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2nd language making more sense | ||
Tags: Usefulness | Foreign Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| yaboycon Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4536 days ago 40 posts - 50 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 1 of 22 16 December 2011 at 4:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Does anyone else find that when studying another language sometimes you will look at the grammar or some of the rules of the language and realise that it makes more sense than your own?
Example the spelling in Russian and Spanish makes way more sense to me than English sppelling. When Russians ask me questions about English, it often makes me realise some of the ridiculous things about the language. It makes me think about English in a different way. Has anyone else experienced this? I had a lot of examples but I've suddenly forgotten them. I'll post them when I remember. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SueK Groupie United States Joined 4552 days ago 77 posts - 133 votes  Studies: Mandarin | Message 2 of 22 16 December 2011 at 4:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am, you are, he is ....... really, what's the point of that?
Yes, I know just what you mean! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5400 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 3 of 22 16 December 2011 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, not to speak of articles, what a superfluous ballast!
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| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4810 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 4 of 22 16 December 2011 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, I agree. How comes Czech doesn't have a past perfect tense and subjonctif? We can live without it, obviously, but still. And Czech has got the most complicated system of using the coma symbol or what is it called (,). Lack of that is something I enjoy a lot when writing in other languages.
But the English spelling is an extreme, nearly anything makes more sense. Edited by Cavesa on 16 December 2011 at 5:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6957 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 22 16 December 2011 at 5:47pm | IP Logged | ||
Plenty of times, although I hesitate to label some language as unconditionally "ridiculous" compared to another on the strength of differences or features that can drive learners nuts. - Grammatical gender? English, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, and Saamic among many others get along just fine without it. - Conjugational endings on verbs that denote the person? Why bother? Just do as in Afrikaans and put the personal pronoun in front of a "bare" verb and we know who did the action. - Inflection for dual as in Saamic and Slovenian? Most of the languages that I've studied have ditched it but can still indicate that there are two subjects (or two objects) using "two", a derivative of "two", or "both" (e.g. English: "the two of you", Hungarian: "mi ketten", Slovak: "oba" etc.) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6398 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 6 of 22 16 December 2011 at 10:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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| jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4835 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 7 of 22 17 December 2011 at 4:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have experienced that with Japanese. There are times when I find the sentences much more elegant and compact for things we would take many words to say in English. Conversely, I have noticed that strings of possessives (particle "no") can make Japanese sentences seem really long in comparison to English ones trying to express the same concept.
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5567 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 8 of 22 17 December 2011 at 5:26pm | IP Logged | ||
Not really, they're used to structure the information for the listener - take the difference between 'I saw the White House' and 'I saw a white house'. When there's a differentiation between definite and indefinite quality of a word (in Germanic and Romance language that's mostly done using articles), the listener knows to wait for further explanation or rack their brain to somehow make sense of what's just been said. Word class makes sense too. It's just the way word class developed to seem assigned arbitrarily that makes it seemingly superfluous. Edited by Bao on 22 December 2011 at 3:14am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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