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More translation...
Aug. 18th, 2001 12:17 amI do hereby intend to stop crabbing about opportunities to translate from English into Russian. If I don't do such translations, I'll never get any better at them. (I just need to recall my first Russian-to-English translation... man, I sweated blood over it and must have looked up every second word!)
I don't know what the academic term for it may be, but I view myself as a "instinctive" language user. Experience has shown that my attempts to understand language in terms of grammar have been laughable. In school, I used to dread having to do grammar exercises as simple as identifying the subject of a sentence, though I never had serious trouble identifying malformed sentences, doing practical grammar exercises, or originating well-formed sentences of my own.
In college, I was fortunate to have a department chairman who felt that live, imperfect conversations were better for one's language development than engaging in contemplative silences spent wondering whether to utter one's next phrase in the pluperfect subjunctive. (Following his advice, I eventually was approached by one of the lit professors, who jokingly asked me if I had anything personal against using the accusative case.)
Compared to Russian, English has almost no grammar to speak of. As the structure of words changes little, if at all, depending on how they are used in sentences, word order becomes very important: "the man bit the dog" communicates something completely different from "the dog bit the man."
Cases in grammar are used to show the function of nouns and pronouns in a sentence. English has three cases, the subjective (also called the nominative), the possessive, and the objective case. For the most part, the only one of the three that involves a change in the form of nouns is the possessive (as in AlexPGP's LiveJournal). Some people claim this makes English easier to learn, but I disagree. I think it makes English harder, especially if one's native language lays everything out for you, casewise.
As is the case in Russian, which has six cases (pause while I stop and mentally review an unprintable mnemonic to make sure I'm right). In Russian, nouns and the words that describe them take the same case - and therefore change their endings in prescribed ways - as required by the grammar and syntax of the sentence.
Anyway... gotta go get ready for my turn on console.
Cheers...
I don't know what the academic term for it may be, but I view myself as a "instinctive" language user. Experience has shown that my attempts to understand language in terms of grammar have been laughable. In school, I used to dread having to do grammar exercises as simple as identifying the subject of a sentence, though I never had serious trouble identifying malformed sentences, doing practical grammar exercises, or originating well-formed sentences of my own.
In college, I was fortunate to have a department chairman who felt that live, imperfect conversations were better for one's language development than engaging in contemplative silences spent wondering whether to utter one's next phrase in the pluperfect subjunctive. (Following his advice, I eventually was approached by one of the lit professors, who jokingly asked me if I had anything personal against using the accusative case.)
Compared to Russian, English has almost no grammar to speak of. As the structure of words changes little, if at all, depending on how they are used in sentences, word order becomes very important: "the man bit the dog" communicates something completely different from "the dog bit the man."
Cases in grammar are used to show the function of nouns and pronouns in a sentence. English has three cases, the subjective (also called the nominative), the possessive, and the objective case. For the most part, the only one of the three that involves a change in the form of nouns is the possessive (as in AlexPGP's LiveJournal). Some people claim this makes English easier to learn, but I disagree. I think it makes English harder, especially if one's native language lays everything out for you, casewise.
As is the case in Russian, which has six cases (pause while I stop and mentally review an unprintable mnemonic to make sure I'm right). In Russian, nouns and the words that describe them take the same case - and therefore change their endings in prescribed ways - as required by the grammar and syntax of the sentence.
Anyway... gotta go get ready for my turn on console.
Cheers...
