Quote Originally Posted by Marcus View Post
And this is very strange. English is not your mother toungue. How could you say it corectly if you did not know the rules? We learnt structure of English qestions and trained using them for a very long time. And questions with "who" and "what" were treated separately and much attention was paid to distinction between questions where "who" ("what") is a subject and where it is an object.
I guess people have different teachers and different ways of learning. I learnt English myself and I didn't have any tutors. That's why I didn't know about subject/object issues much. I know a Swedish girl who speaks English pretty well. She did study English at school but she had know idea what transcription is (she could not read it) or what the present perfect tense means...I agree with Throbert McGee...we study grammar at schools but then we just speak our native language and we don't pay attention to the rules that much. For example, when you say "Она пришла домой" or "Я пришел домой" you just say it and you don't wonder why you say "она пришла" and not "она пришел".