Important notice from the GRAMMAR POLICE. Plz read. This means you.

[Liz]

Do you 'make' or 'take' a decision?  If you 'take' a decision, I have to ask where are you taking it to?  If you 'make' a decision, it is a process going on in your head.  I cringe everytime someone says or writes 'take' as this, to me, is just wrong.

I have never once heard or read about someone "taking" a decision. That's just awful.

PS: If you're going to introduce yourself as "anal" about grammar, you might be interested to note that there are several easily spotted errors in your post. Hop to it, Grammarfan!

[SolaceDevotio]

There are people who say "take" a decision?  My head would explode.

[ZeKat]

There are people who say "take" a decision?  My head would explode.

You would be fun to have in my English class then! (I'm Danish, so English is taught as a foreign language)
People in my class have the worst spelling and grammar errors I've ever seen, and I might not even spot all of them, since it's my second language too  I even have to correct my teacher sometimes, despite the fact that he lived in London for 6 years.

[J. M. Pescado]

Yes, but at least they have the excuse of being foreign, which makes their mistakes amusing rather than infuriating. I mean, it's difficult to learn a new language, especially when your instructors are bad at it, too. People who are natively English-speaking have no excuses! With practice, you can even learn to recognize the distinct flavors of patois that foreigners have. For instance, Italians mutilate English in a distinctly Italian way, whereas Germans are entirely different: Germanian-English is always very stiff, and excessively formal, characterized by a rigid adherence to rules, whether or not they are present or correct, whereas Italian-English have this kind of babblative flow to it. A classic example of "Germanian-English" is FatD from here and around: His English is always extremely rigidly correct: While there are no apparent errors in it, in that his learning is very good, it's simply too stiff and formal, even in an extremely informal context. A side effect of this is that he was very good at hiding being 12.

[Tsarina]

I even have to correct my teacher sometimes, despite the fact that he lived in London for 6 years.

My mum studied Danish at university and lives in Denmark on 13th year. Sometimes, it's still noticeable that she's foreign. Living in an English-speaking country does not make one speak English natively.
I speak Russian at least an hour a day. I'm still not very good at it. Languages are hard. The fact that people are taught a foreign language and then expected to teach it to others, is, when you think about it, slightly pathetic.

[ZeKat]

I even have to correct my teacher sometimes, despite the fact that he lived in London for 6 years.

The fact that people are taught a foreign language and then expected to teach it to others, is, when you think about it, slightly pathetic.

Indeed, I would love a native English teacher. Also, well done to your mother for managing to learn Danish, it's so ridiculously complicated and inconsistent that we can't even speak it properly, I think half the Danish population still calls it "et hamster", when it is actually "en hamster". (Similar to the difference between a and an except we have NO RULE to identify when to use which. You just have to remember for each and every possible combination...)

[Liz]

I've been trying to learn Cantonese for 2 years now, an effort made more difficult by some of the local population. Certainly there are plenty of people, native Cantonese speakers, who encourage my efforts, but strangely it's often seen as something of a novelty that I would bother trying to learn to speak the predominant language where I live. This attitude puzzles me.

Regardless of what language I use to address someone here, many people will insist on responding in English. This is usually done in an attempt to be helpful, and while I appreciate the sentiment, it's hard to practice the local language when half the locals I meet are "too helpful" to speak to me in Cantonese. Others who reply in English appear to be doing much the same thing I am, taking the opportunity to practice a non-native tongue. In a third scenario, the person to whom I'm speaking is so enthusiastically impressed with my meager smattering of lingual skillz that regardless of what I just said or asked, the answer I receive is, "Wah, so good your Cantonese la!" Say thanks in Cantonese, begin to ask the question again. "You live here long time?" Two years, begin 3rd attempt at question. "Why you not speak Mandarin? Is much easier la." And there goes my bus. Thank you for your assistance.

[Tsarina]

Also, well done to your mother for managing to learn Danish, it's so ridiculously complicated and inconsistent that we can't even speak it properly, I think half the Danish population still calls it "et hamster", when it is actually "en hamster". (Similar to the difference between a and an except we have NO RULE to identify when to use which. You just have to remember for each and every possible combination...)

Actually, she has described Danish grammar as "castrated German", so that's not the problem
It's mainly because Russian does not differentiate between, say, the plate and a plate, and Danish does.

Regardless of what language I use to address someone here, many people will insist on responding in English. This is usually done in an attempt to be helpful, and while I appreciate the sentiment, it's hard to practice the local language when half the locals I meet are "too helpful" to speak to me in Cantonese.

Both parties speaking the other's language is in many cases more foolproof, as it ensures no-one speaks in a too complicated manner. If I recall correctly, this was done on a Russian-American space project - the Russians spoke English, the Americans Russian. So if the locals hadn't been so busy complimenting you, maybe it'd be more efficient...
Still annoying, though.

[Lorelei]

the person to whom I'm speaking is so enthusiastically impressed with my meager smattering of lingual skillz that regardless of what I just said or asked, the answer I receive is, "Wah, so good your Cantonese la!" Say thanks in Cantonese, begin to ask the question again. "You live here long time?" Two years, begin 3rd attempt at question. "Why you not speak Mandarin? Is much easier la." And there goes my bus. Thank you for your assistance.

So I suppose Amy Tan got the speech patterns exactly right!

[Liz]

the person to whom I'm speaking is so enthusiastically impressed with my meager smattering of lingual skillz that regardless of what I just said or asked, the answer I receive is, "Wah, so good your Cantonese la!" Say thanks in Cantonese, begin to ask the question again. "You live here long time?" Two years, begin 3rd attempt at question. "Why you not speak Mandarin? Is much easier la." And there goes my bus. Thank you for your assistance.

So I suppose Amy Tan got the speech patterns exactly right!

I've never read any of her books, but I just perused a few excerpts. Sure enough, the patterns I saw are very much like what I hear around me every day. For instance, someone might say, "You very lucky have money." That's not very good English, but it is a direct and accurate translation of the Cantonese sentence into English words. There was a weird learning curve I had for months where I would get frustrated because I couldn't figure out quite how to say, "I want to go to the diner to eat dumplings." I mean, I could say, "I want go diner eat dumpling," but I couldn't figure out the rest. Finally I got it through my head that there really is no "rest", that all the "to the" and other such phrases just aren't needed. Conversely, I imagine it must be incredibly frustrating for a native Cantonese speaker to be translating every single word perfectly but still be considered awkward and incorrect in her English speech.

[rufio]

For instance, someone might say, "You very lucky have money." That's not very good English, but it is a direct and accurate translation of the Cantonese sentence into English words. There was a weird learning curve I had for months where I would get frustrated because I couldn't figure out quite how to say, "I want to go to the diner to eat dumplings." I mean, I could say, "I want go diner eat dumpling," but I couldn't figure out the rest. Finally I got it through my head that there really is no "rest", that all the "to the" and other such phrases just aren't needed. Conversely, I imagine it must be incredibly frustrating for a native Cantonese speaker to be translating every single word perfectly but still be considered awkward and incorrect in her English speech.

Interesting - there really aren't any function words in the Cantonese sentence?

Word-for-word translation isn't a good method for any language though.  If it were, machine translation would be leagues ahead of where it is now.

[DrNerd]

For instance, someone might say, "You very lucky have money." That's not very good English, but it is a direct and accurate translation of the Cantonese sentence into English words. There was a weird learning curve I had for months where I would get frustrated because I couldn't figure out quite how to say, "I want to go to the diner to eat dumplings." I mean, I could say, "I want go diner eat dumpling," but I couldn't figure out the rest. Finally I got it through my head that there really is no "rest", that all the "to the" and other such phrases just aren't needed. Conversely, I imagine it must be incredibly frustrating for a native Cantonese speaker to be translating every single word perfectly but still be considered awkward and incorrect in her English speech.

Interesting - there really aren't any function words in the Cantonese sentence?

That's pretty common in a lot of Asian languages.  It's not so much that the words don't exist, it's that they're totally unneeded, like you can have sentences in English with "understood" subjects, like "Take out the trash."  They also tend to have trouble with "count" and "non-count" nouns.

[rufio]

That's pretty common in a lot of Asian languages.  It's not so much that the words don't exist, it's that they're totally unneeded, like you can have sentences in English with "understood" subjects, like "Take out the trash."

Most languages have very different ideas about the kinds of things that need to be marked (and where they get marked) than others (unless they're very closely related, of course).  It just seems kind of odd to me that purpose clauses ("[in order] to eat dumplings") and allatives ("to the diner") don't seem to be marked here.  It might actually make sense to just treat motion verbs like "go" as transitive and have the "object" actually be the goal of the motion (hence something like "I go diner"), but the clause thing is strange.  Japanese doesn't mark relative clauses (other than with word order) but it does mark other ones.  I'd think there was something marked on the second verb, except that IIRC Chinese languages are extremely isolating.

If I had hopes that I'd get a real answer, I'd ask Liz to translate some other sentences into Cantonese (or glossed Cantonese, anyway).

They also tend to have trouble with "count" and "non-count" nouns.

Probably because they lack number, and the count/non-count distinction has to do with pluralization.  Although, at least in Japanese (probably Chinese too, AIUI) you could probably make the argument that all nouns are simply non-count.

[professorbutters]

With practice, you can even learn to recognize the distinct flavors of patois that foreigners have. For instance, Italians mutilate English in a distinctly Italian way, whereas Germans are entirely different: Germanian-English is always very stiff, and excessively formal, characterized by a rigid adherence to rules, whether or not they are present or correct, whereas Italian-English have this kind of babblative flow to it. A classic example of "Germanian-English" is FatD from here and around: His English is always extremely rigidly correct: While there are no apparent errors in it, in that his learning is very good, it's simply too stiff and formal, even in an extremely informal context. A side effect of this is that he was very good at hiding being 12.

You can see this in Shakespeare's plays, where there are characters who aren't supposed to be English speakers.  The most famous is probably the bilingual "love" scene at the end of *Henry V*, where the French princess Katherine blows off a compliment with "O Dieu! les langues des hommes sont pleins de tromperies." Henry asks her lady in waiting,  "What does she say?  That men's tongues are full of deceit?" and Alice responds, "Oui, dat de tongues of de mans is be full of deceits. . . dat is de princess."  It's an almost word for word rendering of French into English.

There's another character in *Love's Labors Lost* who is a Spanish traveller.  Often the character is acted with a thick, almost indecipherable Spanish accent, but that doesn't fit the way he actually speaks, which is extremely fancy and formal, with at least three alternative words employed for the same thing.  The guy adores language, and he can't resist showing it off:  "see!  See!  LOOK how fabulous my English is!"  (Just ignore the fact that the play is supposedly set in France for now--everybody speaks English.)  Plus the stereotype of what Spaniards are like was different:  it wasn't all castanets and Carmen and ole; it was more Phillip the II, formal and stuffy with very starched clothes.  So his speech is hypercorrect.  Or Shaw's Professor Higgins is right:  foreigners speak English beautifully.  It's native English speakers who crucify the language. 

[Jelenedra]

Japanese and Chinese are similiar that way. You don't need things like "to the" in the language because it's implied. It helps that they have words(?) that do thinks like mark the subject of the sentence and another to imply what the verb is doing.

I went to the park.

Watashia wa paaku ni ikiimashita.

Directly translated: "I park went."

Wa marks the subject, I. And ni lets you know that iku (go) is the verb. The 'mashita' verb form lets you know it was past tense. If it was "itte" it'd be a command to go to the park. If it was "ikiimasu" then you are going to the park.

Now, ad a "ka" to the end of the sentence? It automagically becomes a question. "I went to the park?"

[rufio]

Watashia wa paaku ni ikiimashita.

Wa marks the subject, I. And ni lets you know that iku (go) is the verb.

No.  Wa is in fact a topic-marker, which is sometimes used to mark whatever is considered the subject in English, but not always; you could also rephrase the sentence as

paaku ni wa ikimashita

but in this case you are focusing on talking about the park rather than on what you did.  Also, as you can see from the above, the ni particle is actually part of a postpositional phrase with paaku and cannot be separated from it without changing the meaning of the sentence.  In other words, it is identical to English allative "to" in this case, except that it comes after the noun it modifies rather than before.  There is no need to "let you know what the verb is" in Japanese.  I have no idea what the shit you are talking about there.

Itte is actually a te-form, which is used for multitudinous wildly distinct purposes in Japanese.  If you follow it with "kudasai", then yes, the sentence is imperative.  This has much more to do with the "kudasai" than the te-form, though.

Also, Japanese and Chinese are incredibly not similar at all when it comes to syntax.  I do know that much.

[Jelenedra]

Yes, but ni and wa do not TRANSLATE into English. So why it may be "identical to English allative "to"" that doesn't make it MEAN "to." That was my point. Head peen. "O" "NO" "WA" and "NI" do not have an English translation. So, if you did a word for word translation, you wouldn't get anywhere. That was the topic at hand, so that is what I was talking about. It was also greatly watered down explaination so that people who haven't studied the langunage would get it.

For another example:

Neko no ai

Can be translated as follows and still be correct because "NO" doesn't have an English counterpart. It's merely a possessive marker.

"Cat of love"

"Cat's love"

"Love cat"

"Cat love"

[rufio]

Can be translated as follows and still be correct because "NO" doesn't have an English counterpart. It's merely a possessive marker.

"Cat of love"

"Cat's love"

No, try "love of cat(s)".  That is exactly what it means.  Those first two translations you gave are, in fact, wrong.

And, as I said before, the fact that you cannot translate literally word-for-word is the case with every single language.

ETA:  For anyone who was actually interested in the Cantonese questions (yeah, right), this is apparently what is going on.

[Jelenedra]

You are such a fucking moron.

Studied the language for 6 years. All those translations are in fact RIGHT.

[rufio]

You are such a fucking moron.

Studied the language for 6 years. All those translations are in fact RIGHT.

ROFL

[Jelenedra]

You're such a waste of time and space.

I could go into a list of name translations that are all "of X" have the same XnoY setup, but you wouldn't listen because you know sooo much more about EVERYTHING.

[rufio]

That's because X no Y is in fact "Y of X" and not "X of Y" like you said originally.  Only you could spend six years learning a language and so completely fail to understand how the grammatical particles work.

[Annan]

I even have to correct my teacher sometimes, despite the fact that he lived in London for 6 years.

The fact that people are taught a foreign language and then expected to teach it to others, is, when you think about it, slightly pathetic.

Indeed, I would love a native English teacher. Also, well done to your mother for managing to learn Danish, it's so ridiculously complicated and inconsistent that we can't even speak it properly, I think half the Danish population still calls it "et hamster", when it is actually "en hamster". (Similar to the difference between a and an except we have NO RULE to identify when to use which. You just have to remember for each and every possible combination...)

If Danish is anything like Swedish, there are rules for which words are en or et/ett, but they haven't been taught in ages. My grandmother was taught it when she had grammar in school (she's born in 1919), but I don't think my mother was. In my grammar classes the teachers said it "didn't matter", "because everyone knows it by sound", which makes me curious of how they teach it to immigrants (my guess is they don't, BTW).

[soozelwoozel]

Oh look, rufio has diversified and is now sharing his grammar learnings (or lack thereof) in more than just his mother tongue. Non English speakers the world over will now rejoice that they no longer have to follow his ramblings with subtitles. Huzzah!

[Tsarina]

If Danish is anything like Swedish, there are rules for which words are en or et/ett, but they haven't been taught in ages. My grandmother was taught it when she had grammar in school (she's born in 1919), but I don't think my mother was. In my grammar classes the teachers said it "didn't matter", "because everyone knows it by sound", which makes me curious of how they teach it to immigrants (my guess is they don't, BTW).

This is interesting. I will have to look it up. Thanks for mentioning it.
Especially because with the amount of English words in the language, those rules are needed to not make people sound like retards.