Final-Fan said:
RolStoppable said:
thetonestarr said:
So I misstated a couple things. :rolleyes: The point still stands entirely.
The statement about the be-verbs was more differentiating European languages in general from other languages, a thing that complicates them all. I'm aware of the ser/estar issue in Spanish (estar isn't really complicated at all, though... ser's the funny one. And I guess grasping which is more appropriate is a bit funny too). I don't remember how the be-verb works in German, it's been too long since I studied that one.
I love how you guys are basing your entire arguments off of personal opinions and not off of actual factual data obtained from real non-European language-learners. There are obvious fallacies behind your logic. Yes, there are a lot of funny rules that don't exist in English while they do in other European languages, but English likes to go against its own rules constantly. We have more exceptions to the rule than any other modern language, and as I've already said, it's because English is developed from a multitude of languages.
Anyways, where I work - a US federal government facility - we deal with a number of different languages. The languages are broken down based on the difficulty level behind learning them, into four different categories.
CATEGORY 1: Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, Haitian Creole, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish
CATEGORY 2: Bulgarian, Dari, Farsi (Persian), German, (Modern) Greek, Hindi-Urdu, Indonesian, Malay
CATEGORY 3: Amharic, Bengali, Burmese, Czech, English, Finnish, (Modern) Hebrew, Hungarian, Khmer (Cambodian), Lao, Nepali, Pilipino (Tagalog), Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhala, Thai, Tamil, Turkish, Vietnamese
CATEGORY 4: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean
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Care to name some examples for exceptions to the rule?
Also, I think the only reason why English is in category 3 is because the USA prefers to believe that they speak a really sophisticated language that can't be easily learned.
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Funnily enough, that EXACT list is found here -- except English, it is supposed to describe how hard it is/how long it takes for AMERICANS to learn the listed languages (I is easier, IV is harder/longer). So clearly someone somewhere is just making up bullshit about whether this is an objective list or targeted towards people within the European linguistic culture.
I am also curious as to these rule exceptions; I hope you are not talking about spelling. But while I'm thinking about it, having inconsistent phonetics is still better than "here's a picture, memorize this word" IMO.
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