I am using a foreign language right now, as I'm Finnish... But I acquired English starting from very young age and I've acquired it mostly the same way you acquire your native language, through exposure and use, so I couldn't really explain English grammar any more than I can explain Finnish grammar. I use English instinctively.
Though I suppose you don't have to look very deeply to find some major differences, since Finnish is highly agglutinative language and English is, well, not. Ok, now that I've thought about it, another quirk of Finnish is that it has a very freeform sentence structure, you can put the SVO in basically any order and it's valid (but some are more natural than others), while English is more rigid, but still has some flexibility. But there are other languages where the sentence structure is much more rigid than either English or Finnish.
I can theoretically also speak Swedish and German, but my Swedish is very rusty and my German is non-existent, since I only took it couple years in school and that was over 25 years ago and I've basically never used it since.
Of the three foreign languages I know German is the most different. It has unusual sentence structures, and it works by compounding words (which Finnish can also do). It also does the whole grammatical genders thing which I find absolutely ridiculous. Finnish doesn't even have gendered personal pronouns! Let alone assign genders to inanimate objects and intangible concepts...
Though I suppose you don't have to look very deeply to find some major differences, since Finnish is highly agglutinative language and English is, well, not. Ok, now that I've thought about it, another quirk of Finnish is that it has a very freeform sentence structure, you can put the SVO in basically any order and it's valid (but some are more natural than others), while English is more rigid, but still has some flexibility. But there are other languages where the sentence structure is much more rigid than either English or Finnish.
I can theoretically also speak Swedish and German, but my Swedish is very rusty and my German is non-existent, since I only took it couple years in school and that was over 25 years ago and I've basically never used it since.
Of the three foreign languages I know German is the most different. It has unusual sentence structures, and it works by compounding words (which Finnish can also do). It also does the whole grammatical genders thing which I find absolutely ridiculous. Finnish doesn't even have gendered personal pronouns! Let alone assign genders to inanimate objects and intangible concepts...
Statistics: Posted by x-viila — 11 Aug 2024 21:36
