Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
Learn some Asian languages, like Chinese. They don't have tenses. You just add something like "yesterday" or "tomorrow", they also have a simple word that you can add to a sentence to indicate that everything happened in the past. Europeans have build up these hugely complicated grammatical structures that are not really necessary for understanding. You only start to realize that once you step outside of that circle.
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How interesting! I speak (as foreign languages) English, French and Russian. I know a fair bit of a few other languages, but I would not quantify that as "fluent".
They certainly all have past and future, but it's interesting that the Easternmost one of these, Russian, has less complex tenses; they stick with just one for past, one for future.
But it's extremely complex in several other respects.
I'm a big fan of Esperanto (don't speak it, just love the idea) i.e. a language made up to have simple grammar, no exceptions and words with a Germanic, Roman or Slavic origin. We should drop English in the EU and use Esperanto instead. Fairer on everyone, nobody is at an advantage or disadvantage and no need to wast years of your life perfecting your English like many are forced to do. You can reach the same level in Esperanto on 1/5 of the time, apparently.