How I taught my daughter the difference between You're and Your
Interchanging the use of You're and Your is an easy mistake to make. While working in the BPO industry, where English fluency is highly regarded, I've encountered this grammatical lapse more than a few times from peers and managers alike. I too make this error every once in a while so I made it a point to discuss this with my kids when they started learning English Grammar in school.
In my personal, non-professional opinion, this lapse could easily be avoided if the difference between these two words is highlighted to young learners early on.
My daughter, Sam, was in 1st grade when she was introduced to English Grammar. Her class was on the topic of Possessive Pronouns when I called her attention to this pair of homophones.
Basically, this is how I explained it to her:
YOU'RE is the contraction or "shortcut" of YOU ARE. Hence the apostrophe. You use this when the subject or topic of your sentence is the person you are talking to.
As an exercise, I gave examples of sentences that used the word YOU'RE and then expanded it into YOU ARE.
Examples:
You're beautiful. - You are beautiful
You're an amazing person! - You are an amazing person
You're the apple of my eye. - You are the apple of my eye
And then I proceeded with YOUR.
YOUR is used to refer to a person, a thing, or a place, that the person you are talking to "owns".
For our exercise, I still gave examples of sentences that used the word "YOUR" and then expanded it.
Exercise:
Your mother is waiting outside. - The mother, of the person you are talking to, is waiting outside.
Your shoes are upstairs. -The shoes, of the person you are talking to, is upstairs.
Your house is so big. - The house, of the person you are talking to, is big.
As a tip, I told her to treat YOU'RE and YOUR as a red flag. Anytime that she needs to write YOU'RE or YOUR, she should stop and ask herself if what she means is YOU ARE. If yes, then she should continue with YOU'RE, if not, then she should use YOUR.
So far, it has worked for her.
My OCD is triggered when the words "Accept" and "Except" are interchanged.
I have probably caused you some distress @cryptopie! My spelling is terrible.
And it's my first and only language.
I start to convulse when "Than" is interchanged with "Then" @o@
There their they're!!!
😆
I still remember being introduced to English, I first learnt of it's existence in my 4th grade and it was VERY challenging for me for the first couple of years.
The only factor that gave me a jump-start was my teacher back then, she was pretty different from other teachers, while they used shouting or hitting with sticks/water hoses as a form of punishment (a very popular thing in Egypt), she studied each student personally, and only gave punishment through grades, which was actually a new thing to me, if you can believe it.
Later on, I became the worst student in the class. Luckily, she discovered that i was - in short terms - a sore loser, I was the kind that if provoked about being less (in anything, really), would feel immense shame and work myself to death so i wouldn't be called that again, and so she found her way in through there, giving me subtle nudges, my grades went up, a month or so later, my mother - noticing the grade-difference - approached her to give me private lessons with my younger brother and a few other kids, her way of educating was also different from the other teachers, while they only treaded what was in the books by the letter, never going out of it or even approaching their subjects as the sciences they are, her approach was that of teaching a language, as a whole, not the yearly quota of information restricted by school books.
And nowadays, my English - while very far from perfect - is one of the few things I take pride in, thanks to her. I hope you become that sort of inspiration to your daughter, in all things, and thank you for a memory juggling post!
When I was in school, whether I liked the subject or not heavily depended on the teacher. I try to remember that now when I'm tutoring my kids. What you wrote is very inspiring. Thank you, @sandstrider!
And allow me to say that your English is very good 👌
Here it's very much the same, thank you for the very kind words.
Great post and explanation. :)
I'd like to teach this to a couple of men I know. They could benefit by this! I'd love to send them one of your pictures when they use the incorrect word! lol Luckily I do not text to either of them any longer. haha ;)
Lol! 😆 Thanks for dropping by!
lol ;)
You are welcome! Enjoy the day :))