Online language lession - stay or go

[Liiisa]

Wow, reading that question made me realize how much my knowledge of English as a native speaker is based on some innate feeling I acquired when I was a child as to what's correct and what isn't, and can't explain why.

Hopefully some of the language specialists here can explain!

[shilgia]

"I speak Spanish" = I am capable of speaking Spanish. "I am speaking Spanish" = I am, currently, speaking Spanish.

Maybe an easier example:
"I bike to work" = it is my practice to bike to work/usually when I go to work. You can say this whether you're currently at home, at work, or on your way from one to the other.
"I am biking to work" = I am currently on a bike, making my way to work by bike.

"I walk slowly." = When I walk, I'm slow.
"I am walking slowly" = I am currently walking slowly.

-ing is for ongoing processes. I am walking (right now). Yesterday, I was walking to the store, when xyz happened. (= xyz happened *while* the walking was going on). Yesterday, I walked to the store, and then xyz happened. (= xyz happened *after* I had walked to the store.)

[romily]

Thank shiglia - that was my feeling as well, but I am slightly horrified about the fact that I forgot all the grammar I knew when I learned to speak english - after 22 year's it's automatic like Liisa said. And that's been without taking german into account as I learn my third language based on the second one...

Made me realise two things - that I really need to dig into grammar again learning Spanish, and that this is a good teacher bringing this to my attention already in the trial lesson / assessment.

I know we have some smart people here on the board when it comes to grammar, might start an english grammar thread:)

Love the fact though that I am already starting to engage my brain in a new way - day to day work is busy but I know everything inside out, learning something new keeps you young, isn't that what they say?

[Liiisa]

The great thing about Spanish is that it HAS to be much easier to learn than English, if for no other reason than that the spelling is very rules-based rather than completely whimsical like English. I know that speaking Spanish beautifully is difficult (subjunctive tense, etc), but I've found that learning it well enough to chat with someone in line at the grocery store can be done without too much pain.

I was on a birding trip in Costa Rica and I overheard our usual guide saying to one of the local guides in Spanish "be careful around that one (i.e., me), she understands more than you'd expect," ha! I need to review before I go back though.

[romily]

Well, looking at the grammar I think english would be easier that German. And don't forget, you don't really conjugate verbs in english - I go, You go, He/she/it goes, we go, they go...only in the third form does the verb change, whilst in spanish each form is different.

Hard to say what I easier - I have been told one of the most messed up languages to learn is hungarian as it is not linked to any other languages.

[shilgia]

Yes, English is absolutely a lot easier to learn than German! German is a grammar horror show.

[sprite]

But English is Germanic! (bwahahahaha)

[romily]

I just wish I would remember all the German and English grammar I once knew, would make things easier going forward! Maybe it will come back.

I had Latin in school and was really bad at it, but I still have enough in my head so that the Spanish verb conjugation, or the fact that female nouns and adjectives have the same ending, makes sense. But that was one class I only passed because my friend who sat next to me was really good at it - not that I would have ever cheated on an exam, no, not me

[sprite]

Did you have a long neck during exams?

It might be helpful to find some German texts on learning Spanish, because there's grammar in Spanish (from my memory) that doesn't exactly exist in English, but might be similar to German.

For example, English doesn't have a subjunctive anymore. We use the present tenses for things that are real, facts, likely, close (in relationship, preference, time and space). We use the past for things that are unreal, not true, unlikely, or far (in time, space, opinion, preference, politeness).
Spanish has a way to talk about real or unreal events in different ways, and also has verbs for politeness, in a way that English can't mimic but I suspect German can?

Shilgia's explanation is really clear. But it's also why we can say, "My flight leaves at 6pm tonight." THat's a future event, but it's a fact so we can use the present simple. Equally, "I'm eating dinner at my friend's tonight" is the present continuous, but because we are sure that thing will happen, we don't have to use a future marker.

and there is no true future tense in English, just combinations of verbs to give a future effect...

sigh. my nutty language.

[Liiisa]

lol I wasn't comparing English with German, I was comparing it with Spanish! German does my head in!

sprite, if I were to say that English never has a subjunctive tense... well but ok, "were" is kind of the past tense.

[Queen]

Shilgia explained it very well, but this might help

I speak vs I am speaking

is the same as

I spoke vs I was speaking


And Spanish has retained that wonderful grammatical joy that English has pretty much lost - the subjunctive. I remember a Spanish friend explaining how he missed it in English as a mode of expression and he was very upset when I told him it exists but we'd collectively decided not to use it.

(And I first learnt grammar in a structural way when I learnt French so if I have to figure out tenses I often end up with French terms - which is why I didn't label them here...)

[tzarine]

Apr 13, 2024 13:23:09 GMT -5 Liiisa said:

The great thing about Spanish is that it HAS to be much easier to learn than English, if for no other reason than that the spelling is very rules-based rather than completely whimsical like English. I know that speaking Spanish beautifully is difficult (subjunctive tense, etc), but I've found that learning it well enough to chat with someone in line at the grocery store can be done without too much pain.

I was on a birding trip in Costa Rica and I overheard our usual guide saying to one of the local guides in Spanish "be careful around that one (i.e., me), she understands more than you'd expect," ha! I need to review before I go back though.

spanish grammar is logical

i only use 3 tenses. i slur when i dont know the proper tense.
the castillan lisp is a horror

a mexican fellow @ the rite aid asked me bout maizena this evening. he was from a local resto & needed some. suggested he go to the nearby supermercado. he thanked me.
shocked that the entire conversation took place in spanish

liisa
reading garcia lorca in spanish helps a lot

[Liiisa]

I don't think I would recommend Garcia Lorca to a beginning Spanish speaker!

Read newspapers, or online sites about low-complexity things you already know about like recipes, or movies. Or read the Spanish translation of a simple book you've already read in English or German.

Or something for children: I read the first Harry Potter book in Spanish translation. I thought I could kill two birds with one stone - read a book in Spanish and finally say I've read something of Harry Potter.

[tzarine]

charlie brown in spanish

my french teacher taught asterlix & charlie brown in french

[snowwhite]

Subjunctive isn't a tense, for anyone reading this and wondering. The slightly interesting thing about the subjunctive (which can be called 'the irrealis mood' if you want to be fancy) is that what we have left of it works slightly differently in UK vs US English; there was a Johnson column about it in The Economist one time, but I forget the details.

And yes, in English, you can only mark present and past tense on the verbs, everything else is done with auxiliaries (I wrote a whole assignment about auxiliaries in English once), so to indicate the perfective, you have a past tense verb with an auxiliary marking the perfective aspect (I have walked, rather than the simple past I walked). You can pile up a lot of auxiliaries if you try (I will have been being ....)

Oh, and we already have a general languages thread around somewhere, which would happily accommodate grammar questions, but that's not really a reason not to have an English Grammar questions thread if anyone wants one.

[Liiisa]

That's fabulous, snow, thank you

[sprite]

Apr 13, 2024 15:27:46 GMT -5 Liiisa said:

lol I wasn't comparing English with German, I was comparing it with Spanish! German does my head in!

sprite, if I were to say that English never has a subjunctive tense... well but ok, "were" is kind of the past tense.

I think I meant to say that we don't have a really visible subjunctive anymore, more like the we have the tailbone version of the subjunctive.

[sprite]

I wondered how long we'd have to wait for Snow to get in here!

Annoyingly, because it is my job to teach this stuff, very little of my training actually went into stuff like tense/mood/etc. i've had to pick up scraps of grammar history and explanations on my own.

[snowwhite]

Apr 14, 2024 16:07:39 GMT -5 sprite said:

I wondered how long we'd have to wait for Snow to get in here!

Annoyingly, because it is my job to teach this stuff, very little of my training actually went into stuff like tense/mood/etc. i've had to pick up scraps of grammar history and explanations on my own.

Whereas the person who taught me quite a bit of this stuff was/is a former EFL teacher. There's a Maggie Talleman book she used for teaching the syntax bit to undergrads (I did the follow up seminar, so sat in on the lectures) which is pretty good, and (more importantly imo) fairly theory neutral.

I mean, you *could* go and do a MA in formal linguistics, specialising in syntax... there's a very good dept at Edinburgh. You would probably find that most formal linguistics people have *views* about the applied linguistics people and the academic rigor of some of the stuff they look at.

ETA: I just had a quick look out of curiosity and actually they're MScs at Edinburgh, but English Language or Linguistics both have a compulsory syntax module. Not that I think you'd actually want to go down this route.

[romily]

See, the fact that I learn Spanish starting from English means German isn’t in my brain at all – and I think it might make things even more confusing, considering that I don’t really remember German grammar either. It’s funny how your brain works with languages – if somebody asks me what a Spanish word means in German I literally have to translate it to English first to then find the German word.

A fried of mine who is Danish, and learned French and English at school says the same. If an English speaker asks him what something means in French, he needs to go bac to Danish to find the translation.

I’m definitely not doing a university course😊 I’m counting on the fact that my Spanish teacher explains things to me as we go along – this was just the first part of the assessment so we see how it goes.

Considering I have to fit this all around a full time job and other stuff going on in my life, there is only so much energy I can give it.

[sprite]

"hilariously", Snow, if I did their own MSc Ling, I still couldn't get a permanent contract with the language teaching department at U of Ed.
Currently having to learn all of these phrases like 'parataxis' and 'parathentical' for an exam. I do and explain all this stuff with students, but don't know the formal terms.

Romily, that really interesting about the language chain!

[lillielangtry]

I had my Persian classes in German and generally it was totally fine. I did find it funny when the teacher spent a long time carefully explaining a way of talking about repeated actions in the past and I was thinking "hang on, isn't this just the "used to" construction"?! Like "I used to go swimming every Saturday". And indeed it was.

[psw]

I took conversational Hebrew for a while with a native speaker who also taught another class including several Russians.

The teacher noticed that I caught on to certain constructions/usages that were difficult for other classmates, and I, who used to teach Russian to English-speakers, explained that like Hebrew, Russian has a built in ride/walk distinction for verbs and a location/destination distinction, both lacking in (modern) English. "GO" in particular, is all-purpose and leads to many amusing errors in the other two languages. In Hebrew class I took notes in either English or Russian as appropriate.

And I also have had some brain-stressing moments double-translating through English as above-described - headache following.

[tzarine]

Apr 14, 2024 17:03:35 GMT -5 snowwhite said:

Apr 14, 2024 16:07:39 GMT -5 sprite said:

I wondered how long we'd have to wait for Snow to get in here!

Annoyingly, because it is my job to teach this stuff, very little of my training actually went into stuff like tense/mood/etc. i've had to pick up scraps of grammar history and explanations on my own.

Whereas the person who taught me quite a bit of this stuff was/is a former EFL teacher. There's a Maggie Talleman book she used for teaching the syntax bit to undergrads (I did the follow up seminar, so sat in on the lectures) which is pretty good, and (more importantly imo) fairly theory neutral.

I mean, you *could* go and do a MA in formal linguistics, specialising in syntax... there's a very good dept at Edinburgh. You would probably find that most formal linguistics people have *views* about the applied linguistics people and the academic rigor of some of the stuff they look at.

ETA: I just had a quick look out of curiosity and actually they're MScs at Edinburgh, but English Language or Linguistics both have a compulsory syntax module. Not that I think you'd actually want to go down this route.

one of our relations has a phd in linguistics
rather pompous, stereotypical academic
funny @ holiday gatherings, tho

[tzarine]

i tried do chinese & french
got one of my colleague to get me a french chinese dictionary & french chinese texts
didn't work w my brain

[romily]

It's not only the language chain - it's also the whole personality thing when being bi-lingual. I literally feel different about myself when I'm in Germany speaking German - so much growth has happened in my life in the last 20 years in English whilst living in England, and somehow that seems to be not as easy accessible when switching languages. I find it 100% easier to stand up for myself in English than in German.

Not to mention opinion forming - due to the German history I find it much harder to voice my opinion about the Gaza conflict in German than in English. actually it gets a step beyond that - I start to question my opinion when I speak German for awhile. Due to the whole guilt about the holocaust that gets pretty much bred into you growing up in Germany, which again is linked to the language. pro's and Con's of nuclear power is another subject I feel differently about depending on which language I use.

Not wanting to get political but I find it fascinating how my brain is hard wired in certain areas depending on what language I use. I am sure somebody must have done some research on this somewhere...

[sprite]

Yes, tons of research into that bilingual personality! It's fascinating. I don't speak my other languages well enough to really notice it, but I know I change my voice, and I'm sure I do change my body language a little.