"To run is good exercise"?!

It seems that non-native speakers of English in Taiwan do not realize
that "To run is good exercise" is not a good English sentence. A
collegue today even said it was grammatically correct. I don't think
it is: I would never start a sentence with an infinitive. The one
counterexample I can think of would be the song lyric "To know him is
to love him" except here the sentence is in the form verb phrase = verb
phrase and not the awkward verb phrase = noun phrase as in the previous
example.

The basic problem is that students don't seem to be taught the
difference between a gerund and an infinitive. At best they assume
that "I enjoy swimming" is idiomatic and "I enjoy to swim" is still
grammatically correct. I have counter argued that you can meaningfully
say "I watch the Summer Olympics because I love swimming" but not "I
watch the Summer Olympics because I love to swim".

Grammar books make it clear that a gerund is a noun and not a verb,
that "running", "writing", "swimming" and "collecting stamps" are
activities, abilities, passtimes and hobbies but some non-natives think
the same can be said of an infinitive: they'll argue that when a person
says "I love to swim" that "to swim" is the object of the verb "love"!
Does anybody know of any grammar books that clarify this issue for the
sake of students and teachers here who, for some reason, won't take the
word of a native speaker? It could be hard to find such a reference
because a native speaker would never say "To run is good exercise":
nobody would think to write a rule to correct an error that nobody
would be expected to make.

Incidentally, I find that English grammar books in Hong Kong
distinguish the "infinitive with 'to'" and the "infinitive without
'to'" as in the examples "I can run" and "I must find a job". I think
this is a good way to describe the infinitive even though native
speakers wouldn't think of "run" and "find" as infinitives in these
examples: the phrase I learned when I was in junior high school was
"base verb".

Martin

.

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