As someone who does speak Spanish, I think assigning gender to nouns in Spanish makes perfect sense. Otherwise the elegant and refined "Yo quiero Taco Bell" could have easily been "Yo quiero Taca Bell" and things would have jussst not been quite the same. History and civilization would have been destroyed.animus fox said:
Just with Hindi and Chinese you can speak to about 40% of the world's population.
Spanish is the same way. So is German, but German also has what is called "neuter" (pronounced noy-tur)...neither feminine nor masculine, but neutral.
I thought about posting something for you to tell 'em, but that might be best left to the PM system.
There are indeed many dialects. There is a large number of Punjabi speakers in my area.
I knew several Filipinos when I was in the Navy. I made it a point to have a few of them teach me all the bad words in Tagalog, simply so the others wouldn't talk **** to me.
I can see how English can be hard for a non-native speaker to learn (and even a lot of native speakers struggle with speaking it properly). Some of the Filipinos I've known have learned it pretty well, no matter how difficult it was...and putting the shoe on the other foot, I know I'd struggle to become fluent in Tagalog.
I recently started a new job, and I'm back to regularly reading through service manuals. It's quite obvious that they were written by someone whose first language is not English (I believe it's Japanese, in this case), as some translations are a little...off. In that case, grammar rules play a part, specifically the order in which parts of the sentence are placed. Throw in colloquialisms, and speaking especially can be tricky. Foreign-language classes almost always teach you proper, super-formal ways of speaking, though the German class I took in college was a little less so.
