My latest course from Recorded Books' Modern Scholars Series is my grammar book, which I recorded back in the spring. I'm very happy with the way it came out: the people at Recorded Books did a pretty amazing job both with the audio and with designing a nice course book. If you want to improve your grammar and laugh while you're doing it, you might enjoy this book. And you'll get to hear the whole "That's no panda, that's a $%$#%-ing racoon!" joke as well as my railing about the transcendent stupidity of the split infinitive convention.
(Also, the red panda for the course mascot was chosen long before Kung Foo Panda came out, and my Red Panda is better--and a direct challenge to the black-and-white pandas of Lynne Truss and David Crystal).
Lecture 1 The Red Panda and the Drout Way: A Sensible Approach to Grammar
Lecture 2 What Is Grammar?
Lecture 3 Why It Is the Way It Is: The Short History of the English Language
Lecture 4 G-H-O-T-I Spells Fish
Lecture 5 Word Classes
Lecture 6 Pronouns and the Noun System
Lecture 7 The Verb System I
Lecture 8 The Verb System II: Infinitives, Participles, Gerunds
Lecture 9 The Verb System III: Truly Irregular Verbs
Lecture 10 Subjects and Predicates and Objects, Oh, My!
Lecture 11 Transformations
Lecture 12 Phrases and Clauses, Word Choices and Pauses
Lecture 13 Punctuation: Pause and Effect
Lecture 14 Fight! Fight! Fight! For English (for English?)
3 comments:
my railing about the transcendent stupidity of the split infinitive convention.
You have no idea how happy that would make me.
I do love the GHOTI thing. We discussed that in the Chamber Choir when I sang in college. English pronunciation is such a nightmare! I'm so thankful to have learned it all as a first language.
The split infinitive thing is pretty silly, isn't it. Where would Captain Kirk have been if he'd had 'to go boldly'?
This is cool... I've been listening to your new audio course all week in my work van and now I find out you have a blog!
By the way: the main reason I chose it from all the other stuff I was browsing at our local library was because I saw where you taught, and I thought, "Yeah, Wheaton College up in Wheaton, IL... I have friends who went there and probably know this guy..." Do you get that kind of confusion a lot?
(And Michelle: there used to be a Christian rock group called Ghotihook.)
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