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I first truly learned technical terminology when I tried learning French.  Until then, I just "knew" how it all worked.

"I said, 'Wait a minute, Chester, You know I'm a peaceful man...'" Robbie Robertson
by NearlyNormal on Mon Jun 2nd, 2008 at 12:26:34 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Yup. I remember an English class where our teacher decided to do some of the grammatical and sentence structure stuff. Blank looks until he switched to French to explain English to a bunch of people who were mostly native English speakers or the equivalent and where no one spoke French better than English (lots of folks were native level in both, but none in French but not English).

And everything I know about Polish grammar comes from Russian class. I've never taken a Polish language class in my life, whether for foreigners or native speakers. In retrospect the funniest part of Russian class was learning about verb aspect, which is both one of the most fundamental parts of Polish (and Russian) grammar, and generally the hardest thing for (non Slav) foreigners to get - I had no idea that aspect existed even though I'd been using it correctly my entire life.

by MarekNYC on Mon Jun 2nd, 2008 at 12:59:23 PM EST
[ Parent ]

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