Monday, October 15, 2007

no-pucckuu?


Today I was thinking about how different foreign languages are from English. I'm majoring in Russian, and we're learning basic words and phrases, and we've started to make simple sentences. It's pretty tough and a lot different than anything I have ever learned. I had just gotten used to Spanish after taking it for four years in high school! I had learned where to put the subject in the sentence and how to use adjectives to describe it. So now when I compose sentences in Russian, I want to put them in the same order we learned in Spanish. But Russian doesn't have a specific order, you can use adjectives anywhere around the subject-before or after, it doesn't matter. Also, they don't have the verb "to be" which I'm still trying to figure out. You say things like "She teacher." I guess it must make sense to Russians. It makes English, with all its grammar rules, seem crazy. You can tell what tense the verb is in just by looking at the ending of the subject...the word changes with past tense and such. It's hard to understand, but in a way makes more sense then a lot of English grammar.

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