>>In Spanish, verbs have a different ending for each person (I, you-singular, he, we, you-plural, they) and tense (present, past, past-imperfect, past-perfect, past-plusperfect, not to mention future, imperative, gerund, participle and the whole subjunctive mode; I forget.) There are even archaic and regional persons: the equivalent of English Thou/Thee/thy/thine and y'all, except with specialized verb endings! (Example: Vos podés: Used in Argentina and Central America.)
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>>So each verb has over 100 variations which I think comes from the Latin heritage. And of course not all verbs are regular...
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>Is it like in French and German, though, where the endings of some persons are the same as for another? e.g. in German Sie Sind means both "You (plural) are" and "They are" - even the same pronoun!. What's the point!?
"Sie" has three meanings:
1. She
2. They
3. You (both singular and plural, like english), but this a more formal form which is common in Germany because germans are "old fashioned". This form of Sie (note the capital S) corresponds to old english forms like thou and thee, I guess.
>>The unbelievable thing is that humans learn it easily when young! We are amazing.
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>And it's interesting to watch how kids learn the rules and stick to them. It's amusing to hear my 5-year-old saying things like: "I taked it with me", "I swinged the rope", etc. The rules get like hard-coded then they have to learn the numerous exceptions.
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>I expected Spanish would be a lot like French, with all these tenses, and, I suppose, Italian. French throws another spanner (wrench) into the works with their Past Historic tense; if I remember correctly, it's only used in the written word, for recounting stories. How mad is that!?
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>On the French theme: I believe that Canadian French has quite a few words, forms and expressions that aren't in the native language. And I expect the accent is different too (I suppose like the difference between Canadian English and English English. All this contributes to making the language very difficult to follow for those who learnt French French. e.g. the song "Une Complainte pour St. Catherine" by K & A McGarrigle has several un-French words and is practically unintelligible to me.