" (a new one for me, first aired in 1993) to get the straight dope on predicates. And just because I was feeling froggy, I checked out "I'm Just A Bill" (about how a law comes into being) and my personal fave, "Three is a Magic Number." The song lyrics are readily available online, and most/all of the videos can be found on You Tube among other places. The School House Rock! collection is available on DVD, and any parent (or nostalgia freak) could do a lot worse than to bring this home. The true kicker is that my German got better after I finally figured out what the teacher was talking about!
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