How to Learn Any Language 9
How to Learn Any Language 9Now let the adult mind enter and make peace. Obviously, no language tries to be hard just to keep you out. Whatever rules you find perplexing in your target language, that language came by them naturally and organically. Grammar does change, but so slowly you’ll never have to worry about it. Approach the grammar with a smile and your hand extended. That which you understand, take and keep. That which is confusing, return to again and again. That which seems impossible, return to again and again and again, until it becomes merely confusing. It will ultimately become clear. Meanwhile, however, you will be speeding ahead in your command of the language as you keep returning to those stubborn fortresses of grammatical resistance.
I can honestly say I came to like the study of grammar. Once you finally approach grammar with the right attitude, it becomes both a map that shows you the pathways through a language and a rocket that takes you there faster.
A paleontologist can find lifetime fascination with a fossil a child might ignore, kick, or toss into the lake just to hear the splash. Likewise, the grammar of various languages throws off some laughs and insights nonlinguists never get a chance to marvel at.
In German, for example, a woman doesn’t achieve feminine gender until she gets married. The word for “girl” (M鋎chen) and “miss” (Fr鋟lein) are both neuter gender. In Russian, the past tense of verbs acts like an adjective; it doesn’t shift forms according to person and number as verbs normally do, but shift according to gender and number as adjectives do. In Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish the definite article (“the”) follows the noun and is attached to it. Therefore, “a field” in Norwegian is en mark. “The field,”, however, is marken. Romanian and Albanian, completely unrelated to the Scandinavian languages, do the same thing.
In Finnish, the word for “not” is a verb. (At least it behaves like a verb.) Finnish, alone in all the world, has an inflecting negative. In every other language in which verbs conjugate, the form of the verb changes according to person and number, whether the verb is positive or negative. Thus, in Spanish the verb meaning “to want” goes yo quiero, tu quieres, el quiere. If you wish to say “I don’t want”, you keep the verb forms the same and throw the word for “not”, no, in front of it (yo no quiero, tu no quieres, el no quiere).
In Finnish, and this is pure believe-it-or-not to anyone who’s looked at a lot of different languages, it’s the word for not that does the changing! Thus, “I want,” “you want,” “he wants” in Finnish goes, (min
页:
[1]
