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Mon 7 May, 2018 08:46 pm
Hi all?
Please take a look at this sentence.
'It was elementary school that I started to study English.'
Well, actually, I find this sentence rather weird.
At school, I learned 'It...that' pattern for emphasizing something.
Well, you can say,
"I've been looking for the book."
In order to put some emphasis on the fact that
it's the very book you have been trying to find,
you also can say
It is the very book that I've been looking for.
Right?
Here, let me omit 'It','is' and 'that'.
Then what's left is,
'The very book', 'I've been looking for'.
It still makes sense if you change the order.
'I've been looking for', 'the very book'.
Let me do the same thing to the sentence above.
It was elementary school that I started to study English.
-> 'Elementary school', 'I started to study English'.
Well, even if the order is changed,
'I started to study English', 'elementary school'
it doesn't turn into a grammatically perfect sentence, does it?
So, I concluded the sentence is wrong from the beginning.
Could you please tell me if my guess is right?
And if the suggest sentence is awkward,
would you please show me a better one?
I would've written, like,
'It was when I was in elementary school that I started to study English.'
How does mine sound?
I'd appreciate any comment.
Well, the more I learn English, the harder it gets.
It surely does.
Thanks.
@SMickey,
Actually, I think the sentence would look better if it read, "It was in elementary school where I started to study English". I'm not sure if using "where" instead of "that" only sounds better or it is better grammatically, but a native English speaker would use "where".
To shorten, you can also say, "Elementary school is where I started to study English".
Or, "I started to study English in elementary school".
@SMickey,
I would say:
I started studying English in elementary school.
@Blickers,
I like 'that' or 'where' about equally.
I like your rewrite more than the originals.
It was in elementary school when I started studying English.
@SMickey,
In elementary school is an example of American English, we don't say that in England. For starters we don't have elementary schools we have primary schools.
We would say either:
It was at primary school where I (first) started to study English.
or
It was primary school where I (first) started to study English.
Although for the second example we're more likely to say,
Primary school is where I (first) started studying English.
In the sentence given, I would certainly use 'where', instead of that. But, I reckon I see where you are coming from. Take for instance this sentence:
"As far as elementary school goes, well, it was there that I first started studying English."
I think that is the correct way to phrase it in this instance. Substituting the word 'where' for that now sounds strange: "As far as elementary school goes, well, it was there where I first started studying English."
But then again, I'm not a native English speaker, so I might be off here. Still,the first sounds better to me than the second...
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