Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
English is a hard language to learn I understand as there are so many 'borrowed' words in it as well as things like it's and its and you're and your etc. so it doesn't surprise me that grammar in English is also complex to learn.
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This is commonly believed among native English speakers, but it's not true. English is one of the easiest languages to learn, at least for speakers of other European languages (and probably the easiest European language to learn for speakers of other languages). As one of my 8th grade students said when I was teaching English in Germany, "English is easy - you just learn a couple of rules and then all you do is learn words."
Whereas even with a language like German (which is easier than Russian or Finnish or many other languages), to correctly say even simple sentences, you have to know the gender of the noun *and* whether it is the subject, direct object, or indirect object of the sentence, or if it is being possessed. You have to know the appropriate endings to use for the definite/indefinite article with each of these parts of speech, and if you use an adjective, it has to match, while using slightly different endings.
So in English, you might have the term "the black dog"; this term won't really change depending on its part of speech in a sentence.
In German, the black dog is "der schwarze Hund" if it is the subject of the sentence (Der schwarze Hund [sees the cat]).
But it's "den schwarzen Hund" if it is the direct object of the sentence ([The cat sees] den schwarzen Hund). And if you give something to the dog, it becomes "dem schwarzen Hund" - ([I threw the ball to] dem schwarzen Hund). Possessive becomes "des schwarzen Hundes".
But those are just the rules for the definite articles; there are different rules for indefinite articles, different rules again for nouns preceded by adjectives but no articles, and different rules again for plural, which also require knowing what case the noun is in.
German only has 4 cases; Latin and Russian both have 6, IIRC, and Finnish has some implausible number in the teens.
The problem with these rules for language learners is that you have to learn them at the very beginning of learning to speak; they aren't obscure rules that you can pick up later (like the subjunctive, say); you have to know the gender and case and proper endings of all the nouns in your sentence to even say the simplest sentence. While in English you can blithely say "Fred sees the black dog; the black dog sees Fred; Fred throws the ball to the black dog; Fred knows the name of the black dog. If you want the indefinite article, just change "the" to "a"; nothing else changes.