Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One: Online Version
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CHAPTER 11
THE FIRST STEPS IN LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
WORD ORDER
In the above section about gender, you may have noticed something strange about Spanish word order. If máquina means “machine,” and roja means “red,” then the phrase máquina roja literally means “machine red,” not “red machine.” Why place the adjective after the noun? That’s not how we do it in English. We say “blue sky,” “tall man,” and “flexible material.” The adjective always comes before the noun.
However, if you’re speaking Spanish, the adjective always comes after the noun (with a few exceptions). Spanish speakers don’t see anything strange about this. Neither do speakers of French, Portuguese, or Italian, who also place their adjectives after their nouns.
The rules governing word order are by no means uniform across languages. Perhaps the best examples of convoluted word order (from an English speaker’s perspective) are Japanese and Korean, which place the verb at the end of a sentence.
Articles
In English, these are the words “the,” “an,” and “a.” Most Asian languages completely ignore these. There is no exact equivalent of “the” in Chinese or Japanese. Other languages use definite articles only under limited circumstances.
In most European languages, the article changes according to gender. In Spanish, “the house” is la casa. Casa is a feminine noun, so it takes the definite article la. On the other hand, the word for “car,” coche, is masculine. Masculine nouns in Spanish take the direct article el, so “the car” is el coche. As noted below, the articles in many European languages also change if the noun happens to be plural.
Plurals
Whenever there is more than one of something, a plural is involved. In English, plurals are generally formed by adding an –s to a word. We have “cats,” “dogs,” and “automobiles.” (Of course, we also have our share of irregular plurals.)
The Romance languages (Spanish, French, etc.) are relatively well behaved in regard to plurals. (In fact, the plural forms in most Romance languages are more consistent than those of English.) An –s is added, and a consistent change is made to the definite article. In Spanish, for example, el libro (“the book”) becomes los libros (“the books”).
However, German—another commonly studied European language—has a complex system of plural formation that requires quite a bit of memorization. When a German plural is formed, the direct article and the ending of the original word both change. “The year” is das Jahr. However, “the years” is die Jahre. “The boy” is der Knabe; “the boys” is die Knaben.
Arabic is perhaps the most maddening of all—the plural version of a noun may take a form which looks like a completely different word. For instance “a house” is bayt. However, “houses” is bayut. There are several distinguishable patterns for plural formation in Arabic---but Arabic plurals are challenging, nonetheless.
In Japanese, explicit plural forms are seldom used. In most situations, context tells you whether you are talking about one armadillo, or a whole pack of armadillos. If you need to specify the exact number of armadillos, then you use a special auxiliary word, called a counter, which indicates quantity. Just to keep you on your toes, Japanese has different counters for different types of objects. There are unique counters for books, animals, people, cupfuls, etc.
Indonesian plurals are perhaps the easiest and most logical. An explicit Indonesian plural is formed by simply doubling up the noun. For example, the Indonesian word for “child” is anak. The word for “children” is anak-anak.
Plurals are one of the first aspects of grammar that you will have to learn. The difficulty that you will face in this area will largely depend on the language which you decide to study.
Copyright 2005 Beechmont Crest Publishing
