May I know when this group was established?
Hello. I learned in a text that we can say 'May I know…?' in formal situations. But an American teacher of English told me it sounded unnatural. He said 'May I borrow your phone?' is okay (but formal). He said he has never heard any native speaker use 'May I know…?'
But I found these examples on this website: https://ell.stackexchange.com/search?q="may+I+know"+
https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=%27May+I+know%27+
And these examples on Reverso:
https://context.reverso.net/перевод/английский-русский/may+i+know
May I know if this American teacher was correct? He says May + to know sounds weird because we don't need to ask permission to know something.
Note: I ask about normal English contexts, not about contexts like a servant talking to master!
He says things like "Could you please tell me…? and "Would you mind letting me know…? are much more natural. Are there other ways?
Also, is there a difference between British English? Is 'May I know…?' more natural in British?
He also said to look at this Google gram:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=May+I+know&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CMay%20I%20know%3B%2Cc0
May I know what this gram means?
Best Answer
I agree in all respects with that American teacher. (I am also American.)
For a question like this—one that just asks for information and doesn't constitute a request for the listener to do anything at all onerous or time-consuming—I don't think it's particularly impolite to use a direct question without any softening words: When was this group established?
But if you want to be less abrupt, another way of asking a question like this (aside from the constructions you mentioned in your question) is to use "I'd like to know...."
I guess one comment that I have is that I think that "Could you tell me...?" is formal and polite enough by itself; adding "please" to a question like this actually seems to make it more forceful rather than less. The word please is used so often in requests that it can have a fairly demanding tone, depending on the context and on how you say it, so I think it's safer to avoid using it. People may have different opinions about this, though.