yudantaiteki Wrote:Indeed. My father's use of English makes me convulse, but he doesn't speak that way because he's stupid (no matter the impression it gives...), or because English is hard, but only because his parents, and presumably school friends, also speak/spoke that way and he's been unwilling to 'correct' since then.kame3 Wrote:This is not entirely true, because natives sometimes do have problems in speaking them, especially the hard grammar structures. For instance in Dutch, you have some 'famous' 'grammar problems' that you hear wrong all the time. I guess Germans have problems with the cases sometimes aswell. And I don't know if every Japanese knows all the correct counters.I don't think that necessarily has anything to do with the complexity of the structures, it's just whether they are still being used in the current colloquial spoken language or not. Typically the prescriptive grammars that tell native speakers they are "wrong" are essentially just making up rules with no basis in actual usage, and so it's not that the rules are difficult, just that people didn't learn to talk that way.
No matter how hard I try.
