For those that like to rant about fronted adverbials @coco
Sounds like something you visit the chemist for …
Giving my poor education, it’s not a complete surprise that I know nothing about fronted adverbials.
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It’s complete wankery.
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I was supposed to teach my 10 year old daughter about this stuff during home schooling. I had to google almost every aspect of grammar! 
Couldn’t help but wonder what the fucking point of teaching kids this sort of shit is.
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I learnt more about grammar from French lessons than English.
Learning foreign languages for a start, (perhaps not the fronted adverbials bit) but I learnt nearly all my English grammar because I was subjected to lessons in Latin.
In my day the teaching of formal English grammar was appalling.
Fronted adverbials annoy Pete - and that’s all you really need to know about them, no-one else cares.
I’d never heard of them until today. Reminds me of the short-lived madness of ITA in the 1960s, under which spelling regime my own education was put-back a good few years. This is genuinely how it looked:
Not a great way to teach, since it effectively formalises an alphabet you will cease to use two years later in your next tier of schooling - teaching you to misspell.
Makes FAs look positively user-friendly by comparison…
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My sister was taight that system (or something very similar over 50 years ago. Still has difficulty spelling some words.
I think the challenge is that most European languages kept all their accents, which provides a lot of information about the pronunciation of specific characters. English for whatever reason, got rid of the very vast majority of them, so you have to build up a huge databank of quite arbitrary knowledge to know how to pronounce things properly.
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Children learn Irish.
Therefore no-one, and I mean NO-ONE, can claim English is difficult to learn 
Given most kids will just use their phone for translation duties, not sure learning a foreign language has much point either. I learnt French, German and Latin at school, apart from a couple of times on holiday, I’ve never used any of it. They’d be better off learning more about how things work.
I managed to use the old “the bird is in the tree” phrase that was taught in the Oxford French o level. The old French gent I was talking to at the time looked target perplexed as I spent the next five minutes pissing myself laughing.
He had just asked me where the bird we were watching had gone. 
Sadly I can’t remember how I was taught in the 60s.It was a very good primary school in hindsight.
Secondary was a bit of a waste of time for all concerned
So now schools actually teach English grammar, and everyone’s criticising them? 
My spelling and grammar is still fucked due the ITA madness. Oldham Council really went in for it as I have come across others who went to school in Oldham and had to use ITA.
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Saying that, they did get us to dress up as 18th century Welsh people for cuntry dancing.
Most kids will use their phones for arithmetic too. Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t learn the appropriate methods even if they don’t need them as adults.
Learning and using another language is an amazing and worthwhile thing to do.
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My school gave firearms and live rounds to children.
Will they let kids do that now? Will they heck.
elf’n’safety gone mad, innit.
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Next step up, the monkey and the branch
VB