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Trolling or serious? How can you be a native speaker and not understand Your vs You're or its vs it's? > Or the fact that half our words are German and the o

Trolling or serious? How can you be a native speaker and not understand Your vs You're or its vs it's? > Or the fact that half our words are German and the other half are French. Quite a few of the basic ones come from old Nordic I think. : ) How did you really learn all the German (and French I guess) genders? I guess you either grew up in a multilingual home and as such doesn't represent the majority of us or you are incredibly gifted or just trolling.

dubcanada 12y ago
I don't mean that I don't understand it, of course I do. I'm basing this on the difficulty of the language. Not what I know/don't know. Learning genders is easy. It's just a memory game. And most people now and days don't really care if you mess it up. English is mostly old Germanic.
aaron-lebo 12y ago
I didn't figure out its vs it's until this past year, and I'm 27. It just didn't seem particularly important to bother with... Out of the 50 most used English words, all but one are from Anglo-Saxon. Out of the top 200, all but 13 are from Anglo-Saxon. On the other hand, out of the entirety of the English vocabulary, only a small portion of them are Anglo-Saxon. English has a Germanic core but has borrowed happily from other Indo-European languages. I hope I'm representing these numbers right. Been listening to the History of English podcast [1] which, if you like this stuff, is absolutely fascinating. The first episode is worth listening to just to hear Old and Middle English spoken. 1. http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  > It just didn't seem particularly important to bother with... That's on you.
  - aaron-lebo 12y ago
    Never said otherwise. You this hard on everyone or just fellow UTD alumni? ;)
    - pavel_lishin 12y ago
      Had I known you were a woosher, I'd have been harder :)

dubcanada 12y ago

I don't mean that I don't understand it, of course I do. I'm basing this on the difficulty of the language. Not what I know/don't know. Learning genders is easy. It's just a memory game. And most people now and days don't really care if you mess it up. English is mostly old Germanic.

aaron-lebo 12y ago

I didn't figure out its vs it's until this past year, and I'm 27. It just didn't seem particularly important to bother with... Out of the 50 most used English words, all but one are from Anglo-Saxon. Out of the top 200, all but 13 are from Anglo-Saxon. On the other hand, out of the entirety of the English vocabulary, only a small portion of them are Anglo-Saxon. English has a Germanic core but has borrowed happily from other Indo-European languages. I hope I'm representing these numbers right. Been listening to the History of English podcast [1] which, if you like this stuff, is absolutely fascinating. The first episode is worth listening to just to hear Old and Middle English spoken. 1. http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/

pavel_lishin 12y ago
> It just didn't seem particularly important to bother with... That's on you.
- aaron-lebo 12y ago
  Never said otherwise. You this hard on everyone or just fellow UTD alumni? ;)
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    Had I known you were a woosher, I'd have been harder :)