liammcg Senior Member Ireland Joined 4597 days ago 269 posts - 397 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 209 of 227 08 December 2014 at 8:32pm | IP Logged |
Yes, talk about making mountains out of molehills with the conditional! Good to see your
still ploughing through TY, almost there!
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Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4837 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian
| Message 210 of 227 08 December 2014 at 9:20pm | IP Logged |
liammcg wrote:
Yes, talk about making mountains out of molehills with the conditional! |
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I'm not sure I follow you. Is that what you did in Irish class when you were at school?
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liammcg Senior Member Ireland Joined 4597 days ago 269 posts - 397 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 211 of 227 08 December 2014 at 9:31pm | IP Logged |
As you said, people often cite the conditional as a particularly difficult area in
learning Irish whereas I always found it to be pretty straightforward. See Des Bishop's
video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=PfLuFHdUG6k
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Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4837 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian
| Message 212 of 227 08 December 2014 at 9:51pm | IP Logged |
Ah, okay! Thanks for the video! Now I understand "making mountains out of molehills" is an idiom. In German, it's "aus einer Mücke einen Elefanten machen".
Yeah, I don't understand why the conditional mood is supposed to be so difficult. However, conditional sentences are difficult for most people when they first try to form them in a different language.
I don't know how many hours we spent on conditional sentences in English class and some people never got the hang of where to put the past tense (in the "if" clause) and where to put the conditional mood (in the consequential clause).
Edited by Josquin on 08 December 2014 at 9:51pm
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sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5384 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish
| Message 213 of 227 08 December 2014 at 10:39pm | IP Logged |
I think that being that the conditional is the only tense that's really "conjugated" in
Irish (other than the ist person endings that can be tacked on) making it hard as Irish
students didn't have to worry much about changing verb endings until that point. I'm an
old hat at conjugating by now so it's not really a problem (the only question is how to
pronounce the darn things). Also, conditional statements can be tricky for many to get
(though Irish seems easier than others to me where we need mathematical formulae to
construct one). The tricky part about Irish verbs just remains drilling the back and
forth morphology (question/negative/positive statements, postive/negative answers),
verbal noun and dependent forms and the, thankfully, limited number of irregulars.
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jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6902 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map
| Message 214 of 227 09 December 2014 at 8:04pm | IP Logged |
Some funny pictures, regarding the dreaded mood:
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Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5049 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian*
| Message 215 of 227 09 December 2014 at 9:58pm | IP Logged |
Josquin wrote:
Yeah, I don't understand why the conditional mood is supposed to be so difficult. However, conditional sentences are difficult for most people when they first try to form them in a different language.
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I think Russian is an exception here. The conditional mood is pretty easy, isn't it?
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Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4837 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian
| Message 216 of 227 10 December 2014 at 10:56am | IP Logged |
@sctroyenne: Yes, you're definitely right! Getting the questions and yes/no answers straight is the biggest problem for me as well. Especially, since I read that you usually answer questions in the conditional mood with the respective verb in the FUTURE tense. Yeah, fluency in Irish is still far away...
By the way, I finished Teach Yourself Irish yesterday and it turns out that the past habitual has almost the same endings as the conditional, at least in the first conjugation. But of course, it's much less common than the conditional.
@jeff_lindqvist: Great shirts! I definitely need one of those. ;)
@Марк: Yes, the conditional is one of the few things in Russian which are rather easy. In other languages, like English or the Romance languages, conditional sentences are rather tricky though. I especially hate hypothetical conditional sentences in Italian: past subjunctive + conditional mood... Brrr!
Edited by Josquin on 10 December 2014 at 11:03am
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