Reply to Re: Ice Hockey World Championship 2009
If you don't have an account, just leave the password field blank.
Really, English is quite easy to learn. Some benefits:
- English has no genders, compare that to for example French and Dutch which have 2 and German which has 3 (Well, technically Dutch has three too, but the Dutch never bother about the difference between masculine and feminine words. This means that in practice Dutch has only the masculine/feminine gender and the neuter gender...)
- English has no cases, compare that to 4 for German and 7 for latin...
- English has an alphabet containing only 26 letters. Compare that to Japanese which has three different writing systems (plus latin characters). Never bother how much letters you'll need to learn...
- Simple conjugation, not quite as simple as Swedish, but still.
- English doesn't distinguish between a 'formal' pronoun and an 'informal' one. In Dutch you can address someone as either 'u' or 'jij', depending on how formal you want to speak to him/her. In English you can always use 'you'. There is still a thou-form in English, but it's hardly used (compare to the Dutch 'gij', which is used in normal speech only in Belgium). And don't even bother trying Japanese...
EDIT: Actually the difference between 'u' and 'jij' is less of a difference between formal and informal (as it is with the German 'Sie' and 'du')and more of a difference between respectful and informal. This is a little difference that actually leads to some interesting things. For example Dutch children often refer to their parents as 'u' (respectful, but not necessarily formal) while in German children would say 'du' (informal).
And there are probably quite a few others things which I have missed, but in general English is grammatically a very easy language to learn. Obviously I still make lots of mistakes, but that's because I suck...
- English has no genders, compare that to for example French and Dutch which have 2 and German which has 3 (Well, technically Dutch has three too, but the Dutch never bother about the difference between masculine and feminine words. This means that in practice Dutch has only the masculine/feminine gender and the neuter gender...)
- English has no cases, compare that to 4 for German and 7 for latin...
- English has an alphabet containing only 26 letters. Compare that to Japanese which has three different writing systems (plus latin characters). Never bother how much letters you'll need to learn...
- Simple conjugation, not quite as simple as Swedish, but still.
- English doesn't distinguish between a 'formal' pronoun and an 'informal' one. In Dutch you can address someone as either 'u' or 'jij', depending on how formal you want to speak to him/her. In English you can always use 'you'. There is still a thou-form in English, but it's hardly used (compare to the Dutch 'gij', which is used in normal speech only in Belgium). And don't even bother trying Japanese...
EDIT: Actually the difference between 'u' and 'jij' is less of a difference between formal and informal (as it is with the German 'Sie' and 'du')and more of a difference between respectful and informal. This is a little difference that actually leads to some interesting things. For example Dutch children often refer to their parents as 'u' (respectful, but not necessarily formal) while in German children would say 'du' (informal).
And there are probably quite a few others things which I have missed, but in general English is grammatically a very easy language to learn. Obviously I still make lots of mistakes, but that's because I suck...
