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You are saying. For me as a native German speaker I feel very much the same when trying to speak Portuguese. I'm used to simply read a verb and start picturing
by weinzierl 3y ago
You are saying. For me as a native German speaker I feel very much the same when trying to speak Portuguese.
I'm used to simply read a verb and start picturing the sentence meaning in my mind, immediately. Whereas in Portuguese there's this need to keep the whole conjugation table in working memory so you can figure out the meaning.
Also in Portuguese verb forms are really important to understand and communicate meaning whereas split verbs are just fancy dressing even Germans get wrong sometimes.
- nunuvit 3y agoConjugations are just compound words with improved efficiency. If anything, maybe they're too German.
- weinzierl 3y agoHardly, with almost 70 forms per verb, many irregular verbs and almost 20 different tenses/modes in Portuguese - German is really a kid's game.
- nunuvit 3y agoLiterally, though it's hardly obvious. Language Transfer does a good job of presenting Romance languages as conceptually regular in a way that's helpful, at least for beginners. I forget the term, but there's a concept where a word's distinct parts become merged in the mind of a native speaker. A simplistic example would be "breakfast". I was surprised as a kid to learn that it means "break fast" because I thought of it as an indivisible thing. Maybe that's obvious to Germans. Verb conjugations can be similarly decomposed, as long as you learn the conceptual "regular" form and the pronunciation "value system" that creates all the variety and irregular forms. It doesn't work for everything, but I think it's useful. It's more of a stretch for Portuguese, but the etymology is still there.