VCF Europa Update

On Wed, Mar 08, 2000 at 12:18:05PM +0000, Hans Franke wrote: Toddlers can learn *anything*, it doesn't help the rest of us!!! When I tried (very unsuccessfully) to learn German it was just dizzying... All those word endings which the teachers said were nice because it meant you could understand what a word meant independently of the word order, but don't get the idea that that means you can be sloppy with the word order because German is super strict about that too! All that stuff with time/manner/place, and moving infinitives to the end of the sentence, and the fact that some prepositions take accusative case and some take dative (???) just based on a memorized list (aus, ausser, bei, ...), it's just so much work! And every detail seems to be different from English. You have to be thinking furiously just to cough up semi-correct childlike sentences in real time. And of course your slang is just as confusing as ours must be... Kids have it easy since their brains are a lot more receptive to just picking up patterns w/o basing them on rules. So when they learn a language, they just get a feel for what "sounds right" and that's it, the rules of grammar can come as a total shock to them years later but they were obeying most of them all along anyway. Kind of like Morse code -- you can get up to around 5-7 WPM by just using a lookup table in your head and concentrating really hard, but by the time you get to 20 WPM you'd better "just know" which letter is which. Well unless you're a genius or something... John Wilson D Bit