bkw wrote:Probably it is much harder working SC with meaning in mind for non natives than it is for Americans.
i don't think this is true at all -- i think that it has much, much more to do with your educational and occupational background.
i.e., if you think about grammar before meaning, it's *not* because you're reading something in your second language (see below); rather, it's because
that's how your background has trained you to read things.
for instance, some huge proportion of people on here work in engineering/IT, in which "reading" means...
... going through things with lots and lots of technical detail
... stopping to pore over the meaning of every little term that you come across
... figuring out how lots of little details are related to each other
and, most importantly,
... NOT thinking about the "big picture"!
as an illustration of this last -- consider the engineers who work on, say, the electric portion of an Iphone screen that's responsible for detecting the touch of a finger.
these people are responsible *only* for details; the entire design of the phone, and the MEANING or PURPOSE for which people are going to use their finger, are entirely and utterly irrelevant to them.
as a result, when the same people analyze a sentence, they are naturally going to analyze the sentence in the same way -- component by component, seeing how all the little components fit together, without stopping to think about the meaning of the sentence. it has nothing whatsoever to do with language; it has to do with
internal consistency. someone who spends all day long thinking about little details is not magically going to think about the big picture without deliberate effort.
this is totally independent of the 1st language / 2nd language issue.
in fact, for 2nd language speakers it should be much
harder to think about grammar, and therefore
2nd language speakers should be thinking even MORE about meaning!
here's what i mean:
it's usually pretty easy to figure out the meaning of a sentence, even if the grammar has been completely butchered. for example, if i write
"freeway accident on, me behind, late two hours of margin at least"
... not a single piece of the grammar of this sentence is correct, but its meaning is still completely obvious: i'm sitting behind an accident on the freeway and i'm going to be late by at least 2 hours.
if you aren't a native speaker of english you may not be able to fix the sentence perfectly, but
it's not any more difficult to determine the meaning.
given that this is the case, it's suboptimal for second-language speakers to go after the grammar first -- because grammar of any foreign language is always ridiculously difficult, while meanings tend to be fairly universal and are usually pretty easy to pick up on.
i personally am proof that the 2nd language thing isn't the issue: when i read things in spanish or finnish (my 2nd languages) i think
entirely about the big-picture meaning first, because
that's the way i usually think about everything else in my world.
i'll see a bunch of words and instantly think, "what the heck does this
mean?"
i probably don't know 30-40% of the grammatical structures -- and there are lots of words, especially nouns, that i don't know -- but i can still determine the meaning of almost everything that i come across.
--
the reason i've written on this at length is because everyone here is trying to get into business school and become managers.
and guess what...
...management is ALMOST ENTIRELY BIG PICTURE THINKING.
the huge change in mindset that will take you from "grammar grammar grammar" to "what does this mean?" is EXACTLY THE SAME CHANGE IN MINDSET that is REQUIRED if you are to become a successful manager.
if you think like a micro-component engineer, then you can be a very good micro-component engineer, but it's pretty much impossible to be a successful manager with the same super-detail-oriented, non-big-picture way of looking at things.
this is also the reason why the gmat includes so many things that are invariably meaning-based, like modifiers, pronouns, and so on ... and, more importantly, the reason why it DOESN'T test things that are purely micro components, like spelling, punctuation, or a/an/the.
think about it.
