2007年11月1日 星期四

A wedding

A wedding
I still remembered I attended a wedding in Taipei last year. The couple fell in love with each other for almost eight years. The couple arranged the wedding by themselves, they rented a small restaurant and arranged the food, decorations, bridal veils…etc, and they didn’t let their parents to worry about the wedding. Their parents told us that they were told to attend the wedding and decided the attendant. We could see that their parents were very proud of them. Before the wedding started, the couple showed us a video which recorded their stories and the process that the bridegroom asked the bride to marry him. All the attendants there were so touched by the video. I believed they could be happy and blest in the future because they had a beautiful love.

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"A wedding
I still remembered I attended a wedding in Taipei last year." You have to decide what you want to say before you say it and then check to see what you said in order to tell yourself whether you actually said it or, as in this case, said something else. I know that you believe you merely provided the title a second time, but that's not the way it looks on the page I'm looking at. The least you could have done was to have hit the Enter key and provided a space under the title. Better still, you could have used the formatting feature of the blogger software to put "A wedding" in bold font and capitalized the first letter of "wedding" so that it looks different from the body of the post. Just a reminder that text is different from speech and that what your writing looks like is sometimes important.

"I still remembered I attended a wedding in Taipei last year" talks about the past, not about the present, but you are speaking in the present about something you "still remember" right now. Your sentence implies that you forgot a whole lot of stuff sometime during this past year, but that you did remember the wedding. That's strange and an unnatural way of writing English. When you tell this kind of story, you want to avoid using "I remember" unless saying that is important, and it usually isn't. The fact that you can tell the story is enough to tell your reader or listener that you remember. "Remember" is best used in questions and negatives and in songs, e.g., "The Tennessee Waltz", the lyrics of which I have provided below, when telling a story you'd rather not remember or that happened so long ago you probably don't remember everything very well.

You should probably have started this story with something like this: "I went to an unusual wedding in Taipei last year. The couple had fallen in love almost eight years earlier. What made the wedding quite special was that the bride and groom arranged the wedding by themselves." Is this really strange in Taiwan? Who usually arranges weddings? The parents of the bride and groom? Their friends? A wedding-arranging company? I had one wedding for my five marriages. No, it wasn't the first one but the fourth one, and I didn't want any wedding, but my stepmother arranged it all for us. I was frankly quite annoyed that she had interfered in my life and what I considered my private business.

"and they didn’t let their parents to worry about the wedding" is not natural English. The translation from Chinese is wrong because you use "let". This is true for almost every native speaker of Chinese who thinks in Chinese and then translates the Chinese into English instead of thinking in English. It's the same problem as "Music can let me relax". Music doesn't let anyone relax. There are two ways to say this in real English. First, you can say "Music allows me to relax", but that isn't really very good because music doesn't allow anyone to do anything. Second, the only good way to say this is this: "Music relaxes me" or "Listening to music relaxes me". For your story, of course, you should say something like this: "They didn't ask their parents to worry about the wedding".

"and the process that the bridegroom asked the bride to marry him" is not normal English. It should be simple, not cluttered up with useless words: "and the groom asking the bride to marry him", which is 25% shorter than your flabby sentence.

Your concluding sentence is very sweet, but it merely highlights your youth and naivety. Most couples seem blessed with "a beautiful love" on their wedding day. It's the years that follow that one big day that are important, however. Wedding day joy is fleeting. Reality walks in the door very quickly and sobers everyone up. Then life looks different. Think a little more critically before you speak and write, and you will avoid sounding foolish much more often. But, of course, because we are all human, we can't help but sound foolish sometimes. That's part of human nature.

++++++++++++++++++

Tennessee Waltz

I was dancin' with my darlin' to the Tennessee Waltz
When an old friend I happened to see
I introduced her to my loved one
And while they were dancin'
My friend stole my sweetheart from me.

I remember the night and the Tennessee Waltz
Now I know just how much I have lost
Yes, I lost my little darlin' the night they were playing
The beautiful Tennessee Waltz.

(Instrumental Interlude)

I was dancin' with my darlin' to the Tennessee Waltz
When an old friend I happened to see
I introduced her to my loved one
And while they were dancin'
My friend stole my sweetheart from me.

I remember the night and the Tennessee Waltz
Now I know just how much I have lost
Yes, I lost my little darlin' the night they were playing
The beautiful Tennessee Waltz
The beautiful Tennessee Waltz