Fun Stuff > CHATTER
English is weird
oddtail:
Prepositions are tricky, and I remember when I was in school, other students often had trouble with some of their uses in English.
But since the grammatical alternative is to inflect words, and that can get very complicated, fast, I still consider English to be a very simple language. I've known people for whom Polish is a foreign language, who have been immersed in it for many, meany years, and they still get conjugation or grammatical cases wrong.
Heck, when learning German, I struggled with noun cases - and there are only 4 in German, as opposed to 7 in Polish (and I... think they're roughly analogous? Still a nightmare to learn and I ultimately didn't). I'll take having to learn/memorise plenty of idiomatic prepositional phrases over inflection-based grammar any day.
(and after a while, you develop a feeling for what preposition "feels" right in certain phrases. It's arbitrary to an extent, but I don't think it's completely arbitrary, even when it seems to be)
jwhouk:
English is about the only language out there that you have to speak to understand.
Is it cold in here?:
My wife made her living for years analyzing and classifying the use of prepositions in English.
Russian does have prepositions: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Russian/Prepositions
Morituri:
Huh. If it does, then clearly I must have missed another part of the story, namely 'why would he have said that in that case....?'
It's something I heard from a Russian immigrant who was a coworker a few years ago... and I always just assumed it was true. But, consulting a proper source, clearly it's not.
I guess we learn something every day. Thanks for calling it out.
oddtail:
If Russian is anything like Polish wrt prepositions, it's that they strictly refer to things in relation to other things. In Polish at least, it's very straightforward and there is less variation and usage that, to a Slavic speaker, would seem weird in English (which can't rely on inflection).
Plus, I don't know about Russian, but Polish just has fewer choices to increase confusion. For instance, Polish doesn't distinguish between "of" and "from" (in the sense that it has one preposition that roughly covers both concepts in most contexts). I suspect Russian is similar in that regard.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version