I came across Aran’s English prompt yesterday, which reads: ‘I’d prefer if I don’t care whenever you breathe’.That is some odd utterance! It may just about be interpretable, but doesn’t make sense even if you can attach an interpretation to it. I’m pretty certain the equivalent Welsh would be equally senseless. A little like Noam Chomsky’s ‘Colourless green Ideas sleep furiously’.
Aran seems to want learners to practise ‘I’d prefer’, ‘I don’t care’ ‘whenever’ and ‘you breathe’. All fine in their own right, but put together are really problematic. Grammatically, I’d even challenge the construction ‘I’d prefer if’. What would be expected would be ‘I’d prefer it if’. And ‘I’d prefer’ (conditional tense) is followed in English by the past tense, e.g. ‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t do that’ .So should we be learning useful, meaningful utterances, rather than using the syntax to bind together a handful of expressions, irrespective of meaningfulness?
