INTRO: This week on Wordmaster, Grammar Lady helps Avi Arditti and Rosanne Skirble tackle a problem in learning English called the third- person "s."

MUSIC: "One"/Chorus Line

AA: I dance, you dance, but Rosanne here — she dances.

RS: So what's wrong with that? Nothing. It's a rule of Standard English. You have to remember to add an "s" to a verb when you're talking in the third-person singular.

AA: So it's "he runs," "she jumps."

RS: For more of an explanation we turn to Mary Bruder, also known as Grammar Lady. She says this third-person "s" is a problem for students of English as a foreign language because they often forget to use it.

TAPE: CUT ONE - BRUDER

"In the present tense there's only one subject that takes the third person 's.' All the rest of them don't have an 's' on the end. So, for example: I live in Pittsburgh, Avi and Rosanne live in Washington, D.C. My friend lives in Pittsburgh. So when you have he, she or it as the subject - 'he lives in Pittsburgh,' 'he drives a car,' 'she mows the lawn - you have to put the 's' on and it's the only subject that does. It's hard to remember because it's all by itself."

RS: But how can you help yourself remember when to put the "s" at the end of verbs?

TAPE: CUT TWO - BRUDER

"I had a teacher - I think she was from Yugoslavia - she made a huge red S that she hung in the front of her classroom and when any of the students forgot to put the S on, she would go up and tap on the S and they knew exactly what their mistake had been. Now for the individual - and this is important, I think, mostly when you're writing — when you're writing, you want to make sure that you have this 's' on the ends of these verbs. For the individual you can make a note card and put it at the top of your writing materials when you're writing your compositions or whatever, to remind you to put the 's' on the ends of these verbs."

AA: Grammar Lady Mary Bruder says the "s" can be hard to remember for speakers of languages that don't have similar verb markers — in fact, even some non-standard varieties of American English omit the third person "s."

RS: She remembers one African American woman who was having trouble in a job that required her to write down what was said at business meetings.

TAPE: CUT THREE - BRUDER/ARDITTI/SKIRBLE

"The woman was a secretary of a group and she was to do the minutes [of meetings] and she was writing up the minutes and she couldn't remember - she said she didn't even know - when the verb should have an 's' on it.

"Because she didn't use them in her dialect, and she couldn't hear them when others - when a thing doesn't exist in your dialect, you don't hear it in anyone else's - she simply didn't know how to fix her minutes. And I said to her, can you go through them and find out whenever there is a singular subject — 'the man,' 'he,' 'mister so-and-so' — anytime there's one of those all by itself, the verb will have an 's.' She was so astounded; nobody had ever told her this before."

AA: "Because in African American Vernacular English, it's commonly left off."

BRUDER: "It's commonly left off, that's correct."

RS: "So to learn this, you first have to perceive that it exists and you have to hear it."

BRUDER: "Yes."

RS: "And then you can produce it."

BRUDER: "Sometimes you can produce it, and sometimes you can't."

AA: Fortunately there's Grammar Lady to help.

Grammar Lady's Web site atwww.grammarlady.comhas more tips on English usage. She's also written a new book "Much Ado About a Lot: How to Mind Your Manners in Print and in Person" .

We'll talk about that book in a future program.

RS: To reach Avi and me, write toword@voa.govor VOA Wordmaster, Washington DC 20237 USA. Next week we take a field trip to a high school science class for learners of English as a Second Language. We hope you'll come along! With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

MUSIC: "One"/Chorus Line

词汇点津：

今天的词汇大师讨论了英语中的“单三”问题third-person "s." 如果主语是单数，又是“你”“我”以外的词语，就要在动词后面加上表示单三的“s”，如：he runs，she jumps。

看着简单，但是这对于英语学习者可算是一个难题，甚至是母语是英语的人有时也会忘记。如何才能记得加“s”呢？有的老师会在黑板上写上大大的“s”来提示学生，有的人会制作小卡片或是在写作前标记上“s”来提示自己。

而让人惊奇不已的是，有的方言中dialect竟然没有“单三”这一语法规则。如，非洲裔的美国人压根就不用“单三”。