I have begun learning five different languages, both through school and college courses and on my own time. Some of these languages I have given up and, to be honest, I am yet fluent in none of them. However, having gone through the introductory level of five languages, I have noticed some things which are common to many languages, but not to English, and which English speakers often have a difficult time with. This hub is meant to explain these concepts and language features.

I will cover:

• Gender
  
• Concord/Agreement
• Verb Conjugation (including a note on Semitic languages)
• Case Systems/Word order
• Idioms/Meaning-binding
• There is no right way
  

In many languages (all romance languages, German, Greek etc.) all nouns posses what is called grammatical gender. This is a very strange notion for English speakers because, in English, gender is only relevant in pronouns (he/she, his/hers etc). The notion, however, is quite simple.

German, for instance, has three genders (the most a language ever has): masculine, feminine, and neuter. This means that every noun falls into one of these categories. These categories do not have any meaning, they are only grammatically relevant (mostly with rules of concord/agreement, covered next). So, some quick examples:

der Mann- the man, masculine die Nacht- the night, feminine das Mädchen- the girl, neuter

As you can see in das Mädchen, grammatical gender does not necessarily have anything to do with the real gender of the noun, although it often does (der Mann, for instance). Also, you can see that each gender takes a different definite article, a different form of 'the.' This is one form of concord/agreement.

To most of you, gender probably seems silly and pointless and you're confused as to why it exists at all, since it has no meaning. I am too, although I think it may be part of a conspiracy to make learning a foreign language more difficult. Regardless, it does exist and you should know what it is. Now, on to concord and agreement.

First a quick note, concord and agreement are the same thing, just by different names. When I was learning Spanish the concept was called agreement, when I was learning Ancient Greek, it was called concord. Now, the explanation:

Concord/Agreement is a fairly simple concept, one which is present in English already. In English an example would be using "this chair" or "these chairs." You use "this" when the thing in question is singular and "these" when plural. Agreement is the idea that words must agree with each other. In the example just given "this" and "chair" agree because they are both singular and "these" and "chairs" because they are both plural. You would never say "these chair" because the words do not agree.

Agreement becomes more complicated in other languages, however, because there are other ways words can agree than just in number. There is additional difficulty because there are more words that are concerned with agreement. In English, you can say "the chair" or "the chairs" but in Spanish, for example, the definite article differs based on the number of the noun it goes with. It also differs with gender. For example:

La silla- The chair vs. Las sillas- The chairs (both feminine)

El asiento- The seat vs. Los asientos- The seats (both masculine)

Things become even more complex if the language has a case system (covered in depth later). For now, just be aware that case makes agreement more complex because words not only have to agree in gender and number, but in case as well.

Finally, although the only examples of agreement I have discussed here have involved the definite article (or demonstratives in the English example) agreement occurs with other kinds of words as well. Between adjectives and the nouns the modify, for instance, among still more places. However, regardless of where it is applied, the concept is always the same.

This is a feature which is present in English, but is not thought about. Verb conjugation is the simple fact that the verb changes depending on the subject: "I am" vs. "You are." The difficulty for English speakers is two fold: 1) for the most part, we never think about verb conjugation and so it seems like a strange concept, especially because 2) many other languages have conjugation systems which are far more complete and complex than ours.

This is very well demonstrated by Spanish. In English, our conjugation system is so deteriorated that you must always include the subject of the sentence, even when it's a simple pronoun. In Spanish, however, the conjugation system is complete enough that it is rare to include the pronoun in an utterance like "I speak."

The verb hablar means to speak. Conjugated in the present tense, it looks like this:

hablo- I speak

hablas- you speak

habla- he/she/it speaks (also you speak when addressing someone formally)

hablamos- we speak

hablaís- you (plural) speak (informal, only used in Spain)

hablan- they speak (also you (plural) speak in Latin America, or formal in Spain)

As you can see, the difference in word ending determines the meaning. This is very common and it does occur in English: I speak, she speaks; however, the system is complex enough in Spanish that the endings actually carry meaning. Thus, as I mentioned before, in Spanish you would almost never say "yo hablo," (yo- I) but rather just "hablo."

A note on Semetic Languages

In Spanish (and English and German etc.) a verb is conjugated by changing its ending. This is not so in Arabic and other semitic languages. Instead, each verb has a root of three (usually three, anyways) consonants. To conjugate a verb, you insert a predetermined set of vowels and other consonants among and around the root consonants. It is a very interesting and complex system, and more information can be found here.

Now, the really fun stuff: Cases!

In English the position of a noun in a sentence determines its function, i.e. in the sentence "I gave the shoe to her" you know it is the shoe that is being given because it follows the verb and you know I am giving it because it precedes the verb. However, many languages have a different way of showing a words function within the sentence, they use cases.

We will look at German as an example. German has four cases, named thusly: nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative. The case of a noun is determined by its function and shown in different ways in different languages. In Greek it's shown by its ending, rather like you know Michael's is a possessive because of the apostrophe s, whilst German only shows cases through agreement (i.e. a noun in the accusative has a different definite article than one in the nominative).

The rough correspondence of case to function is thus: nominative, subject (I gave Michael's shoe to her); genitive, possessive (I gave Michael's shoe to her); dative, indirect object (I gave Michael's shoe to her); accusative, direct object (I gave Michael's shoe to her).

In German the words of that example sentence could be put in nearly any order (the only rule being that the verb must be second). Thus: Ich gab Michaels Schuh ihr. is the same as Ihr gab ich Michaels Schuh.

This is a warning about something which is so basic that it took me a long time to realize it explicitly. First, and most obviously, idioms are different in other languages. "I get it" does not mean, in Ancient Greek, "I understand." Even idioms that make sense, or are deeply grounded in English need not be present in other languages.

Which brings us to the second topic: Meaning-binding. By this, I mean how meanings/concepts are bound to words. In most languages a given word can have multiple, not necessarily even related, meanings and the way multiple meanings are bound to one word is not the same across languages. If you look up "so" in a English-German dictionary, you will find four or five different german words to cover all of its meanings.

This is a fairly obvious notion, but it's one that took me awhile to get clear. I mention it here because often we don't realize that one word even really has multiple meanings, particularly with abstract words like "so."

This is just a final caveat and word of wisdom:

All languages are weird, all languages have their own oddities and idiosyncrasies (English more than many) and so it is important to keep in mind when learning a new language that "There is no right way to do it." You may think case systems are hideously confusing and arcane, but they are a perfectly valid way to determine a nouns function. You may think gender is pointless but so is having a meaningless conjugation system (i.e. English). When you're learning a new language find those differences you think are interesting, and find the ways those differences you hate can be good things.

Most importantly: learn!