I'm still having problems with articles and pronouns. The other parts of speech are coming along OK and the idioms I've seen are all present in English and make sense with what I've learned about German grammar but I am still ****ing up the articles and pronouns, and it's almost all because I can't remember the gender of the nouns.

Still enjoying it though.

The English language is a mess. With rules like i before e except after C which is not a rule at all because there are loads of exceptions.

Done even get me started on my pet hate word, the word queue... Strip the pointless letters and just use Q ffs lol

One interesting fact is that Old English is actually similar in structure and words as German and other Germanic based languages. Years back Eddy Izzard did a show on Old English and went around countries that have Germanic languages and could communicate speaking in Old English and they would understand.

Come on, that's only in English to mess with non English speakers heads, like much of the spelling.
The only real rule in English is there are no rules, much of the language is taken from other languages, complete with spelling, you can actually blame either the French, or Latin for the origin of the word.

And old English, or Saxon, was originally German in origin so it's not a big surprise that German hasn't evolved a great deal and they still understand old English.

And you can also blame the Normans, or Norse, or French, for the changes from Saxon. Mind you, they messed with the earlier Brittonic. And the Romans, and before that was ..........

Note to a certain mod, dekko is Indian in origin, in Hindi the loose translation is have a look, jester is old French, who stole it from Italian where it actually meant 'puff up the cheeks' so as a translation it means, 'look at puffing up the cheeks' :cartman:

English is like C++. A collection of whatever seemed useful at the time, taken from other languages.

Quote from Woz :

T
Done even get me started on my pet hate word, the word queue... Strip the pointless letters and just use Q ffs lol

Now that's because it's a french word originally, and we all know the french like to add letters to words for no apparent reason :P

Quote from Woz :

The English language is a mess. With rules like i before e except after C which is not a rule at all because there are loads of exceptions.

It's not a rule, it's a rubbish mnemonic probably dreamed up by a primary school teacher somewhere.

Not sure if using a word such as mnemonic in this thread is safe.

Oh and Kev, should you decide to come to Bavaria despite our funny language, don't forget that everything you learn now is proper prussian german. Which noone here will understand :-)

All down the drain.

Should you need any help just give me a shout, I live quite near the austrian border and I have grown to understand the locals here.
Or just stop by, we'll have a pint and discuss much nicer topics than stupid pronouns.

greetz

der b&butz

Yeah it's like when I decided I'd be OK in Spain because I learned a bunch of Spanish from Mexicans I knew in the USA, so I went to Barcelona and they all spoke ****ing Catalan...