Joel

[ateamstupid]

Originally Posted by Dunbar

(after re-reading my last sentence, I can only conclude that either I am a lousy writer or English is a weird language! I can only pity a non-native speaker trying to decipher that.)

Dun -

You ain't lyin'..

My mom is an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher, and she regularly goes on about the ridiculously confusing parts of the language she has to teach. Stuff like "by tomorrow, I will have done this"..

It's amazing that so many people can speak it well.

[Dunbar]

Originally Posted by ateamstupid

Dun -

You ain't lyin'..

My mom is an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher, and she regularly goes on about the ridiculously confusing parts of the language she has to teach. Stuff like "by tomorrow, I will have done this"..

It's amazing that so many people can speak it well.

I don't envy her task, Ateam. But at least we English speakers don't have to learn the gender of things like windows and hands. In German, which I have struggled with for too many years, you have to change the endings of articles and adjectives depending on both the gender of the noun and whether it is used as a subject, object, or indirect object.

The German word for girl is Mädchen, which is neuter, not feminine. If you were to say something like "She is a nice girl" in German, you wouldn't use the normal "she". You would use "it". "It is a nice girl" is the way it might seem to a non-native German; but a native German speaker would hear it as we hear "she is a nice girl".

Conversely, a German would say the equivalent of "He is a nice table", if he likes the table. Sometimes you hear Germans making this kind of mistake when they speak English.

And I hear Polish is far more difficult grammatically than German. Not to mention the severe vowel shortage the Poles have been experiencing for centuries.

Whoa, way off topic and way more than anyone wanted to know!

--Dunbar

"We are talking about him because we like fact that he wasn't whisked away to stud as soon as he raced 10 times. And we like the fact that he can still compete in graded races 3 years after his burst of excellence."

He cant go to stud so he will be raced as long as he can continue to earn paychecks...

[ateamstupid]

Originally Posted by Dunbar

I don't envy her task, Ateam. But at least we English speakers don't have to learn the gender of things like windows and hands. In German, which I have struggled with for too many years, you have to change the endings of articles and adjectives depending on both the gender of the noun and whether it is used as a subject, object, or indirect object.

The German word for girl is Mädchen, which is neuter, not feminine. If you were to say something like "She is a nice girl" in German, you wouldn't use the normal "she". You would use "it". "It is a nice girl" is the way it might seem to a non-native German; but a native German speaker would hear it as we hear "she is a nice girl".

Conversely, a German would say the equivalent of "He is a nice table", if he likes the table. Sometimes you hear Germans making this kind of mistake when they speak English.

And I hear Polish is far more difficult grammatically than German. Not to mention the severe vowel shortage the Poles have been experiencing for centuries.

Whoa, way off topic and way more than anyone wanted to know!

--Dunbar

For sure. The one thing English has going for it is that it doesn't force us to learn two versions of everything for the masculine and feminine.

The hardest part of any language, I feel, isn't the vocabulary, but the grammar. I've been "learning" spanish for almost all of my life, and I remember a pretty good amount of vocabulary, but ask me to put together a sentence, and you'll be sitting there for a while.

[GenuineRisk]

Originally Posted by ateamstupid

For sure. The one thing English has going for it is that it doesn't force us to learn two versions of everything for the masculine and feminine.

The hardest part of any language, I feel, isn't the vocabulary, but the grammar. I've been "learning" spanish for almost all of my life, and I remember a pretty good amount of vocabulary, but ask me to put together a sentence, and you'll be sitting there for a while.

I think the thing that makes grammar such a pain in the neck is that you can't ask "why?"; you just have to accept "because." I can't tell you how many times I've sat in French class and listened to students argue with the teacher about a grammar rule because it made no sense to them. As if the teacher would go, "Oh, you're right; that makes no sense. Okay, we'll speak it your way." Tee hee.