Search:

Excellent post, Jca.

Cougar asked me the "were to" one, the other one is just me trying to come up with something awkward but possible :)

Not necessarily. Imagine two guys sitting around. "If you had some money, we could go to the movies." No lost opportunity there. If they get the money, they can go.

They go in order to you, because you are a native speaker of English. What if, however, my native language is one where the object comes first, then the verb, then the subject? To me, it would seem...

Yeah, and which language has six cases with tons of exceptions and rules that have to be learned for each preposition? And two forms of the same verb to learn?

French doesn't have more difficult phonetics. You might get put off by all the q's and apostrophes, but the spelling system is entirely regular. And, Nixer, you are a native Russian speaker, so of...

I believe that at one time English also had a formal form, which gradually went of use. However, what you're talking about goes beyong pronouns. Although you may use "you" with both of them, I'm sure...

I take it Scandinavian languages have the thing where you're supposed to mention the expression of time first, or were you just translating directly?

Comparing it to Russian was the wrong way to go about doing it, I agree. I'm not intending to say "This language is better than that one." But my point is that English is really not such a terrible...

JJ, that may be true, but let's compare the conjugation of "to go" in English and Russian(we'll just use идти for it instead of one of the many other Russian verbs of motion :) )

to go
-------...

English is really not a hard language. The spelling is absurd, but besides that and some strange idiomatic constructions as well as "verb + preposition" things like "take on, take out, take off" and...