How would you explain the uses of "that" in English, or the uses of the gerund, in a comprehensive way?

That

“That” is a great word. It has so many uses. The best way would be to explain it in terms of parts of speech. “That” can be a pronoun, adjective, adverb, or conjunction.

1. Pronoun “that” – “That is my favorite car”. “It is the one that I want”. In the first sentence, it’s being used as a demonstrative pronoun—in the second, it’s a relative pronoun.

2. Adjective “that” – “That car is too expensive”. In this sentence, it’s being used as a demonstrative adjective, to signify something farther away than “this” does (generally).

3. Adverb “that” – “This car is not that expensive”. In this sentence, “that” is an adverb that modifies the adjective “expensive”, with the meaning of “to such an extent”.

4. Conjunction “that” – “We went to the store so that I could buy a new shirt”. In this sentence, “that” introduces a subordinate clause, often expressing purpose, aim, or result.

Keep in mind that relative pronoun “that” and conjunction “that” can often be omitted in English.

Gerund

The gerund is a verbal noun, formed with ”-ing”. It turns a verb into a noun. A gerund can then be used in any situation that a noun can: subject, direct object, indirect object, object of preposition, etc.

The gerund form of the verb “walk” is “walking”. So it now can be turned into a noun and used in various ways, such as:

1. Walking is my favorite form of exercise (subject).
2. I hate walking. (Object)
3. We always talk about walking, but we never do it (object of preposition), etc.

Thank you @DominicY!

Also—I realized too late that I spoke too narrowly about ”-ing” with just gerunds. Could I expand that part of the question into the different forms of ”-ing” (for you or anyone else)?

It might help a little bit to know the base language that you’re trying to teach “from”. Many languages have words that look alike / sound alike – or like the word “that” in English – have so many alternate meanings that it’s a word which has to be understood “in general”, and the specific meaning picked up from the context in which it is used.

One example that I understand, a little, anyway, is that of the Spanish words ‘para’ and ‘por’.

Maybe some example from your student’s native language would help to illustrate the general rule?

@Soubresaut So the main other use of the ”-ing” form is the present participle. A participle is a verbal adjective (or adverb), rather than a noun. That would be something like “I, walking past the house, noticed no one was home” (where “walking” modifies “I”). It’s also used to form the “continuous” forms of English verbs (along with a form of “to be”). The non-continuous would be “I walk past the house”, the continuous would be “I am walking past the house”.

@CWOTUS Para and por are translated to for. That in Spanish is que or ese/esa/eso.

@CWOTUS—Thanks, yeah that could help. Their first language is Chinese, though they’ve been speaking English for several years. I have very little experience with Chinese. I do know they often use “that” where I would put something like “because” or “for example,” and a couple other instances that are more difficult to describe.

@DominicY thanks again!

It’s in a tutoring situation where we look at essays the person is writing. The different uses of “that” and ”-ing” will come up at separate times. I’ll try to explain in the moment, but it winds up feeling a bit ad-hoc, so I’ve been trying to make the explanation reach beyond the single instance or type of instance—but since both “that” and ”-ing” have several different usages, it would make more sense to lay them out systematically like above.

@JLeslie did you look at the link? Your response to my suggestion is facile, simplistic and just not correct. And I was not attempting to define the word ‘that’ in Spanish, only giving a counter example of a Spanish word that also has various nuances of meaning beyond simply “for”. Look at the link.

@Soubresaut you might ask, then, for some of their own examples of Chinese homonyms (or whatever they’re called in the various Chinese languages), of words that have the same appearance and sound, but depend on inflection and context to communicate meaning. Since I’m not a Chinese speaker or reader myself, I can’t help you there, but I know that the linguistic conditions exist.

@CWOTUS I didn’t look at the link when I wrote my response, but I do understand why para and por have nuances sometimes difficult for English speakers to get straight or remember. I look at it more like in English we have one word that means many different things, but I understand your example.

Prepositions are an example of a part of speech that is incredibly difficult to get right for many people who are ESL. If we go back to Spanish, the words “on” and “in” are both translated to “en.” There is only the one word in Spanish, unless you translate to “on top of,” or “inside of.” Also, my husband will say, “fill up a form,” when filling out a form. He will say, “get down from the car,” instead of get out of the car. If we go to verb tenses, he often makes a mistake and conjugates incorrectly for sentences in the past tense like “the man did said he was going to call.” It’s understandable why this particular tense is difficult for ESL speakers. You could talk to my husband all day, and his English will be perfect, and then throw a “did” in front of a verb and you will know it’s his second language. I don’t know off the top of my head what form of the past tense that is called. He has an MBA from an American university and has been taking English since kindergarten.

If Chinese speakers put “because” or “for example” instead of “that” into a sentences, either they are consistently taught incorrectly (similar to the Japanese being taught the letter L is pronounced like an R) or maybe the Chinese use the words “because,” or “for example” in that type of sentence in their language, and they are directly translating. Especially, “for example” and the word “that” I can easily see being difficult.

@JLeslie—thank you! Yes, that’s a similar story. I’m assuming the person uses “that” and ”-ing” the way they do because of a similar sort of difference between like-words/usage in Chinese and English, but I really don’t know. I agree, it’s entirely understandable, and it’s more than I can do—I only speak one language!

The big question is do lots of Chinese speakers make the same mistake? Everything I named for Spanish speakers are very common mistakes when they speak English. When I speak Spanish I make a lot of the common mistakes English speakers make.

As a possibility, I offer you this anecdote for which I can not now find a link. There is a paper written by a couple of Taiwanese professors who wanted the curriculum changed which would essentially ruin teaching ESL to Asian language speakers because they wanted to keep from hurting their feelings, even if they were incorrect. That is, they didn’t want to have to tell the students that they had anything wrong because the students might get their feelings hurt and lose their motivation to learn english.
I swear that I am not making this up. It was a paper by either two or three asian professors and I can not now remember the university at which they were teaching. It has been a few years since I read and then re-read this paper, but I found it baffling at the time, and still am flummoxed by such a concept.
I bring this up because it may be possible that lots of Asian language speakers may be being taught under this ridiculous premise now which could account for some errors which are widespread.

@Jak This same sort of idea was, maybe still is, a problem among Asian pilots. It used to happen among American and other country pilots too, but in the 70’s I believe a lot of it was addressed. There are commercial plane crashes that happened in history, because no one in the cockpit was supposed to question the captain’s judgment.

At the same time, many Asian cultures are very tough on young students to be at level. China is one of those countries that seems to expect all children to be on level, and if they struggle then they just need to work harder.

Asian with several years of using English here. I want to clarify a bit: was what the Chinese said something like: “I love ice-cream that it’s delicious” or something different? I would like to see an example of the error. Maybe I can see how the error is made.

And yes, @Jak and @JLeslie, some people get butthurt when their mistakes are showed, especially people with higher status or people supposed to be knowledgeable. This is quite a situation here too.

@Mimishu1995—yes, exactly like that, thank you. I can’t give specific examples, but I’ll go off the one you provided. Usually the “that” is functioning as an indicator some sort of explanation to follow. I don’t know if it’s a matter of grammar differences between the two languages or something else, but I didn’t want to assume it was and I didn’t want to assume it wasn’t. The two sorts of explanations I’ve seen: ones indicating cause or reason, just like in “I love ice-cream that it’s delicious”; and ones indicating further information/detail or else indicating an example. I’ll work on making a sample sentence for the second one.

Maybe since even English speakers confuse using “which” and “that,” they are putting “that” where “which” might be obvious to English speakers?

For instance, if they had written, “I love ice cream, which is delicious,” it doesn’t sound quite as bad, even though we still would use because.

Here’s another example:

He went to Julie’s house, which was closer than John’s. He went to Julie’s house, because it was closer than John’s. Those two sentences could be possibly interchangeable, but saying, “He went to Julie’s house that was closer than John’s,” sounds very wrong.

I’m just guessing.

Well I’m guessing that it’s something similar to what @JLeslie said. For example, maybe they meant to write “I love ice-cream that is delicious”, but instead ended up with my example. I have tried to translate the correct sentence into my language and it ended up becoming something similar to the incorrect sentence if translated word-by-word.

I’m fairly sure that is the grammar differences, as my native tongue is very similar to Chinese, which is also far different from English. I’m waiting for your second sample for further explanation.

There could be a number of reasonable explanations of what the speaker intended with a sentence such as “I love ice-cream that it’s delicious.”

1. For one thing, it could be a simple omitted comma: “I love ice-cream, that it’s delicious,” seems perfectly grammatical, even if somewhat oddly phrased. In that case, the phrase after the comma is an intensifier or specification adverbial phrase to explain the love. (Some of the best writers in English often use, have used or did use “odd” phrasing.) This is not sentence construction that I’d recommend to a new student, but it’s not actually wrong (with the comma, anyway).

2. Many speakers and writers of English – perhaps even “especially” native English-only folks, frequently omit forms of the infinitive “to be” and other simple verbs and auxiliaries in casual speech and writing. As an example of that, how many other listeners cringe, as I do, when they hear a sentence such as, “That’s a situation that wants handled,” or “I gots to go”, instead of “I have got to go.” Everyone in earshot knows that it “wants to be handled” (disregarding for now that situations don’ want nothin’ at all), and everyone (except me, apparently) accepts that usage. Your user could have meant something such as that, though I can’t quite put my finger on what might have been intended.

3. It could have been a misplacement of “that” and “it’s” (along with a missing semicolon, which almost no one uses any more), and “I love ice-cream; it’s that delicious.” Again, that would not be recommended, but it works.

The only thing I’m trying to point out is that it might not be a sentence about cause-and-effect. “I love ice-cream because it’s delicious,” makes the most sense to those of us scratching our heads and wondering “what did he mean by that?”, but what he actually meant may be something else again.

A gerund cannot be used in any situation that a noun can be used.

I enjoy walking the dog.
*I enjoy perambulation the dog.

A gerund has noun-like properties: it can function as the object or subject.
I like walking/perambulation.
Walking/perambulation pleases me.

And it has verb-like properties: it can take an object.
I like [to walk the dog.]
I enjoy [walking the dog.]