Meaning of "to go method" & why do they say "there IS a lot of reasons"?
Hey guys,

I would like to know what the phrase "to go method" is about. I read it in a newspaper article (an interview with Jared Leto). They asked him if he did "go method" related to his role as an HIV positive transgender woman. What does this mean?

And then there is another thing I don't really get: I sometimes hear people saying IS instead of ARE, like "there IS a lot of reasons" when normally I think it should be "there ARE a lot of reasons"... is this just some kind of slang or a bad habit or even a special kind of English they speak in specific regions?

Regards,
Dennis

Question

Meaning of "to go method" & why do they say "there IS a lot of reasons"?
Hey guys,

I would like to know what the phrase "to go method" is about. I read it in a newspaper article (an interview with Jared Leto). They asked him if he did "go method" related to his role as an HIV positive transgender woman. What does this mean?

And then there is another thing I don't really get: I sometimes hear people saying IS instead of ARE, like "there IS a lot of reasons" when normally I think it should be "there ARE a lot of reasons"... is this just some kind of slang or a bad habit or even a special kind of English they speak in specific regions?

Regards,
Dennis

Answer

"To go method" means that an actor uses method acting to create a character:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_acting

As for "there is (plural)", you probably heard "there's (plural)". Grammatically this is no different, but when speaking you will find that "there's" slips out more easily than "there are". Basically it's a slightly lazy bad habit, and a good speaker will be far more careful. It's not really slang (which is deliberate) or regional.  Still, I wonder if the habit of "there's (plural)" will become standard decades from now...

Answer

He is referring to so called "method acting", started by Stanislavski and further developed by Lee Strassberg. It requires of an actor to connect with the emotions of their character by using actor's own emotional experiences. Brando, De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Daniel Day Lewis come to mind.

Answer

Dennis, I don't know what the "to go method" is. It sounds like a way of acting, but if someone is playing a transgender woman I wouldn't pay a lot of attention to their philosophical understandings or acting methods, anyway. Its just too weird of a subject to expect to gain any useful understandings to come out of it.
I think you hit it the nail on the head with your second question and answer. You are right. It should be "there are a lot of reasons". As a citizen of Germany you may not realize that we are not uniformly educated over here in the USA. There are a lot of products of our educational system that never fully grasped English grammar, let alone the grammar of a foreign language.