Some studies actually show that people are actually born with pretty complex language. Obviously these methods of communication aren't as vast as the memorized aspects, but not all language is learned.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Learning Greek has led me to appreciate how easily I just remember the English forms of 'to be'

by Anonymous 12 years ago

I am You are He is We are They are Not that hard. I could memorize that pretty easily without prior knowledge of English.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

I feel you've never tried to learn another language.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Je suis Tu es Il est Nous sommes Vous etes Ils sont Still not very hard. And that was from memory. I've never tried to learn Greek, that's true. It might be more difficult in that language.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Oh okay maybe I'm wrong. Just saying because I'm in my sixth year of french and I still can't remember those to save my life.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

You're coming across as a bit of a knob tbh.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

I was just proving a point. It's not the hardest thing in the world to memorize the conjugations of "to be"/

by Anonymous 12 years ago

My thing is that there are rules to be memorized and then all the exceptions to those rules. Like in English, verbs follow a pattern: I type, you type, he types, we type, you type, they type. Then you've got the forms of 'to be,' which don't fit. It's easy in English because I've been speaking it my whole life. Learning ειμι, ει, εστι, εσμεν, εστε, εισι is harder. Then you throw in future, imperfect, infinitives, and imperatives and it can get pretty complicated.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Yeah, that's true. And English has so many things that just don't follow any rules at all. I'm glad it's my first language.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

I agree, this is one of the few things Spanish is harder in: soy, eres, es, somos, son estoy, estás, está, estamos, están all for "to be"

by Anonymous 12 years ago

And then there are languages that have tons of conjugation classes and even more conjugations depending on the "mood", not to mention quite a few declension classes depending on what vowel nouns end in. :P

by Anonymous 12 years ago

huh. I never thought about that. That's insane, especially when you think of people who know upwards of 5 or 6 languages.

by Anonymous 12 years ago