Joel

[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