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If I must. Becoming grammatical

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  • meaglothmeagloth Member Posts: 3,806
    jacobtan said:

    @Loub‌

    Perhaps you have difficulty eliciting goodwill in person, but you should have an easier time on an online forum since you do not have to worry about body language and you can review what you write before you post. Contrary to what you wrote, there are ways to improve your demeanor (and improve your communication skills in general) - the question is whether you are willing to exercise some self-discipline to get there. How about trying these:

    Yea. Not even advice, but proven biological and psychological fact, practice makes permanent. Any skill not embedded in your genes can be learned, to a reasonable degree. drawing, playing a musical instrument, C++, and friendliness.
    jacobtan said:

    @Loub‌

    2. Communicate at your level. I believe people are generally willing to give leeway on what they consider to be appropriate behavior, but if you bust these unspoken limits, you are in for trouble. For example, in an earlier thread, you had strong words for @CrevsDaak‌ about his views on life, and they were words that sounded like they came from a veteran in life instead of a teen. Like it or not, words of wisdom spoken by a 91-year old lose their power when spoken by a 19-year old, because you are not considered to have reached the stage in life that gives you the station and authority to speak them.

    I speak the above from experience, though mine was a case of a 26-year old speaking to a 62-year old :P

    That may be so, but I call dibs on being forum-cadderly.
    CrevsDaak said:

    jacobtan said:

    "lack of self-awareness"

    That's probably one of the worst problems nowadays.
    I went to a library happily going to spend a 150$ pesos voucher a friend gave me for my birthday (plus some of my money), and happily spent them in some Michael Moorcock books I was looking after since several years ago.
    I checked in the computer/informatics section to see if there was anything about C or C++ (which I am trying to learn), and, found lots of books, guides and manuals about: Microsoft Office (eg powerpoint, excel, etc), how to use an iPhone 3GS (I have one, and it's VERY SIMPLE, like every software apple makes, it's very intuitive), and, a guide to........ Facebook.... and to twitter... I mean................... Is people SO degenerate?
    Pretty much that ended all my happiness.
    1. @CrevsDaak‌ there will always be stupid people. 'Tis a fact of life, that for there to be those who are great there must be this who are less. Do not despair; dumb people make the world go round. It frees up the smart people to do the important stuff. right?

    2. You said library, I think you mean bookstore. You don't pay for things in libraries, at least in 'merica.
    CrevsDaak said:



    @jacobtan‌ about what you are saying... I think that also applies for me in Real life....

    Loub said:


    My own utter lack of charisma renders me unable to sway people with my words, mostly because my demeanor is so averse and alien to that of the average person I might as well call myself non-human.
    In general, no one likes me, and I like that fact - it's better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.

    THAT is me IRL, I insult people for them not being intuitive, for not walking as fast as I do, for not being wise enough and take drugs... Pretty much for whatever I consider wrong *and* I don't do it myself.
    /end of derailing this thread.
    Related to what I said above about learning skills, I hear you. I myself am trying to diminish my (surprising sizable, especially today [I had a sub-par day] ) Bealoth-side, and can particularly speak to the walking speed problem.
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  • jackjackjackjack Member Posts: 3,251
    Both are correct and accepted. I personally think the first sentence has a more whimsical, romantic feeling to it.
  • NonnahswriterNonnahswriter Member Posts: 2,520
    bengoshi said:

    You, guys, are wonderful. I've got 43 notifications from this thread after just one week-end. It turns out BG gamers usually don't dump INT and WIS. In fact, it seems everyone here has solid rolls in INT, WIS and CHA!

    Seriosly, I'm glad this topic has found its place on this forum.

    I always did like to think of myself as a cleric/mage. :)

    Probably a dual-class, though, with some tomes added in to max my most scholarly stats. Practice really does make perfect, guys; when I think back to my first comments and experiences on the interwebs...

    *shudders*

    Those were some fun times, but I know I've made far more mistakes than I care to admit. >_>;; All that matters is that you learn from them.
  • BelgarathMTHBelgarathMTH Member Posts: 5,653
    iuventas said:

    @Squire‌, hah. After almost a year of studying Danish I have to tell you that in comparison, English is a walk in the park.
    I love Danish, but at the same time all the reasons for it give me frequent headaches. There are sounds that simply don't exist in my native language (besides stød, which is a nightmare and I feel like a goose trying to use it), with a special place for the highest Y. I'm terrified of going to Denmark one day and discovering I ordered killing instead of kylling (kitten instead of chicken), because year ago I couldn't even hear the difference. It's there, though.

    There's my beloved mother tongue too, with all the lovely rustling sounds that are a nightmare to most foreigners and scarrry rolled RRR's:) At least our pronounciation is consistent with writing... The spelling is hard to learn for some, though. Mostly because we have sets of letters that sound the same, but look differently, for example:
    morze = sea
    może = maybe
    (also Pomorze = Pomerania, region in northern Poland
    pomoże = will help).
    I don't envy people who are trying to learn Polish...

    I have to admit this thread is very useful to me, because I know my English is something to laugh at. I'm trying, though!
    I always have problems with double letters (necessary is a good example) and with where to put "a", "an" and "the", because I either write them with every noun or not at all.

    I think there are problematic spellings, grammatical constructions, and pronunciations in all languages that are very hard for foreigners to get the hang of. Sometimes I think we who speak English as a native language get an incorrect or unbalanced impression of how hard our own language is. Really, they're all hard if you don't learn them at a young enough age.

    I've dabbled in enough foreign languages (a lot of German and French, a tiny bit of Latin, Swedish, Italian, Russian, and Spanish) to realize this.

    French, for example, is one of the easier languages for an Anglophone to learn how to read, but is notoriously difficult for an Anglophone to pronounce or aurally comprehend. I always had trouble with "faim" and "femme", meaning "hungry" and "woman/wife". You might be trying in a restaurant to say "J'ai faim (I'm hungry)", but if you pronounce it wrong, they'll hear "I have woman," or even "I woman."

    You could be trying to order fish - "Je voudrais du poisson." - and wind up saying "I would like some poison." Hilarious examples like this of Americans trying to speak French abound.

    BTW - I can't even remember the correct gender for "poisson", above, or whether it should be plural. So, my use of "du" might be incorrect. Plural would be "des", and feminine would be "de la". I *think* "du" is correct. Most European languages besides English have grammatical gender, and it drives Anglophones absolutely NUTS, I tell you. :) Imagine having to learn one of three grammatical genders going with every noun in the language, which is totally random, and affects the entire grammatical structure of every sentence. It's easy for native speakers, because they grew up with it. I find it almost impossible. :)
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  • iuventasiuventas Member Posts: 95
    Gendered nouns in languages are one huge mess. It's no easier to learn if one's native language has them, believe me. For example, in Polish mouse is feminine, rat is masculine. In Spanish it's other way around and in German, if I remember correctly, both are feminine.

    Basics of English are fairly easy to understand since there's no gendered nouns and any form of declination is residual. English has one grammatical form of the word "two", for example. In Polish, I think there are 17. Good luck, at least it's not Finnish (which is another language I really want to learn. And Icelandic).
  • meaglothmeagloth Member Posts: 3,806
    From my experience, Americans are some of the worst English speakers I've encountered. Gendered. Lund are a pain in my ass, along with prepositions. WHY DO YOU PEOPLE HAVE 15 WAYS TO SAY 'THE'???!!!!!
  • meaglothmeagloth Member Posts: 3,806
    Seriously though, does anyone know were it comes from?
  • Troodon80Troodon80 Member, Developer Posts: 4,110
    @meagloth, during the periods of time that Old and Middle English were spoken, there were 23 (or more). Several are now considered archaic and obsolete. My assumption is that, like those poor vowels that Americans decided to discriminate against and leave out of certain words (just joking), they simply dropped a number of them. After a number of years, they were dropped entirely.
  • meaglothmeagloth Member Posts: 3,806
    Troodon80 said:

    @meagloth, during the periods of time that Old and Middle English were spoken, there were 23 (or more). Several are now considered archaic and obsolete. My assumption is that, like those poor vowels that Americans decided to discriminate against and leave out of certain words (just joking), they simply dropped a number of them. After a number of years, they were dropped entirely.

    Very insightful, but I was actually asking were gendered nouns came from, not were they went. Kudos on your logical deduction though. You'd think sense I'm already in the internet I could look it up myself, but apparently I'm to lazy to open a new tab.
  • Troodon80Troodon80 Member, Developer Posts: 4,110
    @meagloth, where they came from? I suppose any answer would also be dependent upon the sense you are referring to. More logical deduction: look at the languages that form the basis of English. :-)

    French, Teutonic, Latin (with some derivative semi-modern Italian), Spanish, Norse and Danish. Quite a large number of non-English languages are gendered, that's where it came from. A better question lies not in asking about it in the history of the English language, rather asking about it from those of other languages.
  • jacobtanjacobtan Member Posts: 655
    I studied German for a few years as a third language, and I hated having to memorize the gender of nouns even though it was integral to grammatical accuracy. It did not help that the gender assignments were quite arbitrary - how was one to know the gender of an inanimate object?

    My other first language is Chinese, and I prefer it to English because of its simplicity - no tenses and no noun genders! ^_^
  • iuventasiuventas Member Posts: 95
    Loub said:

    If I may - as a linguist, I know a lot of language history and structures:

    The gendered languages are the norm - not an exception, due to the fact that all european languages (save for Basque, which developed entirely separately, and is much more ancient than the rest) come from proto-indo-european, a language that originated in India thousands of years ago - which is why we can find similarities between all of them - I could spend all night citing examples, but due to their sheer complexity I'll rather not.

    As a future (I certainly hope so!) linguist focusing on Nordic region of Europe, I feel I have to add to this. While it's true that most of the languages come from proto-indo-european root, there's a small group of proto-ural languages as well. Most notable examples are Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian as well as minority languages, such as Saami and Karelian.
  • FinneousPJFinneousPJ Member Posts: 6,455
    @iuventas‌ I was just going to post that.
  • LadyRhianLadyRhian Member Posts: 14,694
    It's interesting to me that the four Gaelic languages are only loosely connected, and Scots Gaelic and Irish Gaelic are more related than to Welsh Gaelic (Welsh Gaelic is more closely related to Breton/Bretagne, which is spoken in one of the northernmost regions of France). For example, "My heart" in Scots Gaelic is "Mo Chride" where as in Welsh Gaelic it's "Fy Calon". (Interestingly enough, "My Hero" is Welsh Gaelic is "Fy Arwyr", which makes me think of King Arthur. :) ) And Irish and Scots Gaelic is also related to Manx.
  • BelgarathMTHBelgarathMTH Member Posts: 5,653
    @Shandyr, the reverse of what you wrote about Germans learning to use the present perfect in English is also true for Anglophones learning German. It's hard for us to get used to using the present perfect in place of past tense in most sentences, especially since the present perfect construction is more complicated to conjugate, and German is filled with irregular past participles.

    Subordinate clauses require inverted word order, which means we have to think of the past participle, and then hold it in memory until the last word of the sentence. One teacher once told us, if we wanted to say "I think that (something in the past tense happened)...", it would be better to leave out the "that", so we could avoid inverted word order constructions.

    Memorizing gender is also very hard, as we've said, and German noun declensions are very complex and difficult to learn for a non-native. It gets even more complicated by the so-called "weak" nouns, which have their own, irregular declensions, and it's hard to remember which nouns are "weak". I would say my most frequent error in German is to choose the wrong article, from forgetting the gender, or whether it is a weak noun.
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  • jacobtanjacobtan Member Posts: 655
    edited May 2014
    I thought French was worse. Never regretted studying German instead of French, even if it was perceived to be less cool.
  • meaglothmeagloth Member Posts: 3,806
    Shandyr said:

    @BelgarathMTH
    I admit if I was non-german I wouldn't want to learn that language xD

    What do you think is harder to learn: German or French?

    I would guess that its relatively equally hard for someone who doesn't speak either but I'm not sure.

    @Shandyr‌ @BelgarathMTH‌ in my high school, German is usually considered the easiest of the three languages(Spanish, German, French) I cannot speak to the truth of that, as I have only taken German.(though I signed up for French:P). We also have a Japanese class but only the crazy anime kids that wear animal ears or tails to school or whatever take that, so I have not even heard anything about how hard it is, and sense we've been talking romantic languages, it's not particularly relevant.

    On a separate note, to us English speakers(especially the middle schoolers) gendered nouns are hilarious. Why would you assign a random "gender" to a word? In middle school German it was a big deal that the German word for skirt,(clothing item) Der Rock, was masculine.
  • jackjackjackjack Member Posts: 3,251
    Having taken all three, (Spanish from 1st to 9th grade, German & French afterward), I can definitively say German was the hardest for me to learn—in fact I never did. This despite my dad being fluent.
  • meaglothmeagloth Member Posts: 3,806
    @jackjack‌, huh, that interesting. I wonder if it a etcher thing then. My middle school German teacher was very good(she got the while class to sing her dumb songs. I've never seen a teacher get the whole class to sing before.) though she hated grammar and now I'm behind in high school German, with a grammar-loving teacher, and a "high school level class" whatever that means. Sorry, I should stop venting. I have teacher-relation issues in that class.
  • CrevsDaakCrevsDaak Member Posts: 7,155
    jacobtan said:

    I studied German for a few years as a third language, and I hated having to memorize the gender of nouns even though it was integral to grammatical accuracy. It did not help that the gender assignments were quite arbitrary - how was one to know the gender of an inanimate object?

    It's the same in spanish, which makes it a little bit more complicated than english.
    Learning german from spanish is relatively easier than from english.
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