Is English grammar harder than Dutch

Guest   Sat Dec 08, 2007 10:38 pm GMT
In my opinion, the English grammar is harder than the dutch one, especially the verbs. English verbs, though less inflected, have many tenses and peculiarities. Besides, English syntax is a mess. What do you think about this topic.
Guest   Sun Dec 09, 2007 1:28 am GMT
What's your native language?

I'm a native English speaker, who speaks German, but not Dutch (although I have read a bit about it and can understand a fair bit in its written form).

From what I know Dutch grammar is considerably simplified when compared to German. Although it retains some gender and adjective agreement, it does not retain the same number of cases as German and by no means the same complexity of declension. However as such it is still more complex than English. As for the verbs I don't think they are a great problem, not like in the Romance languages.

HOWEVER if its verb tenses (or more accurately 'aspects') are more similar to German than English, which I believe they probably are i.e. no progressive and interchangeable simple past/ present perfect most of the time, then in this respect it is simpler than English.

German does actually acknowledge a progressive tense albeit only in some dialects and still used in a simpler way than in English. For example you might hear:

'Er ist am schlafen' or 'Sie war am lesen' but probably not in the same variety of structures as in English, although possibly I'm wrong.

I wonder if the equivalent is possible in Dutch.
Milto   Sun Dec 09, 2007 4:00 am GMT
''English verbs, though less inflected, have many tenses and peculiarities. Besides, English syntax is a mess. ''

The less inflected a language is, the more complex syntax it has...
For example, Macedonian, English and Brazilian Portuguese.
Macedonian has no cases, but difficult syntax and word order.
Brazilian Portuguese simplified morphology, but the syntax has been made more complex (topicalization is closer to Chinese than Continental Portuguese)
Guest   Sun Dec 09, 2007 8:51 am GMT
Brazilian portuguese seems to me fairly simple compared to other romance languages
Guest   Sun Dec 09, 2007 9:55 am GMT
Que você está falando, homem? O português é muito mais difícil do que o espanhol. Eu simplesmente não posso aprender a gramática traiçoeira. Pela maneira, eu sou uma máquina que traduza!
Guest   Sun Dec 09, 2007 10:39 am GMT
"Que você está falando, homem? O português é muito mais difícil do que o espanhol"

Isso nao é verdade para mim. Em geral, a gramatica do portugues luso é um pouco mais complexa do que a espanhola, mas a do brasileiro ( através da simplificaçao do uso dos pronomes pessoais e dos tempos verbais) revela-se bastante facil. No Brasil, as crianças tem de aprender um monte de regras gramaticais que nunca hao-de usar na vida diaria.
Por isso a maioria dos brasileiros acha que a lingua deles é multo dificil, na realide a que estudam nas escolas nao corresponde à lingua que realmente falam.
Sinto muito pelos erros e pela falta de acentos: infelizmente nao tenho um teclado portugues. Adeusinho
M + P   Sun Dec 09, 2007 12:53 pm GMT
English tenses (aspects) are much more complicated than Dutch, whose tenses are almost identical as in German: one for each time and a similar construction. Dutch has no subjunctive, no continuous etc.

Yes, it has the equivalent of German "Er ist am schlafen" in the standard language (in German this is dialectal). This is "aan het"

Dutch has no cases, German has 4 and therefore much more complicated things. It's clear that german grammar is *much* harder than the Dutch.

English has much more idiom and slang than dutch, also the orthography: Dutch spelling is logic and consistent. You read a word, you will know the pronunciation.

Dutch is a simple, uncomplicated language. The sounds are harsh, possibly this can seem difficult, but it's not. The Dutch speakers pretend that their language is complicated, but the truth is other thing.

The one difficult thing of Dutch, is the dialectal variety especially in Flanders. But the standard Dutch is very uncomplicated. There will be no Dutch person who will agree; in their culture they like to think that their language is to difficult for foreigners, who are intellectual inferiors :-) !
Guest   Sun Dec 09, 2007 3:52 pm GMT
Dutch has the gender of nouns, which is quite umpredictable like in German
M + P   Sun Dec 09, 2007 4:42 pm GMT
Dutch has 3 genders, but almost never uses 3, only 2:

definite articles: de, het
indefinite article: een

How simple!



But in German, the genders are always 3 and many indefinite articles:

definite articles: die, der, das
indef articles: ein, eine, einer, einem, einen, eines
Milton   Sun Dec 09, 2007 6:56 pm GMT
I don't know if Continental Portuguese is more difficult.
Continental Portuguese neutralized TODO O and TODO, so both are interchangeable, but they are not in Brazilian: todo o means whole, and todo means every...Furthermore, Brazilian Portuguese keeps the distance between ESTAR COM (at the moment of speaking) and TER (usual) so the sentence: AGORA TENHO FOME makes no sense in Brazil, you have to say AGORA EU ESTOU COM FOME.

I think English grammar is more difficult than Dutch (I guess you cannot say ''harder'' for Grammar, but more difficult), because of many contrast found in English (WILL vs GOING TO vs WILL BE DOING vs BE DOING;)
Guest   Sun Dec 09, 2007 7:19 pm GMT
''Dutch has 3 genders, but almost never uses 3, only 2:''

that's why they have to use a dictionary to know whether COW is masculine, feminine or neutral. to have nice grades, you have to know genders, although you may not use it in a more informal speech.
Guest   Sun Dec 09, 2007 7:21 pm GMT
<<
Dutch has 3 genders, but almost never uses 3, only 2:

definite articles: de, het
indefinite article: een

How simple!
>>

It'd be a whole heck of a lot simpler with just one gramamtical gender (like English).

If you exclude things like syntax, spelling, idioms, phonology, and vocabulary, and just focus on morphology (the very heart of grammar) English has got to be one of the simplest languages around.
Guest   Sun Dec 09, 2007 7:24 pm GMT
"Macedonian has no cases, but difficult syntax and word order."

Macedonian has got a very complicated verbal system, one of the most complex amongst slavonic languages, furtherthemore, it possesses three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. So I don't think that it may be compared to English
Guest   Sun Dec 09, 2007 9:08 pm GMT
There is no need to use a dictionary to find out about genders. Everybody knows for every word if it´s masculine/feminine or neutral, because of the articles used in speech. The english word 'the' = 'de' (mascular/feminine) or 'het' (neutral)
Indeed if you want to know if a word is mascular or feminine you'll have to get a dictionary, but there's no need to know.
Guest   Mon Dec 10, 2007 6:04 pm GMT
''Indeed if you want to know if a word is mascular or feminine you'll have to get a dictionary, but there's no need to know.''


I don't agree.
For translating: ''Our grandparents have a cow. It is very nice.''

You have to know the gender of COW in Dutch.
KOE is feminine so you literal translation is: ''Our grandparents have a cow. She is very nice''.

Literal translation''It is nice.'' or ''He is nice'' would be incorrect.


''De koe, hij geeft melk” is incorrect Dutch.
KOE (cow) is feminine and not masculine.
Flamish people and Southern Dutch people (from Maastrich and Utrecht) know how to use genders, but people from the North of the Netherlands may be blessed in their ignorance.