Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
Slavic languages can be ... overwhelming for an English speaker. A noun (the same word) can have 7 diferent forms. For example "I see book" (vidim knihu) uses different form of the word "book" (kniha) than "with book" (s knihou) and that is different from "about book" (o knize).
Each noun has gramatical gender (like German language) as oposed to the English
Also verbs have different form according to the gender of the subject.
Another example
one beer is (1 pivo)
two beers are (2 piva)
and five beers is witten (5 piv)
Now take pivo, piva, piv and make 7 forms out of each of them ;-)
That is because in Czech language the same letter is read the same way in any word, unlike in English.
take English word
angel
and word
angle
Letter A is pronounced in two *totally* different ways, despite being followed by two identical letters 'ng'.
It means that the FOURTH letter after A can change the way the first is pronounced. Crazy! I can't understand how kids are able to learn to read. Kids in Slavic countries have enough difficulties learning to read.
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Beer is always the best example ;-)
And yes, I was completely struck by how easy it was to pick up the sounding-out of the language (aside from one or two trouble letters). It made so much sense, that I couldn't understand how other languages didn't work out the same way in the end - although, SMS/internet chat speak seem to be pushing English in that direction, ever so gradually.