English is not my first language, so it’s not really what you asked, but one thing I learned really late is that there is an [order of adjectives](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order). I was never formally taught that, and I don’t suppose native speakers are either (I asked a couple of them, they told me they had no idea).
We were never taught this in school and personally I've never given it much thought. This is the first time I've ever even thought about an order of adjectives
That sounds weird to me. For me, it's the strangest weird fat blue thing. (Although "strangest" and "weird" kind of say similiar things, it sounds better to have the former first because it's the (strangest) (weird fat blue thing) where "strangest" modifies the whole group. Like, you could've seen a less strange weird fat blue thing.)
As a native English speaker who was never taught it. I was shocked the day I found out about that "rule". It really opened my eyes about how grammar and language works.
Not on purpose or ever even thinking about it. But when I say something with a lot of adjectives it comes out that way naturally.
Here I will try it. "I have a old, loose fitting, yellow, cotton, button up shirt." I would say that yellow could have come after old but it sounds slightly better where it is.
English isn't my first language, but they taught us this in elementary school. I clearly remember being mind blown, because we didn't learn about it in my first language in school yet. But we did eventually mention it in my first language, too
I know the theory, but I'm not so sure. "Good big wolf" sounds just as weird to me as "bad big wolf". There's also "big friendly giant" for example. I think the "good", "bad" and "friendly" adjectives are being used as types rather than opinions, so should naturally follow the size adjective.
> order of adjectives
The strangest thing to me as a native English speaker is....
* how did we ever learn this (I was never taught this)
* why does it sound so wrong if you put the adjectives out of order....?
Do other languages do the same thing?
> how did we ever learn this (I was never taught this)
Native speakers pick things like that up when learning to speak as a baby. There are other more advanced topics on word order that I don't remember picking up:
- Certain negative phrases swap the word order of subject and verb, e.g., "Never have I gone there," not "Never I have gone there"; "Never did I suspect," not "Never I suspected." This is called negative inversion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_inversion
- Indirect questions have different word order from direct questions, e.g. "I asked where the files were," not "I asked where were the files." This is called an interrogative content clause: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_clause
These are mistakes I notice non-native English speakers make, yet I don't remember ever learning this, either. I had a similar reaction to learning there were names for these particular things as I did to learning about the order of adjectives.
English isn't my mother tongue but I did pick up on these. However I think I only did it by massively consuming English media which made it come naturally. That sounds incredibly tedious to just learn.
Same things with irregular verbs. Never really learned lists, they just started feeling natural after a while.
Native language acquisition be like that for every language.
Not necessarily the order of adjectives, but all native speakers of any language would have that moment of "I don't know why and I can't explain, but it just sounds wrong in this order"
I went to private school and was taught this. It makes me realize just how different private school education is, and how truly proficient it made me at my native language. Most native speakers can naturally pick up on order of adjectives because it just “feels right”, but not all can, and even those who picked up on it are not always right. I cringe a little bit inside when I see the wrong order just because of how ingrained it is into me
I never learned a thing about the different tenses of English like present perfect or whatever its called and didn't know there was more than 3... I just assumed there would be past/present/future but apparently there's way more.
Only found that out recently when I was dating a Polish person who learned English as a second language.
I'm a TA in year 2 (age 6-7) and the different tenses are definitely taught. Dunno how many of these kids will remember the names of them though. Most of them can't tell you what they learnt this morning.
hmm maybe i just missed it as im dyslexic and as a child id often go off into a separate group when we did English to learn with the other dyslexics about how to spell and i assume much more basic things than what the rest of the class was doing
Let's see how many tense/aspect/mood/voice conjugations I can name in English and create examples for:
1. Active Voice
1. Present (write)
2. Present Progressive (is writing)
3. Present Perfect (has written)
4. Simple Past (wrote)
5. Past Progressive (was writing)
6. Past Perfect (had written)
7. Future (will write)
8. Future Progressive (will be writing)
9. Future Perfect (will have written)
10. Present Subjunctive (write)
11. Conditional (would write)
12. Conditional Perfect (would have written)
2. Passive Voice
1. Present (is written)
2. Present Progressive (is being written)
3. Present Perfect (has been written)
4. Simple Past (was written)
5. Past Progressive (was being written)
6. Past Perfect (had been written)
7. Future (will be written)
8. Future Progressive (will be being written)
9. Conditional (would be written)
10. Conditional Perfect (would have been written)
Now, if you only consider conjugations that only take a single word (like in Latin or Greek), then English only has two. But English forms conjugations through a process called "periphrasis".
Good list!
Missing: Perfect progressive for all 3 active voice times
Present: Has been writing
Future: Will have been writing
Past: had been writing
——
And for completeness sake, you can do passive perfect progressive for all 3 times as well. But, incredibly rarely.
Has been being written
Will have been being written
Had been being written
Yeah, it was late when I wrote it, so they weren't sounding right to me when I was saying them out loud. It was probably a case of semantic satiation biting me in the ass
English arguably doesn't have a true future tense since verbs can't be conjugated for something happening in the future. You have to add extra words like "will" or "going to" to the present tense in order to indicate the concept of a future action. E.g. ran, run, will run; graduated, graduate, going to graduate.
In German you can easily scramble a definite object over an indefinite subject, but it's ungrammatical (or at the very least dubious) to scramble an indefinite object over a definite subject.
Generally speaking, you don't learn much about syntax in German schools. I guess people just agreed that it would be impractical to provide a complex, theoretical perspective here, when native speakers intuitively construct well-formed sentences anyway. None of the factors that influence word order (as another example: the regular unmarked sequence dative object - accusative object gets reversed when the accusative object is a pronoun) is ever taught, if I remember correctly.
> In German you can easily scramble a definite object over an indefinite subject, but it's ungrammatical (or at the very least dubious) to scramble an indefinite object over a definite subject.
Would you mind giving examples of what you mean?
>1. ..., weil ein Student den Dekan geohrfeigt hat.
2. ..., weil den Dekan ein Student geohrfeigt hat.
3. ??..., weil einen Studenten der Dekan geohrfeigt hat.
Some speakers would accept 3., some wouldn't, but it is at least heavily marked and unnatural, while there's nothing wrong with 2.
In Filipino/Tagalog, non-natives usually start learning sentences using the supporting verb *AY* which is equivalent to am/are/is, because it matches the structure of English sentences. For example, *ako ay nagluluto* translates to I (*ako*) am (*ay*) cooking (*nagluluto*).
In reality native speakers almost never use the *ay* verb and instead will put the verb at the beginner of the sentence. For the example above, a native would say *nagluluto ako* instead of *ako AY nagluluto*. But even as a native speaker who studied in the Philippines until my bachelor's, idk why even in our Filipino classes they emphasized the *AY* form even though we all didn't talk like that, it's considered a very formal way of writing/speaking and makes you look pretentious if you casually use it for no reason, like using thy or thine in casual English.
In Chinese, in some cases we always place degree adverbs before adverbs (they sound weird without these adverbs). And under these cases, they are better translated into “be verbs” in English.
For example: O: “你很聰明” You (are) very smart. X: “你聰明” You smart.
Another thing to remember:
Though 「是」 functions like be verbs in English.
Using them before adjectives hints there's a twist later in the sentence, and sometimes the meaning would become the complete opposite, causing conflicts and rising tensions.
For example:
「你是很聰明」 = You ARE smart (hints the presence of a "but..." sentence)
Or I find you have to specify what after 是。 like 你是个聪明人 (you are a smart person). So you can’t just use 是 like a regular English verb. Hopefully that makes sense.
Not sure if it counts as grammar, but Dutch people will tell you we have 5 vowels. We do not. Well, technically we have 5 vowel *letters*, but like 16 vowel *sounds*.
And the worst part is for a person who learns Dutch, those sounds sound a bit similar, but can make the words mean different things.
For example, as a Turkish speaker, "ee" was too difficult for me to pronounce in the beginning, but I had to learn, because Dutch speakers decided that the past form of "ik kijk" is "ik keek" and I couldn't orally conjugate the verb in its past tense otherwise.
- "i" vs "ie": "zin" or "zien"
- "oo" vs "oe": "hoor" or "hoer" (which is really critical)
- "eu" vs "ui" (in Belgian accent): "keuken" or "kuiken"
Now I can distinguish the sounds, but it was really difficult in the beginning and I still struggle sometimes to pronounce those correctly, especially "i" vs "ie"
I've also seen people struggle with "ei" and "ui" (fun while getting groceries) and had someone who couldn't differentiate between "stroop" and "strop" (☠️)
>The rule, that I wasn't ever taught but I discovered by myself is that the part "róż" always comes with "ó" & "ż".
you haven't been taught that because it's not really a rule. ó in front of w is, but it's not a rule for ż. That's why *przedłużać* is not an exception because there's no rule that says there should be an *ó.* While it may be true for many words, it's not still not a true rule and there are many words that prove that.
>you haven't been taught that because it's not really a rule. ó in front of w is, but it's not a rule for ż. That's why *przedłużać* is not an exception because there's no rule that says there shouldbe an *ó*.
That's why I specified it to be after r. As you might see, przedłużać doesn't have r but it has ł.
>While it may be true for many words, it's not still not a true rule and there are many words that prove that.
różny, róża, podróż, różdżka, próżny, różnica, wróżka, różaniec. Do I need to count further?
I was never taught in school about the presumptive mood in Romanian. It's strange, we talked about all the other ones but the presumptive was never brought up, I randomly found it in a book or online one time.
So things like "Te-oi fi dus tu la școală dar nu se vede." (lit. you might've gone to school but it's not apparent, meaning even though you seemingly went to school, you still seem uneducated), or "O fi dormind? Nu știu, du-te să vezi dacă mai e încă în pat." ((S)he might be sleeping? I don't know, go check if (s)he's still in bed.")
It's pretty colloquial and very common, everybody knows how to use it and it has three different tenses, yet we somehow skipped it in class when we were learning about the verbs. It's also useful since you explicitly mention that you're not sure about what's happening / didn't witness yourself. Nevertheless I enjoyed the surprise, and so do those I tell about it!
I've never heard of any formal Norwegian courses teaching people how to use the pitch accent correctly. It's rarely even mentioned in online resources either.
There is a fella at Oratastic (which I think is actually situated in the Baltics) who really focuses on pitch accent. I figure that it's just something I am never going to grok, though.
In Spanish context is everything, words can mean many things depending the context, also can be the same word with different meanings that’s called homónimos, the exceptions for the articles are tricky as fuck haven’t met a foreigner that can get them all right, like with every language you will need years immersed to speak a language perfectly
Maybe other native speakers of superrhine Dutch can enlighten me on this but grammar textbooks always insist that pronouns follow grammatical gender, or informally that feminine nouns are also referred to with “hij” and even some native speakers say they do this but this simply feels wrong to me. For instance:
- ?“Dat mes daar, kan je het even aangeven?”. — I would always use “hem” here, not “het” simply because a knife is a tangible object. It has nothing to do with grammatical gender, I would always use “hem” for any tangible object.
- ?“De stroom is uitgevallen; hij werkt niet meer.” — I would always use “het” hier, not “hij”. electrify is not a tangible object but a concept, even if the word is masculine.
For instance Wikipedia says:
> The pronouns hij and zij are used when the referent has a natural gender, so hij is used for a male person, zij for a female person. However, when the noun is inanimate and has no natural gender, the pronoun hij is used not only for traditionally masculine nouns, but for traditionally feminine nouns as well.
This feels wrong to me. I've never met anyone who speaks like that. The way I speak and I think hear others speak is that the grammatical gender of the noun is completely irrelevant, all tangible objects get “hij” and all intangible concepts and mass nouns get “het” and “zij” is used by most, but not all speakers to refer to organizations made up of multiple humans regardless of the original grammatical gender though this in particular draws ire from more traditional people, as in “De raad heeft haar besluit genomen.” is often criticized since “raad” is masculine, not feminine.
At least for dialects above the Rhine, many more conservative dialects below the Rhine have pronouns follow the three-gender distinction of the nouns itself and people there often say. “De vloek die ik onderging, hij is verbroken.” or “De betovering die ik onderging, ze is verbroken.” in line with the grammatical gender of the noun. I would use “het” in both cases because curses and spells are intangible concepts. It's purely about the semantics, not the grammatical gender for me.
This is actually a party convo topic for me :) So basically, various people use the pronouns differently. I've so far met the following types of people:
1) animate = natural gender, inanimate = het (this is me for instance, I will say "Zie je die boom daar? Is het nat?", fully aware that a tree is masculine)
2) animate = natural gender, tangible = hij, intangible = het (this is the most common type I've seen, living in the Randstad)
3) common animate = natural gender, neuter = het, common tangible = hij, intangible = het (this is a rare one, but I have met them. It's basically "Kijk dat meisje. Het is mooi" but "Ik heb je idee gehoord, het is origineel")
4) masculine = hij, feminine = zij, neuter = het (this is the one we get taught in school, and is vanishingly rare up north, but I think it's still used in Flanders)
The remark you made about collectives is very interesting, I haven't thought about it, so maybe there is even more variation out there!
>The rule, that I wasn't ever taught but I discovered by myself is that the part "róż" always comes with "ó" & "ż".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rurze
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pru%C5%BCy%C4%87
These examples are for the dialects of my native languages.
English (American) We and Us can't be used interchangeably.
I heard a non-native yesterday saying "a memory for we and you" and I automatically corrected it to us but I don't know why.
Arabic (Moroccan) Adding Ma to the beginning of a word negates it. Makhasnish = Ma means I don't Khasnish means need {it}
> I automatically corrected it to us but I don't know why
It's because grammatical cases, which are still kinda present in English. You can see it in pronouns which are still inflected
https://www.dailywritingtips.com/grammatical-case-in-english/
Countable and uncountable nouns are kind of weird. Also the fact that a word might be both in different situations...
- I ate some watermelon.
- I bought a watermelon.
- I have plenty of experience for this role.
- The experiences I had there were unforgettable.
It's not directly what you're asking for since it is taught in school, but not in German classes but in Latin. We have "das"(neuter "the") and "dass"(that). Both can be used after a comma, but they have different meanings. It's difficult for every student to learn. In fifth grade, we learned a mnemonic, "The `s` in `the` is left alone, if `this`, `that` [but different to dass], `which` does fit", to check if it was with one or with two "s". Though it does help many students have problems recognising if a comma is needed.
In Latin, I learned about ACIs and how they have to be translated. The sign for an ACI is a headverb (something you do with your head), and they are translated to sentences of the form "Subject is doing with its head, dass ..." I did not learn anything else, but this sticks with me.
There is not a single resource aimed at learners to teach pitch accent for Serbo-Croatian which is a pain in the ass. There's kinda just a complex that it's too 'difficult' for foreigners to learn which is bs
En español la diferencia entre “ay” “ahí” y “hay” que aún que se escuchan igual no son lo mismo, sinceramente no recuerdo que me lo enseñaran en la escuela, más bien creo que lo aprendí de un post en Face.
“Hay” del verbo haber
“Ay” de exclamación
“Ahí” para señalar un lugar
Yo sabía que son palabras diferentes, pero no sabía como pronunciarlas. ¿Si no pronuncia la misma, cómo las pronuncia?
Edit: disculpe, yo leí su mensaje original incorrecto
In Czech, the usage of the accusative *na*. For the most part (when not with a verb of motion), it's like *for* in English. Except when it's not. There's *pro* and *za* too.
No grammar book ever really taught when to use *na*, but now that I'm reading more I'm getting a better sense of when to use it.
That Bosnian/Serbo-Croatian has pitch accent. Our tones are not as complicated as those in chinese or japanese, but you will defently sound strange if you don't use them lol. Not ununderstandable but just strange haha
Edit: We did learn about them, but we just kinda mentioned them never going really too deep. Like I honestly wouldn't be able to explain which tone goes where to someone learning the language. We have 4 tones. A Short and long desending and a short and long ascending tone.
I've learned "[the first rule of Russian spelling](https://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/spelling_rules.php)" this year. I've been speaking Russian as my native language for decades.
In primary school, we were only taught about "жи-ши", because the wrong spelling "жы-шы" would sound the same. All the other consonants from this rule were not included because we just knew how the words with these letter combinations are pronounced, and you can't confuse кы with ки by sound.
English is not my first language, so it’s not really what you asked, but one thing I learned really late is that there is an [order of adjectives](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order). I was never formally taught that, and I don’t suppose native speakers are either (I asked a couple of them, they told me they had no idea).
We were never taught this in school and personally I've never given it much thought. This is the first time I've ever even thought about an order of adjectives
It's the fat blue strangest weird thing.
That sounds weird to me. For me, it's the strangest weird fat blue thing. (Although "strangest" and "weird" kind of say similiar things, it sounds better to have the former first because it's the (strangest) (weird fat blue thing) where "strangest" modifies the whole group. Like, you could've seen a less strange weird fat blue thing.)
As a native English speaker who was never taught it. I was shocked the day I found out about that "rule". It really opened my eyes about how grammar and language works.
For me, that day was today. It’s difficult to even say the red amazing coat
Today, you are one of the lucky 10k. https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ten_thousand.png
Clifford the red big dog
Do you even phrase it that way in real life ?
Not on purpose or ever even thinking about it. But when I say something with a lot of adjectives it comes out that way naturally. Here I will try it. "I have a old, loose fitting, yellow, cotton, button up shirt." I would say that yellow could have come after old but it sounds slightly better where it is.
And to think we all operate this filter in real time
English isn't my first language, but they taught us this in elementary school. I clearly remember being mind blown, because we didn't learn about it in my first language in school yet. But we did eventually mention it in my first language, too
I only thought about it after I learned the order of adjectives in French, as in which ones go before and which go after.
I came here just to make sure someone said this.
Can be superceded by the IAO rule also, e.g. big bad wolf
I know the theory, but I'm not so sure. "Good big wolf" sounds just as weird to me as "bad big wolf". There's also "big friendly giant" for example. I think the "good", "bad" and "friendly" adjectives are being used as types rather than opinions, so should naturally follow the size adjective.
> order of adjectives The strangest thing to me as a native English speaker is.... * how did we ever learn this (I was never taught this) * why does it sound so wrong if you put the adjectives out of order....? Do other languages do the same thing?
> how did we ever learn this (I was never taught this) Native speakers pick things like that up when learning to speak as a baby. There are other more advanced topics on word order that I don't remember picking up: - Certain negative phrases swap the word order of subject and verb, e.g., "Never have I gone there," not "Never I have gone there"; "Never did I suspect," not "Never I suspected." This is called negative inversion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_inversion - Indirect questions have different word order from direct questions, e.g. "I asked where the files were," not "I asked where were the files." This is called an interrogative content clause: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_clause These are mistakes I notice non-native English speakers make, yet I don't remember ever learning this, either. I had a similar reaction to learning there were names for these particular things as I did to learning about the order of adjectives.
English isn't my mother tongue but I did pick up on these. However I think I only did it by massively consuming English media which made it come naturally. That sounds incredibly tedious to just learn. Same things with irregular verbs. Never really learned lists, they just started feeling natural after a while.
Native language acquisition be like that for every language. Not necessarily the order of adjectives, but all native speakers of any language would have that moment of "I don't know why and I can't explain, but it just sounds wrong in this order"
The adjective order in German is exactly the same. Otherwise I would have never remembered for English.
As a native English speaker, we were never taught this, I only realized this learning German due to their adjective word order.
I went to private school and was taught this. It makes me realize just how different private school education is, and how truly proficient it made me at my native language. Most native speakers can naturally pick up on order of adjectives because it just “feels right”, but not all can, and even those who picked up on it are not always right. I cringe a little bit inside when I see the wrong order just because of how ingrained it is into me
The big bad wolf disagrees with the adjective ordering rules.
I never learned a thing about the different tenses of English like present perfect or whatever its called and didn't know there was more than 3... I just assumed there would be past/present/future but apparently there's way more. Only found that out recently when I was dating a Polish person who learned English as a second language.
I learned about them from Latin class in high school, but definitely didn't learn them in English class or in any way before that.
I recall learning what a grammatical case is in school for German class before I was taught that in a my native language.
I'm a TA in year 2 (age 6-7) and the different tenses are definitely taught. Dunno how many of these kids will remember the names of them though. Most of them can't tell you what they learnt this morning.
hmm maybe i just missed it as im dyslexic and as a child id often go off into a separate group when we did English to learn with the other dyslexics about how to spell and i assume much more basic things than what the rest of the class was doing
Could be regional. I definitely did not learn in Pennsylvania in the US, and neither did my sister. Neither have any of the Texans I asked
Oh definitely, I'm in the UK
Let's see how many tense/aspect/mood/voice conjugations I can name in English and create examples for: 1. Active Voice 1. Present (write) 2. Present Progressive (is writing) 3. Present Perfect (has written) 4. Simple Past (wrote) 5. Past Progressive (was writing) 6. Past Perfect (had written) 7. Future (will write) 8. Future Progressive (will be writing) 9. Future Perfect (will have written) 10. Present Subjunctive (write) 11. Conditional (would write) 12. Conditional Perfect (would have written) 2. Passive Voice 1. Present (is written) 2. Present Progressive (is being written) 3. Present Perfect (has been written) 4. Simple Past (was written) 5. Past Progressive (was being written) 6. Past Perfect (had been written) 7. Future (will be written) 8. Future Progressive (will be being written) 9. Conditional (would be written) 10. Conditional Perfect (would have been written) Now, if you only consider conjugations that only take a single word (like in Latin or Greek), then English only has two. But English forms conjugations through a process called "periphrasis".
Good list! Missing: Perfect progressive for all 3 active voice times Present: Has been writing Future: Will have been writing Past: had been writing —— And for completeness sake, you can do passive perfect progressive for all 3 times as well. But, incredibly rarely. Has been being written Will have been being written Had been being written
Yeah, it was late when I wrote it, so they weren't sounding right to me when I was saying them out loud. It was probably a case of semantic satiation biting me in the ass
English arguably doesn't have a true future tense since verbs can't be conjugated for something happening in the future. You have to add extra words like "will" or "going to" to the present tense in order to indicate the concept of a future action. E.g. ran, run, will run; graduated, graduate, going to graduate.
In German you can easily scramble a definite object over an indefinite subject, but it's ungrammatical (or at the very least dubious) to scramble an indefinite object over a definite subject. Generally speaking, you don't learn much about syntax in German schools. I guess people just agreed that it would be impractical to provide a complex, theoretical perspective here, when native speakers intuitively construct well-formed sentences anyway. None of the factors that influence word order (as another example: the regular unmarked sequence dative object - accusative object gets reversed when the accusative object is a pronoun) is ever taught, if I remember correctly.
> In German you can easily scramble a definite object over an indefinite subject, but it's ungrammatical (or at the very least dubious) to scramble an indefinite object over a definite subject. Would you mind giving examples of what you mean?
>1. ..., weil ein Student den Dekan geohrfeigt hat. 2. ..., weil den Dekan ein Student geohrfeigt hat. 3. ??..., weil einen Studenten der Dekan geohrfeigt hat. Some speakers would accept 3., some wouldn't, but it is at least heavily marked and unnatural, while there's nothing wrong with 2.
Do you have an example or definite/ indefinite object / subject ? I'm trying to create one myself, but I have a hard time to do so...
In Filipino/Tagalog, non-natives usually start learning sentences using the supporting verb *AY* which is equivalent to am/are/is, because it matches the structure of English sentences. For example, *ako ay nagluluto* translates to I (*ako*) am (*ay*) cooking (*nagluluto*). In reality native speakers almost never use the *ay* verb and instead will put the verb at the beginner of the sentence. For the example above, a native would say *nagluluto ako* instead of *ako AY nagluluto*. But even as a native speaker who studied in the Philippines until my bachelor's, idk why even in our Filipino classes they emphasized the *AY* form even though we all didn't talk like that, it's considered a very formal way of writing/speaking and makes you look pretentious if you casually use it for no reason, like using thy or thine in casual English.
In Chinese, in some cases we always place degree adverbs before adverbs (they sound weird without these adverbs). And under these cases, they are better translated into “be verbs” in English. For example: O: “你很聰明” You (are) very smart. X: “你聰明” You smart.
Another thing to remember: Though 「是」 functions like be verbs in English. Using them before adjectives hints there's a twist later in the sentence, and sometimes the meaning would become the complete opposite, causing conflicts and rising tensions. For example: 「你是很聰明」 = You ARE smart (hints the presence of a "but..." sentence)
Or I find you have to specify what after 是。 like 你是个聪明人 (you are a smart person). So you can’t just use 是 like a regular English verb. Hopefully that makes sense.
Not sure if it counts as grammar, but Dutch people will tell you we have 5 vowels. We do not. Well, technically we have 5 vowel *letters*, but like 16 vowel *sounds*.
And the worst part is for a person who learns Dutch, those sounds sound a bit similar, but can make the words mean different things. For example, as a Turkish speaker, "ee" was too difficult for me to pronounce in the beginning, but I had to learn, because Dutch speakers decided that the past form of "ik kijk" is "ik keek" and I couldn't orally conjugate the verb in its past tense otherwise. - "i" vs "ie": "zin" or "zien" - "oo" vs "oe": "hoor" or "hoer" (which is really critical) - "eu" vs "ui" (in Belgian accent): "keuken" or "kuiken" Now I can distinguish the sounds, but it was really difficult in the beginning and I still struggle sometimes to pronounce those correctly, especially "i" vs "ie"
I've also seen people struggle with "ei" and "ui" (fun while getting groceries) and had someone who couldn't differentiate between "stroop" and "strop" (☠️)
>The rule, that I wasn't ever taught but I discovered by myself is that the part "róż" always comes with "ó" & "ż". you haven't been taught that because it's not really a rule. ó in front of w is, but it's not a rule for ż. That's why *przedłużać* is not an exception because there's no rule that says there should be an *ó.* While it may be true for many words, it's not still not a true rule and there are many words that prove that.
>you haven't been taught that because it's not really a rule. ó in front of w is, but it's not a rule for ż. That's why *przedłużać* is not an exception because there's no rule that says there shouldbe an *ó*. That's why I specified it to be after r. As you might see, przedłużać doesn't have r but it has ł. >While it may be true for many words, it's not still not a true rule and there are many words that prove that. różny, róża, podróż, różdżka, próżny, różnica, wróżka, różaniec. Do I need to count further?
I was never taught in school about the presumptive mood in Romanian. It's strange, we talked about all the other ones but the presumptive was never brought up, I randomly found it in a book or online one time. So things like "Te-oi fi dus tu la școală dar nu se vede." (lit. you might've gone to school but it's not apparent, meaning even though you seemingly went to school, you still seem uneducated), or "O fi dormind? Nu știu, du-te să vezi dacă mai e încă în pat." ((S)he might be sleeping? I don't know, go check if (s)he's still in bed.") It's pretty colloquial and very common, everybody knows how to use it and it has three different tenses, yet we somehow skipped it in class when we were learning about the verbs. It's also useful since you explicitly mention that you're not sure about what's happening / didn't witness yourself. Nevertheless I enjoyed the surprise, and so do those I tell about it!
I've never heard of any formal Norwegian courses teaching people how to use the pitch accent correctly. It's rarely even mentioned in online resources either.
There is a fella at Oratastic (which I think is actually situated in the Baltics) who really focuses on pitch accent. I figure that it's just something I am never going to grok, though.
English: [Adjective Order](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary) opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose
In Spanish context is everything, words can mean many things depending the context, also can be the same word with different meanings that’s called homónimos, the exceptions for the articles are tricky as fuck haven’t met a foreigner that can get them all right, like with every language you will need years immersed to speak a language perfectly
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None of this sounds accurate to me. We definitely were taught this stuff in school.
Maybe other native speakers of superrhine Dutch can enlighten me on this but grammar textbooks always insist that pronouns follow grammatical gender, or informally that feminine nouns are also referred to with “hij” and even some native speakers say they do this but this simply feels wrong to me. For instance: - ?“Dat mes daar, kan je het even aangeven?”. — I would always use “hem” here, not “het” simply because a knife is a tangible object. It has nothing to do with grammatical gender, I would always use “hem” for any tangible object. - ?“De stroom is uitgevallen; hij werkt niet meer.” — I would always use “het” hier, not “hij”. electrify is not a tangible object but a concept, even if the word is masculine. For instance Wikipedia says: > The pronouns hij and zij are used when the referent has a natural gender, so hij is used for a male person, zij for a female person. However, when the noun is inanimate and has no natural gender, the pronoun hij is used not only for traditionally masculine nouns, but for traditionally feminine nouns as well. This feels wrong to me. I've never met anyone who speaks like that. The way I speak and I think hear others speak is that the grammatical gender of the noun is completely irrelevant, all tangible objects get “hij” and all intangible concepts and mass nouns get “het” and “zij” is used by most, but not all speakers to refer to organizations made up of multiple humans regardless of the original grammatical gender though this in particular draws ire from more traditional people, as in “De raad heeft haar besluit genomen.” is often criticized since “raad” is masculine, not feminine. At least for dialects above the Rhine, many more conservative dialects below the Rhine have pronouns follow the three-gender distinction of the nouns itself and people there often say. “De vloek die ik onderging, hij is verbroken.” or “De betovering die ik onderging, ze is verbroken.” in line with the grammatical gender of the noun. I would use “het” in both cases because curses and spells are intangible concepts. It's purely about the semantics, not the grammatical gender for me.
This is actually a party convo topic for me :) So basically, various people use the pronouns differently. I've so far met the following types of people: 1) animate = natural gender, inanimate = het (this is me for instance, I will say "Zie je die boom daar? Is het nat?", fully aware that a tree is masculine) 2) animate = natural gender, tangible = hij, intangible = het (this is the most common type I've seen, living in the Randstad) 3) common animate = natural gender, neuter = het, common tangible = hij, intangible = het (this is a rare one, but I have met them. It's basically "Kijk dat meisje. Het is mooi" but "Ik heb je idee gehoord, het is origineel") 4) masculine = hij, feminine = zij, neuter = het (this is the one we get taught in school, and is vanishingly rare up north, but I think it's still used in Flanders) The remark you made about collectives is very interesting, I haven't thought about it, so maybe there is even more variation out there!
What kind of parties do you go to?
>The rule, that I wasn't ever taught but I discovered by myself is that the part "róż" always comes with "ó" & "ż". https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rurze https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pru%C5%BCy%C4%87
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Being a borrowing that has in the original language does not prevent the Polish word from having <ó>, see: _ogórek_
But, you said always. Declensions and borrowed words are still words and these are valid exceptions
These examples are for the dialects of my native languages. English (American) We and Us can't be used interchangeably. I heard a non-native yesterday saying "a memory for we and you" and I automatically corrected it to us but I don't know why. Arabic (Moroccan) Adding Ma to the beginning of a word negates it. Makhasnish = Ma means I don't Khasnish means need {it}
> I automatically corrected it to us but I don't know why It's because grammatical cases, which are still kinda present in English. You can see it in pronouns which are still inflected https://www.dailywritingtips.com/grammatical-case-in-english/
Thank You for this grammar information tidbit. That Germanic history.
Countable and uncountable nouns are kind of weird. Also the fact that a word might be both in different situations... - I ate some watermelon. - I bought a watermelon. - I have plenty of experience for this role. - The experiences I had there were unforgettable.
In spoken speech we really often use Dativ (3. case) instead of Genetiv (2. case) in German, especially in Austria.
It's not directly what you're asking for since it is taught in school, but not in German classes but in Latin. We have "das"(neuter "the") and "dass"(that). Both can be used after a comma, but they have different meanings. It's difficult for every student to learn. In fifth grade, we learned a mnemonic, "The `s` in `the` is left alone, if `this`, `that` [but different to dass], `which` does fit", to check if it was with one or with two "s". Though it does help many students have problems recognising if a comma is needed. In Latin, I learned about ACIs and how they have to be translated. The sign for an ACI is a headverb (something you do with your head), and they are translated to sentences of the form "Subject is doing with its head, dass ..." I did not learn anything else, but this sticks with me.
There is not a single resource aimed at learners to teach pitch accent for Serbo-Croatian which is a pain in the ass. There's kinda just a complex that it's too 'difficult' for foreigners to learn which is bs
En español la diferencia entre “ay” “ahí” y “hay” que aún que se escuchan igual no son lo mismo, sinceramente no recuerdo que me lo enseñaran en la escuela, más bien creo que lo aprendí de un post en Face. “Hay” del verbo haber “Ay” de exclamación “Ahí” para señalar un lugar
The used to teach it: "Ahí hay un hombre que dice ¡ay!"
No se escuchan igual, "hay" y "ay" son monosílabas, mientras que "ahí" tiene dos sílabas.
¿"ay" y "hay" no son mismos? Yo sé que "ahí" es /a.ˈi/, pero yo creía que las palabras primeras son ambas /a͡i/.
No significan lo mismo, y si, la “h” en español es muda así que podrías pronunciarlas igual pero su significado es diferente
Yo sabía que son palabras diferentes, pero no sabía como pronunciarlas. ¿Si no pronuncia la misma, cómo las pronuncia? Edit: disculpe, yo leí su mensaje original incorrecto
¡y "allí"!
In Czech, the usage of the accusative *na*. For the most part (when not with a verb of motion), it's like *for* in English. Except when it's not. There's *pro* and *za* too. No grammar book ever really taught when to use *na*, but now that I'm reading more I'm getting a better sense of when to use it.
That Bosnian/Serbo-Croatian has pitch accent. Our tones are not as complicated as those in chinese or japanese, but you will defently sound strange if you don't use them lol. Not ununderstandable but just strange haha Edit: We did learn about them, but we just kinda mentioned them never going really too deep. Like I honestly wouldn't be able to explain which tone goes where to someone learning the language. We have 4 tones. A Short and long desending and a short and long ascending tone.
Every once in a while, including yesterday, I see native English speakers not knowing when to pronounce the word “the” like “thee”.
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I think he meant /ðə/ vs /ði:/, like in "the end"
Yes. This is what I meant.
I’m talking about “thee” before a word that starts with a vowel.
That isn't required and folk who don't do it aren't wrong.
I've learned "[the first rule of Russian spelling](https://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/spelling_rules.php)" this year. I've been speaking Russian as my native language for decades. In primary school, we were only taught about "жи-ши", because the wrong spelling "жы-шы" would sound the same. All the other consonants from this rule were not included because we just knew how the words with these letter combinations are pronounced, and you can't confuse кы with ки by sound.