grammar help?

[kojiro]

Which is correct? "an honest person" or "a honest person"

When I was in middle school I was taught that if a vowel comes after then use "an" and if a consonant then "a".

Are there other rules that I am not aware of. I found sites using both.

thanks.

[lucifer]

it's about the sound

so

a hand

an honour

an umpire

a uniform

but do what feels right for you :)

[meow]

Thanks! I could use that too. I say "a uniform" but thought it was correct to write "an uniform". My English has improved. :)

[lucifer]

must be a topic of the moment I was discussing it with a portugese friend only a couple of days ago

the real hard one is

hotel

a or an could be right/wrong depending if you drop your h's ;)

[Coolin]

Personally, I pronounce the "h" so I say a hotel. All my friends and classmates say "a hotel" also.

There's also another grammatical concept. Where to say "tha" or "thee" (phonetic pronounciations.) From what I know, you say "thee" when the word after is a vowel, if not it's "tha"

[lucifer]

I blame the french

[kojiro]

Ok thanks. yeah it does sound weird saying an uniform. ;-)

[LeX]

Damned English! I never liked it. There's way too many irregular this and that and exceptions....

[akashik]

it is getting odd though. I've always used english this way:

an honour
a horror

but in the past year or two I've heard newsreaders use things like:

an horrific accident ...

To me it sounds wrong (and makes it more difficult to pronounce), but I have to presume they are correct. I can see why people who speak another language then try to learn english have so much trouble with it

Greg Moore

[Coolin]

They say English is the hardest language to learn in the world. Although I do not believe that when it comes to writing (I think Chinese or Japanese is the hardest) in speech, English is probably the hardest.

[Gayowulf]

I agree. I thought french was hard at first, but when i really pondered I realized that english has many more "rules" that apply rarely; Not to mention all the figures of speech we use daily without knowing it. Those are enough to make anyone's head spin.

[lucifer]

Originally posted by Coolin
They say English is the hardest language to learn in the world.


I know many people who consider english an easy language to learn. OK there are 125,000 words or something which is alot (more than any other language) but most people (mother tounge) only know a fraction I think the average is something like 16-20 thousand (saw that stat many years ago so may be a little out but no too much)

We don't have any of that gender stuff so you don't have to learn that - the rules of the gender of things are different for different languages. most english verb are regular and simple

none of that formal/informal you stuff

plus the huge advantage that so much stuff is in english - film/music/books/internet etc that there is lots of exposure plus you get to use it more - I was in India 6 months ago and most travellers would talk english to each other as a common language. the more you come into contact with something the easier it is.

[akashik]

I hear Mandarin Chinese is another tough one. Maybe that's just from english though. At least German, French etc all come from a latin root. Asian languages are a whole new ball game with no historical background at all.

Personally I want to learn Thai so I have an idea of what my future mother-in-law saying about me to her friends :)

Greg Moore

[Rodie]

Originally posted by lucifer

Originally posted by Coolin
They say English is the hardest language to learn in the world.
I know many people who consider english an easy language to learn. OK there are 125,000 words or something which is alot (more than any other language) but most people (mother tounge) only know a fraction I think the average is something like 16-20 thousand (saw that stat many years ago so may be a little out but no too much)


I've always wondered where they came up with the number of words in a language, and how they figured it? Even 125,000 seems like a low number to me. I mean, look how big some of the dictionaries they make are! And since each number has it's own unique name, aren't there essentially an infinite number of words in each language? ;0 heh

[Coolin]

The best way to find out is to get the thickest dictionary you can find and start counting word by word. I'll pay any one a buck that does this for me.

And no, you cannot cheat. ;)

[Gayowulf]

Most dictionaries give you an approximate nuber of definitions contained within. The foot thick dictionary in the local library says it has 80 000 words, and my little pocket one claims 30 000.

A very well educated person usually has a vocabulary of about 30 000 words.

[Coolin]

Originally posted by Gayowulf
Most dictionaries give you an approximate nuber of definitions contained within. The foot thick dictionary in the local library says it has 80 000 words, and my little pocket one claims 30 000.Shhh! I said no cheating! ;)

Anyone I have a pocket dictionary with 60,000 words, so I'm pretty sure the thick ones have much more than 80,000. I'm guessing about 125,000 for the thick ones?

[lucifer]

mandarin chinese has very few word only a few thousand but they reuse them with different tones so they mean different things. This makes it very hard to learn if you are not a native as you need perfect pitch (being able to tell what note something is when it is heard on it's own) to do it properly. in english we don't need this skill so we loose it (babies have perfect pitch)

[lucifer]

Originally posted by akashik
Asian languages are a whole new ball game with no historical background at all.

I'm sure they do have a historical background

[kojiro]

English is easy to learn but hard to master. Too many rules and too many exceptions to the rules.

[lucifer]

Originally posted by rshinji
English is easy to learn but hard to master. Too many rules and too many exceptions to the rules.



too true

[polestar]

a gel or an gel? You see, sometimes it doesn't even have to begin with a vowel. In this case, the word has two different meanings depending on whether you say a or an.
Or, from an different gle you might just think I'm a cretin.

[LeX]

Originally posted by lucifer
mandarin chinese has very few word only a few thousand but they reuse them with different tones so they mean different things.
Not quite correct. There are thousands of thousands of different words/characters in the Mandarin Chinese langauge, not "only a few thousand". It's the pronounciation thingy that only has a coupla rules and tones. China has this 5 thousand year history, the people there must've invented millions of words in that time! And there are still new words being created today, just like with English.

I read this Time report once about languages, I think it mentioned English or some other European language as the most difficult, and they listed some reasons that I forgot. But I know for sure it wasn't Japanese or Chinese.

IMO, though, I think Arabian is the hardest. Who da hell understands those squiggly lines? I still find it hard to believe that people can actually decipher their words... :eek:

[lucifer]

LeX my handwritten english is pretty sqigly it's not just arabic. You may be right about the chinese All my info comes via my friend who lived out there a while, but he's on holiday so I can't be expected to remember all those facts ;)

[kojiro]

Well in my native tongue every letter is significant.

So my language is the best. Very simple! Foreigners who visit my country learns it so quickly.

[Coolin]

So what is this language you're talking about?

[Gayowulf]

Pinoy, or Tagalog, i'd assume. Correct me if i'm wrong. maybe Pinoy isnt a language. excuse my ignorance :)

[kojiro]

Pinoy is what we call ourselves. Like Americans called themselves "yanks"

It's not tagalog! I was referring to Cebuano.

No intonation! Words are pronounced by how they are spelled. No rules in spelling that I know of.

[lucifer]

where you from??


back to chinese my friend who knows about these things has returned. he said that there are only 8 strokes in mandarin though you get these arty caligraphers who make up extra ones for aestetic appeal - so it should be well easy :D ;)

[Coolin]

Originally posted by lucifer
back to chinese my friend who knows about these things has returned. he said that there are only 8 strokes in mandarin though you get these arty caligraphers who make up extra ones for aestetic appeal - so it should be well easy :D ;)
That's just the phonetical stuff, you learn that when you're six years old. Real Chinese has like 20 strokes in each word. Some more advanced words have even more.

[LeX]

Coolin is partially correct. The 8 stroke thing is the basic and most commonly used lines in Chinese (words), but there are more than just 8 ways of slashing the brush. As Coolin puts it, there are "more advanced" strokes around. :p But it has nothing to do with phonetics.

[lucifer]

no they only have 8

in english we have 26 letters which we combine to make words

they have 8 strokes that they combine to make the characters

they do also have traditional and modern (simpler versions that the cultural revolution introduced - this was a positive thing and is behind huge increases in literacy in the population since)

[lucifer]

as said calligraphers use/make up more but they are not 'real' ones

[Hobbes]

Go english language!

lol


Does your brain ever try to take words/sentences apart and then analyze them in every way possible? Darn high school for teaching us to analyze every thing until it's just a pile of mental mush :(

[Coolin]

Ok, so the Chinese have an 8 letter alphabet. Try this, put each stroke in a unique position in 20 different places to from a word. And then you have to memorize it because there is no "sounding-out." Try having 20 letter words for every word there is in the English language, let's see how good you are at that. Now imagine that you can't sound out the word, is it getting harder? Now, you have to place the letters not size by side, by one on top of the other, some diagonal, some slightly higher than others, some directly below, some at a certain angle to another. If you call that simple, which you did, you have obviously mistaken Chinese as a language.

Chinese easy? I think not.

[LeX]

No, the Chinese language has 37 "alphabets", and each character/word is "assigned" to specific a combination of "alphabet(s)", which tells you how the word is read. I agree, it's really hard to learn, they teach at least 9 years of Chinese at school! It's a pain to memorize all the different characters/words - what each looks like and how it differs from others and how each one is pronounced in different situations. Yup, complicated.

And there are more than 8 strokes, believe me.

[lucifer]

well I still go with my friend he lived out there and has a degree in the stuff

I know he can work out meanings of characters he doesn't know because it has sub characters like water or person in it but it's not easy to get exactly the meaning more a vauge sense of it

I do know that it's not easy

I love crazy scripts Thai is very good

[Coolin]

Thanks for correcting me LeX, my knowledge of Chinese may be better than some others on these forums, but they are far from perfect. I always seem to have one mistake in each of my posts :(