Teaching grammar by proof-reading online reviews!

I was trying to explain to my kids what Temu is, so we ended up on the site. We were reading the reviews and I thought, "This is a perfect chance to have some fun teaching grammar!"

For once, I feel good about being the grammar police--it's educational for the kids! Both of my kids had a lot of fun, too!

the old high school teacher deep down inside me salutes you. this is masterful.

(the translator i currently am can't resist saying: in most cases this horrible drivel is brought to you by automatic translation software, which despite GPT/skynet/AI terror still can't do it right unless it's fed in a very specific way. they won't be taking my job away just yet.)

It was fun showing the kids just the different quality in the reviews. Some of them are pretty good and look to be written by an English-speaking human and might be a real review. Then there's some that are just atrociously written. And then also, there were some that the syntax was off and sounded like they tried to say something legible, but the translator just failed. My kids were really confused by the latter. It took them quite a while to decode

This very nice to my husband I liked it a lot good material, faithful to the size thanks Temu

to

This is very nice for my husband, and I liked it a lot. It’s made out of good materials. It is faithful to size. Thanks, Temu.

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I like this idea of proof-reading things on the internet. In school, we proof-read each other's papers, which made us all feel awkward and often embarrassed. But, online reviews and other AI/translated/sloppy writing is ripe for proof-reading, and no one ends up feeling bad!

(Though, I might be creating Grammar Police monsters. We'll just have to work on learning kindness on when it's appropriate to Grammar Police!)