Languages Without Verb Tenses?!
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- Опубліковано 21 жов 2024
- How can you communicate without verb tenses? It's not that hard, actually. This is a video about languages that don't have verb tense but express time in different ways, and languages that lack certain tenses.
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Hi everyone! Are you learning a language? One great resource to check out is Innovative Language podcast programs: langfocus.com/innovative-language-podcasts/. Click the link to read my description of the Innovative Language approach, then you'll find your favorite language at the bottom of the page!
I am an arabic native speakers
Can i translate this video to Arabic and send it to you in order to include this translation in the video
Hey Paul! I am writing a paper on alternative ways of expressing verb tense and time in different languages, e.g. Navajo. Would you happen to have some literature on that subject maybe?
I am Chinese native speaker. I learn Turkish in my spare time.
Do you have a video or can you make a video talking about your educational background? I'm seriously thinking of doing a master's in Linguistics or a PhD in Psycho-linguistics but I don't know anyone that has done either of those majors and I would love to get some insight on either majors from someone.
@@jeanp.5929 I don't really have that kind of academic background. I did a degree in English Language & Linguistics, then an Education degree. Most of what I know about languages and linguistics comes from my own self-directed learning. I also know several languages other than English (let's say at a B2 level to be safe, though I might test higher in one of them on a good day), but I learned them mainly through self study.
This channel is really just my place to nerd out and learn as much as I can about things I'm passionate about (languages/linguistics and related subjects, + content creation).
The past, the present and the the future walked into a bar. It was tense.
lol. This is a contender for the nerdiest joke ever. :)
Nice dad joke
Oh please...
This guy got me laughing 😂
yo yo I see you everywhere
I'm Chinese Cantonese speaker, I sometimes forget to use tense in English, when I say 'Yesterday I go to school', my English friends will be confused and remind me I need to use 'went', but I still think 'Hey, I've already said Yesterday'
You already said Yesterday; but using the present tense contradicts it. So we don't know which you mean, past or present. It's as if you answered the question "Did you kill your wife?" with "YesNo". :^>
@@pbasswilI want to ask out of curiosity, which part do you think you are more sensitive to? The verb tense or the context.
@Le Chat I can't say generally which I am more sensitive to - both are clues about time. But in this case, ''Yesterday I go to school'', I would figure out that you intended past tense - you're much more likely to use the wrong tense, than you are to say Yesterday when you mean Today/Now.
@@pbasswil Hmmm, good to know. Thank you.
@Krok Krok Sadly not even half of these pronunciations exist in mandarin Chinese.
As someone who started studying Chinese after German, finding out Chinese doesn’t have verb tenses was the best thing I had ever heard.
And then you worry about the script.
i'm learning spanish after mandarin, and it is NOT so much of a piece of cake as everyone makes out, for this reason
then I guess you found the tones, and the thousands of homophones... :)
@@gracecrook9032 not really I’m still understand about the irregular verbs, regular verbs are easy.
@@sreekargunda3915 actually the script is not how hard people make it to be. We only need to know some hundreds characters and it's only hard at the beginning. I would say it's a cakewalk after 4 5 lessons (with regular practice ofc)
I live in Vietnam and it's very difficult for people here to understand the concept of tense. They always say "Yesterday, I eat noodles" or "Tomorrow I eat with my friends". They also can't use the verb "to be". They say "I hungry" or "Do you busy?". Doing a video on the verb "to be" could be really cool!
yeahh it basically is the direct translation from Vietnamese to English. Those whose English is below par tend to oversimplify English that much but considering the ultimate purpose of a language which is to communicate, I'm OK with it as long as they're not English teachers :))
Vietnamese doesnt have verb tenses and use adverbs or time context to indicate the period of time we are talking to, whethere past, present or future like Mandarin or Malaysian/Indonesian
Not exactly, but familiar situation is with Russian and maybe other Slavic languages. In Russian there are both the future and past forms of verbs as well as present, but they can be droped, if the meaning is understandable. For instance, both the phrases "Вчера я шёл за покупками" and "Вчера я иду за покупками" (Vchera ja shol/idu za pokupkami, the translation is "Yesterday I walked/walk for shopping") are correct, though the last one seems more appreciate if the sentence has following. And word for "be", "быть" or "являться" (byt' or yavlat'sya), is dropped in most part of situations with an exception as science textes.
In spoken german, we always use present tense for future.
So we also say "tomorrow I est noodles" usually. Usually there is an adverb making it clear it's future so there is no confusion.
Meanwhile, natively bilingual in english and mandarin, it was difficult for me to understand the concept of case and gender
Paul is so humble. He admitted to messing up an explanation. Paul, when I grow up, I'm going to be you! :)
You mean like him
Creeps me out.
@@v.prestorpnrcrtlcrt2096 Your hilarious comment made my day. :-D
that would be perfect in the future. (future perfect)
* **** *** *
Sounds like a dream (I'm learning Spanish which is basically 90% verb tenses)
I think we have about 18 tenses in Spanish... I think the really tricky thing is with the Spanish conjugations... For example, the verb "hablar (to speak)" has up to 63 different conjugations (More than 120 if you count the compound forms) depending on several issues... But if
Andrés Landa „But if...“
But if what?
@@YannW-w3f I really don't remember what I wanted to say that time haha... Sometimes is frustrating for me to write in English because it is not my first language so I suppose I forget to finish that comment because of that
Andrés Landa Ok 😂
I know I'm very late but just a general tip, there's a good Channel about Spanish grammar for English speakers and it's called The Spanish Dude. Very simple and clear teaching and exercises
I'm Indonesian. My English-speaking friends would not believe me when I say that we don't have a concept of verb tenses in our language. Hahaha. This is probably why initially, when I started learning English, I had a hard time wrapping my head around the concept of verb tenses. Simply because we don't have that in our own native language.
The three languages that I speak prior to learning English in elementary school all has no verb tenses, no conjugation. I thought English was the weird one with all the -ed and the -s .
Then I learned French.
I started my French journey recently! This video scared me a little, but then I looked up the tenses in Spanish (my mother tongue) and it doesn't seem so bad after that 😁
K
@@wlsbassandy18 They are many tenses in theories but in the reality it's similar than English.
Present
Futur ( Near Futur and true Futur ) .
Passé composé
Imparfait
Conditionnel.
After the other tenses is more use in Litterature ( even though it also possible when we speak ) .
But don't forget that they are 18 tenses in English .
Welcome to Romance languages.
Sparky Barth бич,плиз.....
I can seriously watch your videos all day. This channel is a language lover's paradise! Thank you 🙏🏾
I love his videos
I'm a student of languages and translation in king saud university in saudi Arabia .. and it's some teachers here show your videos in the lectures ..because your videos are very useful
I hope you to make make video about the best ways to learn languages
😊
سلمان سليمان
Learn the basics first and then get immersion, live for a year or so inside your target language: forcing your mind to operate in that language, better the younger you are because young brains are more flexible. Of course not always possible but that's the ideal way.
ادعسس جامعة الملك سعود 😆
Agreed. although living in your target language speaking country is not always an option. I've been learning German for 2 years and I don't have access to native speakers, so I immersed myself by changing my phone texts to German and listening to German podcasts.
Pa Hare you're stupid
A lot of southeast Asian languages (maybe all) do not have tenses. As you have said, we usually use time phrases like "yesterday", "tomorrow" etc..
@Peepee Poopoo
what is your language?
@Peepee Poopoo Where is it ?
Not really. Most languages in the Philippines including its national language (Filipino) have tenses.
@@buenvidanadz1969 they have 3 aspects and no tenses.
@Saudi King Volintine Ander of Arabia lol he said "a lot of" not "alll"
In Portuguese a verb can vary in 70 different forms (54 tenses, and 16 non-tense) Indicative form: presente(x6), imperfect past(x6), perfect past(x6), more-than-perfect past(x6), future of presente(x6), future of past(x6). Subjunctive form: presente(x6), imperfect past(x6), future(x6).
Non-tenses;Imperative form: positive imperative form(x5), negative imperative form(x5). Infinitive form conjugation: personal infinitive(x6). Some of them might be the same, but they have different meanings in context.
I later found out that these 70 variations are the “common” ones, or the ones i’ll most like study in school, but the real number is almost 200 (i don’t remember the exact number). These conjugations don’t really change the verb, but they will change words around it by, maybe, changing the ending of a word or its location on a sentence.
Esse comentário é perfeito
My god, too much for me xD
@Victor Yago more than perfect is not used. But now we use the compaund form. A new way of conjugation using the verb Ter and Haver.
More ways to learn.
Eu lera = eu tinha lido / eu havia lido.
Fora o "tenho lido" that indicates the imperfective aspect with the auxiliar verb.
The portuguese is becoming more simple for us. But more difficult to non natives.
Whatever, still gonna learn it :)
O meu querido infinitivo conxugado, coma en galego
Yes... as Indonesian i found the most dificult thing on English is tenses, simply because we don't use it at all on our language.
I'm learning Spanish and it seems like English tenses are just piece of cake
I’m Brasilian Portuguese speaker, we have present simple, present continuous, present perfect, past simple, past continuous, past perfect, future simple, future continuous, future perfect, passive voice present, past and future, conditional realistic, unrealistic, lost cause, imperative casual, formal and pulral. Don’t be afraid. It’s a beautiful language🇧🇷😄
You lost me after "passive voice present" 😭
Eu acho BP e muito facil. You guys do not use all of the tenses of the verbs. I have traveled to Brazil many times and I don't have a problem communicating. Most people speak at a basic level as we do in the US. Even though you have those forms most people don't use them in normal speech.
对亚洲人来说，动词时态变化就是噩梦😅
I don't know Portuguese. If you were to give an example, would you provide tense or aspect? Passive voice is usually expressed with a form of "to be."
indonesian is my 2nd language. when i first learned english, i was like, wtf why do they make everything so complicated...
Well, don't ever try to learn French, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese then. These languages *love* tenses and different conjugations for every single person *a lot* ... ;-)
@@lexmole *insert Romanian*
In fact, It provides certainty. Eliminates disputes. Better for Literary works etc. It provides much more variety in it. It's called language richness.
@@BlueCruiser yah, that Language is always been forgotten.
@@mikhailjoshuapahuyo1431 which is sad... :(
Oh God, I love your videos so much! ♡
I'm a language crazy gal and most of the people around me don't dig languages like that, let alone keep their eyes open when I start talking about my obsession and all the new facts I absorbed. Those videos of yours are a gift and my favourite geek show. I always feel so at home here with all the comments too. :D
I can totally feel you! It is terrible when you're a languge enthusiast and don't have anyone to share it with.
I can relate, I love learning languages and when my family see me practicing they are like Why are you doing it!? Or That won't take you anywhere!
+Lidia Reyes In my opinion, I'm sure it will take you places within the industry you work in... but obviously you need to study for that industry to be there in the first place. ;p
I know the feeling so well. People look bored when I start going on about languages, especially etymology and cognates. :p
I am Chinese. Back to the time when I started learning English I was told that I would have to study 16 tenses. Me: WTF?
According to the video, some of the so-called 16 tenses include 'aspects', but in Chinese they are both named '时态’. '时’ may refer to tense and '态' may refer to aspect, which has been confusing me for a long time.
@Owen Williams I've been half ass doing mandarin for like four years and I'm still a toneless loser
@@somno6878 The core message of this video, which, I believe, was delivered very clearly, is that many verb forms include specifications of both tense and aspect. I'm therefore assuming that the Chinese word 时态 shitai was created for this reason. It combines tense and aspect perfectly rendering the concept.
Agostino Sepe Yeah that was exactly what I wanted to say. Sometimes some Chinese words seem stupidly complicated like 增益 for gain and 向量 for vector, but they are surprisingly so much more accurately defined compared with English words when one truly understand the detailed meanings of every single character.
16 tenses is nothing for a flexive language
Cantonese:
我食飯。 I have my meal.
我食咗飯。I've had my meal.
我未食飯。I haven't had my meal.
我食咗飯。I had my meal.
我食緊飯。 I’m having my meal.
我食緊飯。 I was having my meal.
我食緊飯啦。 I’ve already started eating.
我會食飯。 I will have my meal.
我會食咗飯。I would have had my meal.
我會食咗飯。I will have had my meal.
我會食緊飯。I will be eating my meal.
我會係食緊飯。I would have been eating my meal。
.
We don't have tenses but our magical suffix that can completely twist meanings/context:
我食飯呀。(emphasizing) I have meal.
我食飯牙。Why am I going to have meal?
我食飯囉。 I have my meal unwillingly.
我食飯喇喎。 (If I'm permitted) I'm going to have my meal.
我食飯喎。 But I'm going to have my meal.
我食飯啫。I'm just eating my meal.
我食飯丫嘛。I have to have my meal.
Hard
skylight 122
As a Japanese learner that seems pretty easy
@@robertoalfonso4120 same, as Mandarin learner, Cantonese prob. just in pronunciation + traditional Chinese character
I am from Malaysia and I speak Malay, English and Chinese. So when I started learning English, verb tenses is the hardest among all.
Keep grinding,mate. Once you mastered English, you'll learn other Germanic languages more easily.
I think all the Malaysian Chinese feel the same way with me that we hate "tenses" in English during school, as the Chinese language and Malay language we learned are "tensesless"...and the English tenses just like come out from nowhere..
chua seng han we share the same experience when learning English for the first time.
And in turkish, which has no aspects, it looks unusual which has no tense.
I concur! Although I have to say having verb tenses in English allow for some form of expressions that become clumsier when translated.
chua seng han English tenses are a piece of cake . Try to learn Spanish .
As a Spanish speaker, I can relate. Not about English, which is easier, but about French. French tenses are a real mess, worse than in Spanish, and that's pretty bad already. Or German cases. Don't even go there D:
But I've got to tell you I've been trying to learn some Mandarin, and between all the sibilants that sound all the same to me, the writing system, the lack of shared vocabulary, and the tones (oh, the tones!), I can tell you it's no walk in the park either.
But keep it up with English, it's one of the easiest European languages out there (except phrasal verbs - WTF, English!). Easier yet would be Esperanto, only not as useful.
in indonesian language, there is also a word "dulu" which is an ultimate sign of a past event ...... example : Saya dulu seorang pilot ( I was once a pilot), saya dulu tinggal di Jakarta (I lived in Jakarta), Saya pernah ke Amerika dulu sekali ( I have visited America long time ago), etc...
"dulu" can also be used for other purposes, as indication of precedence for instance ..... Saya mau makan dulu sebelum pergi ( I'd like to eat first before leaving)... etc....
yeah great explaination u did there kak, although im sitting here still confused how to explain the difference between akan & bakal
Cakra Diaz I'm not too familiar with the grammar rules in Indonesian but in Malay, 'akan' basically translates as 'will' as in 'will marry' = 'akan berkahwin'. The word 'bakal' means the same thing but more to 'would be'. One would say 'my would be wife' as 'bakal isteri saya'. The differences between them is that 'akan' applies to a verb while 'bakal' can applied to verbs and nouns. You could say 'akan berkahwin' or 'bakal berkahwin' (will marry/would be marrying) but if you're referring to the 'wife to be', saying 'bakal isteri' is the only correct way, 'akan isteri' doesn't make any sense.
"dulu" bukan Bahasa Indonesia baku, "dulu" adalah salah satu contoh dari 'hobi' orang-orang Indonesia mempersingkat kata, entah karena susah pengucapannya atau karena lebih simple untuk diucapkan.
dulu ➡ dahulu
udah ➡ sudah
karna ➡ karena
dll
Past: Dulu (informal), Sudah, Pernah, Habis (informal), Baru saja (mean "just now")
Present: Sedang, Masih, Lagi (informal, not mean "again")
Future: Akan, Bakal (informal: Bakalan), Mau (mean "will")
Repetitive: Sering, Selalu
Aqim Julayhi as i know malay always say nak not akan. Cmiiw
Awesome explanation! By the way, this is why we tend to hear Chinese speaker says: "I already (some action)" , instead of using the proper tense, because we don't have tense in our Mandarin Chinese or Malays. This happens especially in SEA region where we would say "I already eat the food" instead of "I ate the food". Much like "Saya SUDAH makan" or "我 已经 吃了".
Nice job deciphering them :) I'm guessing you are from Japan?
Aniko Kozma Ah.. I misinterpreted your name as a Japanese name. Guess I need
It took me so many years to realize that native English speakers use "yes" and "no" to a question in an opposite way than us. And to this day I still use them wrongly :(
I’ve also noticed, when helping my English-learning friends, that English uses the present progressive to talk about the future more often than we think. A good example is:
“We’re eating together tonight.”
“I’m meeting up with my friend soon”
“Are you watching the movie with us today?”
This just shows how English is basically a past and non-past language
It’s the same in Spanish on some dialects like mine, saying “I will meet my friends tonight” (nos veremos hoy a la noche) would be really weird, we never use the future tenses. I’d say something like we meet today at night (nos vemos/juntamos a la noche) or we meet tomorrow (nos vemos/juntamos mañana). I guess that after all we don’t really need that huge amount of tenses.
Vicky cc yes! And it makes you understand how the past tense doesn’t exist in some languages; all you really need is a time word and you can totally understand the sentence.
@@vickycc5020 I took Spanish all four years in high school. By junior year I could converse with my Hispanic friends (at least half the school was Hispanic - I live in Florida, US) but I remember the first time one of my friends said "nos vemos" I couldn't stop thinking about, why isn't "nos veremos" said instead? Though now thinking about it, in English, we hardly say "I will see you soon" - we usually say "see ya". I always love finding those little similarities between English and Spanish :)
I've thought about that, too. English learners are often taught to use future tense too much. It's one of those things that are technically correct, but not used as much as textbooks think it should be used. I rarely say, "I will take my dog to the park," though a formal English textbook will teach that. You'll almost always hear people use present progressive, "I'm taking my dog to the park ___." with a spot for clarification: "later" "after dinner" "this weekend" etc.
probably has to do with the certainty of the statement! as paul said, will is a modal auxiliary, meaning it has to do with how willing you are to make your statement true/how likely it is that what you're saying becomes a reality. if you say "i will go to canada next month" it feels more like a wish or a plan that's not 100% certain to occur, but if you change it to "i'm going to canada next month" it's likely that you have already booked your flight and planned a whole trip. does that make sense?
I reckon English will someday get a true future tense. Consider 'I am going to play'. It is often shortened to ' I'm gonna play'. And often further to 'Ima play'. At some point people may see this as 'I maplay'. But so far that's just a matter of transliteration. It will only become a true prefix when other words can be inserted. For example 'I quickly maplay'.
Great comment!
First one I agree with second one is kinda of weird
Actually, some Americans who speak colloquially will say "amaplay" or "didjeetyet?" even now.
I maybe maddopt it, matry it right now!
Hey, the future doesn't look too bad.
"Gonna" is Ebonics slang, and ima and anything similar to it is a slang of another terrible slang.
Anyone respectful doesn't borrow the atrocities of Ebonics and derivations.
English will never develop a future tense, and that is final. Germanic languages either lost it or it has never existed within Germanic languages. Nobody will ever create a morpheme out of some random slang to express a future tense in English.
In the Ukrainian language (and other East-Slavic and other Slavic languages),
the aspect is integrated into all verbs, which build imperfect-perfect pairs like стрибати-стрибнути (to jump, like "to be jumping" vs "to have jumped"). The two groups have different tense forms:
Present: я стрибаю (imp - I jump or I'm jumping, the pr. perf. form is absent)
Past: я стрибав (imp - I jumped or I was jumping), я стрибнув (perf - I have jumped)
Future: я буду стрибати or я стрибатиму (imp - I will jump or will be jumping), я стрибну (perf - I will jump)
The two types of expressing the future tense for the imperfect verbs are pretty interesting: the first is a compound form: auxiliary бути 'to be' in future form + infinitive: буду ходити "I will go", the second is historically the verb's infinitive + to have (йняти), but the forms of the archaic verb йняти are perceived as endings in the modern language (ходитиму "I will go", ходитимеш "you (sg) will go" etc). The latter form is a unique feature of the Ukrainian language and is absent from both closest languages, Russian and Belarusian.
The other feature incorporated by verbs is a reflexive particle -ся/-сь, in many cases adding this particle to a verb makes it passive:
робити "to do/make/work" - робитися "to be done/made"
In other cases, it makes the verb reflexive or reciprocal:
жмурити "to close eyes" - жмуритися "to screw up one's eyes"
бити "to beat" - битися "to fight/struggle/scuffle (each other)"
In some Ukrainian dialects, the particle ся can still be used before the verb, often making the meaning unclear.
The perfect/imperfect aspect is still applied to the verbs with the reflexive particle:
жмуритися - зажмуритися ("to have one's eyes closed")
There is another particle - б/би - for the conjunctive mood.
Other features of the Ukrainian verb system are not aspect-mood related.
There is an analytical form for plusquamperfect (however, not often used): to be in the past form + simple past ("він прийшов був, але там нікого не було" - "he had come, but nobody was there"), plus there is an even rarer form of PQP's conjunctive mode ("Якби він прийшов був би..." "if he only had come"). Both PQP forms are also a Ukrainian thing which RU/BL lack.
Not to mention that we have two conjugations of verbs with different endings for three persons in two numbers in present and future (the past tense was "lucky" - its form is historically a participle, which has the same form for all persons, having different endings only for singular and plural forms, however, the singular past forms have different endings for three genders - я знав "I (=m) knew", я знала "I (=f) knew", я знало "I (=n) knew").
And we have some other grammatical relicts like so-called "athematic verbs" їсти (to eat), дати (to give), which have a conjugation different from regular verbs.
I'm native in Mandarin, fluent in English, not very fluent in Japanese and French. I remember I found the perfect tense very odd when I first learned it.
Agree! Russian doesn't have the perfect tense either.
It is odd because of the way Grammar books and Intitutes try "to sell" it to you: they claim those modals mean "certain" aspects of future but as you keep on learning you notice (for example) there are so many freaking ways to use the "perfect" tense that no longer makes senses as a past continuing action meaning. I wish someday I could find a perfect historic accurate english grammar book that explains things as they are.
Polish grammar is an immense house of pain; of incredibly complex and subtle tenses, aspects, and moods interplaying together - moreso than any other Slavic language, since much of their modal auxillary verbs got smashed into becoming yet more affixes in Polish.
In addition to the tenses for different personal pronouns (I/you/we/they/etc), each verb outside of the present tense is split into both perfective and imperfective (prosiłem - I asked, poprosiłem = I had asked) AND by gender (prosił = he asked, prosiła = she asked, prosiło = it asked). In addition to Past/Present tense, there is also a fully-conjugating Conditional tense (prosiłby/prosiłaby/prosiłoby = he/she/it would ask, poprosiłby/poprosiłaby/poprosiłoby = he/she/it would have asked) and an Imperative (which conjugates only with subject pronoun, thank god - proś go/poproś go = ask him/go ask him to). Future tense and Future Conditional tense are done with the auxillary verb "będać", which works like English "will" (będzie prosiła = she will ask, *poprosi = she will have asked* / będzie prosiłaby = she would ask, będzie poprosiłaby = she would have asked). Participles work like nouns - they modify for gender AND case.
Oh, and the stuff in bold? All this insanity is conjugated **irregularly**. Like in English, you will have to memorize verb-by verb exceptions - most notably, that all perfective versions of a verb have different and often arbitrary prefixes (po/prze/za/o/etc.) or that some words have a unique, condensed form in the future perfective (daję = I give, dam = I will have given). Aspect is so important that Determiante and Indeterminate verbs are often-but-not-always treated as utterly and completely separate words, especially in verbs of motion (iść - to go/to go to, chodźić - to be going/to walk).
The example verb, prosić, is grammatically fairly standard - and depending on tense, gender, and subject, it can be conjugated *103* different ways.
*One. Hundred. and. Three.* There are more difficult languages in the world, but Polish is quite likely the most grammatically complex of all the Indo-European languages. If it were any more Synthetic, you'd have to call a goddamned Blade Runner to come kill it.
As native Russian I don't see any surprise here. Almost the same in Russian ))))
Polish has a lot of grammar rules and even more exceptions to these rules. Have fun.
Nicely done. As a native speaker of Polish I am truly impressed. I gather you speak Polish fluently, so you will have noticed that native speakers of Polish are extremely careless and sloppy about the way they speak. We butcher our own language on pretty regular basis.
There is no verb "będać" in Polish, just "być" ;)
Russian is more difficult than Polish.
My Chinese Cantonese friends and I have always had a ton of fun with “Hongkey English”- poor English marked with a HK accent said in an endearing way. This video made me realise this “Hongkey English” stems from the lack of verb tense in Cantonese, which is why sentences said by people in Hongkey English always use present tense regardless of time: “yesterday I go to school” or “oh yes rain very big”.
I'm Russian, we have 3 tenses(future, present and past) and 2 aspects(perfective and imperfective). As for progressive actions, they're expressed with the help of context.
The same in Polish :) And we consider a lot of things as implicit so we don't use a/the, e.g. 'Zamknij oczy' 'Close your eyes' (of course it's yours eyes), 'Złamałam rękę' 'I broke my arm' (of course my, I'm not a psycho :)), 'Odwiedził mamę' 'He visited his mother' (and this sentence can be translated as: 'it was the subject's mother', 'it was the mother of some other guy' and it's weird, when I consider how English should be more precise)
@@magpie_girl3741 Yeah, we also don't have any articles, and it's so hard to learn all cases of using them in English x(
And wow, our languages are very alike! I guessed the meaning of most of your Polish examples without translation, because they are formed and sound practically like in Russian) I used to think that Western and Eastern Slavic languages were very different, so I'm positively surprised :)
In my dialect of Swedish, we've lost the distinction in the verb form between past and future in many verbs and it's usually expressed through auxiliaries or sentence construction instead. Example:
Standard: Jag cyklade igår - I biked yesterday, Jag cyklar idag - I bike today, Jag ska cykla imorgon - I will bike tomorrow
Dialect: Ja cykla igår, Ja cyklar ida, Ja ska cykla imorrn
As you can see we also very often eliminate final consonants. (Dialect is from Uppland)
nice to know that!
When I was trying to teach myself French, I got a French grammar book (written by a Frenchman) that listed a whopping 22 tenses, including some that he said were obsolete in modern usage.
@JM Coulon bold to assume western European nation states will persist that long--their culture alongside that
all the subjunctive tenses for example? 'If I go' becomes 'si je vais' instead of 'si j'aille.' and so on.
For Mongolian we add сан(san) on the verb for past tense, на/нэ/но (na/ne/no) for future tense. Pretty easy. Note: Mongolian is SOV language with a lot of Russian/English with some words from Chinese or other languages.
Mongolian, hm interesting
Write in Cyrillic alphabet or Latin alphabet ? ?
Pretty rare to see a mongolian speaker randomly on the internet
In Martinican Creole : Present, past, future = "ka, té and Ø , ké" particles
_Man ka manjé diri_ I *am* eat *ing* rice.
_Man té manjé diri / Man manjé diri_ I *ate* rice / I *have eaten* rice.
_Man ké manjé diri_ I *will* eat rice.
And to make it a bit difficult, we combine the particles "té ka", "té ké" and even "té ké ka" and "ké ka"
_Man té ka manjé diri_ I *was* eat *ing* rice / I *have been* eat *ing* rice
_Man té ké manjé diri_ I *would* eat rice
_Man té ké ka manjé diri_ I *would be* eat *ing* rice
_Man ké ka manjé diri, lè ou wè ou ké adan avyon-a pou Pari_ I *will be* eat *ing* rice when you are in the plane to Paris
Great video ! Thanks for sharing !
Is it by chance a French based creole?
Of course it is, Martinique is a French island ;)
_the verb manger in french looks similar to the word in MC
That is almost exactly how haitian creole works, however with different auxiliary words
I'm Indonesian. It was so hard to study English when I was little, because of tenses.
Mrdochan same for me. It's a common thing to see people say things like 'I played at the stadium later'. It's a lot easier to just say 'Nanti main di stadium'.
Aqim Julayhi You mean "I played at the stadium just now". "Played" is only for past tense. So the correct sentence would be "I will play at the stadium later."
Simon Low, I think he gave an example of a common mistake made by people in Indonesia (or somewhere else but close to Indonesia?) because of how THEIR language works. So I don't think he wrote it "wrong" :P
DuchAmagi I understand what is he trying to convey. I was just correcting his English a little bit, that's all. :)
By the way, I'm from Malaysia. Malaysian and Indonesian are almost identical/very similar so I understand what he is saying. "Nanti main di stadium" literally means "Later play at Stadium."
Simon Low yes I agree as Malaysian, we can understand the context of the sentence and the message that they want to convey although very different from proper grammar in Malay.
I’m a Chinese American struggling to understand aspect in Russian, and your explanation of aspect in Chinese just cleared up so many mysteries for me hahaha thank you!!
Man I love your videos. I've been thinking about this kind too, so I'm glad you cavored it.
No shit sherlock
Hi Everyone. Cavor me please
+Hi Everyone, thank you that IS what I meant.
Ditto.
Description Untitled this comment section is so dumb
One aspect of French, actually most Romance languages, is that the simple future, is derived from a near future of Latin. For example, " aimerai" is really from the Latin "amare habeo", literally "I have to love". Indeed in classical Latin I will love was "amabo" which is not the origin of "aimerai".
So the bone fide future of French originally needed the auxiliary "habere", i.e. to have.
This is similar to portuguese temporal structure.
"aimerai" = amarei
"amare habeo" = amar havei/amar hei (both arcaic), literally "I have to love".
"I have to love" = (Eu) tenho que amar (modern structure)
But: "amabo" would be "amava", in portuguese, which is past not future
So the bone fide future of Portuguese originally needed the auxiliary "hei/tenho", i.e. to have.
Interesting, I didn't know that!
"amaré" -> "amar he"
"temeré" -> "temer he"
"partiré" -> "partir he"
Seems it survives mostly as a literary form in Spanish:
"he de amar", "he de temer", "he de partir".
@@frechjo To be fair, the endings in French "aimer**ai** " look like the present tense of avoir (to have).
Italian futures work this way:
amerò = simple future
avrò amato = future perfect
Seems somehow scrambled compared to the Latin original.
I am a French speaker, I think you miss the point. "J'aimerai" is the equivalent of "I will love". French equivalent of "I have to love" would "Je devrais aimer". This shows that French language is much more precise that English
Excelent channel.
Brazilian portuguese has a very complex and quite complete verb tenses and conjugations.
Chinese native speaker here. Actually many of us were surprised that English use different spelling of verbs just to distinguish past and present when we learned them. Chinese speakers often forget to use past tense (and suffix for personal information like he play"s") because we generally don't distinguish them in our language, but we do understand that they are different.
Most of you also don't pronounce syllable endings where we Europeans put a lot of our grammatical information. That makes you *really* hard to understand.
There are few closed syllables in Mandarin Chinese (only -n and -ng), so many of us are not used to pronouncing them, and I admit this is one of the reasons why we often have difficulty speaking a sentence very fluently.
普通話有啲closed ending但廣東話有幾多
是的，所以說普通話的人要掌握廣東話發音可說是很難。(我是台灣人)(There are much more closed syllables in Cantonese than Mandarin Chinese , so many Mandarin Chinese speakers also cannot speak Cantonese well.)
In this aspect romance languages are way harder, we have to conjugate the verb according to each pronoum and tense for example, the verb "to put" is "poner" and in present tense the conjugation goes like this
I- pongo
you- pones
he/she- pone
we- ponemos
they/you (plural)- ponen
there are 2 missing, vos- ponés (which is you in Argentina and other countries) and vosotros-ponéis (which is a old pronoun used in Spain that is equivalent to you when used as plural), in total we have 7 conjugations only in present, but spanish has around 18 verbal tenses so we have around 90+ conjugations for each verb... and so it goes for portuguese, italian, french and romanian. Of course those conjugations come naturally to us when speaking but english native speakers or non-romance language speakers tend to struggle a lot to get used to this system.
But languages are like this, they are magical and unic :)
I'm half French, half Chinese. So basically one of my languages has no tenses and just a hint of grammar, and the other one is a clusterfuck of linguistic nonsense.
Chinese has *plenty* of grammar -- what it doesn't have is morphology.
(Why are there different words for "and" in different contexts? Grammar. Why do words go in a (very) specific order? Grammar. Why are there two typical negations? Grammar. Why is one of them the standard negation for "to have" and the other one the standard negation for all the other verbs? Grammar. Why does the meaning change when you use the other negation? Grammar. Why can we ask yes/no questions with verb-negation-verb (the same verb twice)? Grammar.)
crimsonwires French grammar isn't that bad. In my experience German is worse.
Yeah, French isn't that bad at all, it's about average in grammatical complexity if you compare it to other European languages, and relatively simple if you compare it to most African or American or Middle-Eastern languages.
The real hard part in French grammar is that it has an unusually high level of difference between spoken and written grammar.
Yes, that would drive me crazy if I had to learn it again.
Peter Lund You wrote pretty much the whole Mandarin grammar 😄😄
Outstanding explanation about this issue, just perfect! Always look forward to new videos from this channel!
In Russian tenses may not work the way they are supposed to and it will not be considered a mistake.
Russian speakers will get this: «Сижу я вчера, читаю книгу»
If I translate it to English word-by-word this would sound like: “I’m sitting yesterday, reading a book”
Therefore, I used the verbs which are conjugated to represent the present tense, however, the word “yesterday” indicates that the action took place in the past. It’s also possible to say: “Сидел я вчера, читал книгу”, which translates “I was sitting and reading a book yesterday”, however, this usage is not as common and doesn’t sound as “smooth”.
So, despite Russian actually having a tense system, it’s usage is rather tricky.
«Rather tricky» You mean its the worst in the world... too many exceptions.
not really. there are only 6 TAM forms( 5 TA forms) and presense historical is pretty common around indo-european languages. You can say thus in english as well and... you will use present only while telling a story in an informal situation, so actually you are not right. it isn't that common. people around me normally use past tense even in this case
Иван Грязин "я сидел и прочитал книгу" does this translate to I sat down and finished reading a book? The про changes the aspect to perfective in this case I think
сидел would be were sitting. To change this verb to perfective, you need to change its stem. sat down woulb be be Сел. There are at least three ways you can change an aspect of a verb in russian
Тоомас Хансо yes, it does. The aspect and thus the whole meaning of the sentence will change depending on your prefix choice. But the sentence you wrote is incorrect because all the verbs should have the same aspect.
I am a Bulgarian speaker and our verb system has all three - mood, aspect and tense, most of which are synthetic and it is a mess!
We have seven moods - indicative, renarrative, dubitative, conclusive, conditional, subjunctive and imperative. Subjunctive is the easiest one, because it's distinguished from indicative only by one immutable particle. All of these can have two aspects - imperfective and perfective.
Each of these moods can have up to five tenses(actually more than five but some forms are identical), with the indicative having nine distinct tenses in total - present, aorist, imperfect, present perfect, past perfect, future, future in the past, future perfect, future perfect in the past and each of those tenses has specific forms for the two aspects. Sometimes I have the feeling that no Bulgarian can actually really use them all properly lol.
In total you can have 42 forms accounted for aspect for a single verb conjugated for one person.
ivz zvi, well, what can I say?
Condolences.
Pat Pezzi As a native speaker I'm getting along with it well, but the poor few who try to learn it are having a tough time with the verb system. Kind of unfortunate considering that the rest of the Bulgarian grammar is quite simple - it's an analytical language with virtually no grammatical cases, yay.
Can anyone explain me what is aorist, with good examples? It exists in Old Russian, Greek, Bulgarian and some others, but I don't get the idea.
Basicly, the Bulgarian aorist works like the English past simple, e.g. I read a book yesterday. = Вчера четох книга. It simply expresses that the action is accomplished in the past moment and wasn't interrupted. The opposit of the aorist is the imperfect (=English past continuous), e.g. When I was reading a book yesterday, I saw Ivana through the window. = Когато четях книга вчера, видях Ивана през прозореца. This should be for a first time a golden rule for you, but more you advance, more you will realize that it is getting more complicate, since aspects can really mess up everything.
Габриел Бояджиев I wouldn't equate the English past continuous to imperfect, because imperfect can be used to express habitual actions (English habitual past "used to + infinitive" ), general truths, frequent iterative actions in the past( while English uses past simple for that), and actions that were in progress during other actions(your example about the book) and even for future actions as a reference to some previous information (Кога ти излиташе самолета утре?).
My native languages are English and Brazilian Portuguese. Portuguese has many verb tenses, but in Brazil we tend to use auxiliary verbs instead of the conjugation. For example, for future, instead of using the future tense we use the verb "ir" just like the English "going to". For the preterite future, we use also "ir" in the past, pretty much like the English "would". We tend to conjugate verbs only in the present and past tense...for the other tenses, we tend to use auxiliary verbs, just like in English.
I'm a Spanish speaker
Spanish is a mess. If we speak properly, we have
One present tense
Five past tenses (2 perfect, inperfect, pluscuamperfect, anterior)
Two futures
Two conditional
Four subjuntives (present/past, perfect/imperfect)
And imperative
(that makes 15)
All of them are often used in proper writing and speaking, and in Spanish we only make these with one auxiliary verb.
You can add, continous aspects, modal verbs...
I speak French, Spanish and English, and if we speak about tenses, aspects and modes, Spanish is the worst. Even Spanish speakers often use these forms terribly
Omg yes. The struggle is real.
Don't mix tenses and moods. The conditional, subjunctive and imperative are moods, not tenses. But moods also may have tenses.
Lluvia_Mmf portuguese as well too many verb tenses
Could you illustrate with some examples , because for me as an Arabic speaker Spanish is the closest Romance language.
Same thing in Italian. In Italian we have two ausilary verbs. And there are not specific rules about it.
Great you're back, Paul!
I didn't go anywhere, I've been working on this video every day since the last one came out. But I haven't been able to spend 8 hours a day on it like I am known to do.
Dont overwork youself Paul! We will always wait patiently for your new vids :)
Very impressive. He goes in the core of any language: the time, and this is quite difficult to clearly expose. Good job.
Mandarin Chinese might be difficult to write, but I think grammatically it might be one of the easiest languages... I've been studying German for quite sometime now, the endings are driving me crazy...
Endings in German you say? Check out Slavic languages - and try not to jump out of the window.
Maybe an example. How many kinds of ''2'' is there?
English:
two
second
Polish:
dwa
dwie
dwoje
dwóch
dwaj
dwiema
dwom
dwoma
dwojga
dwojgu
dwojgiem
dwójka
dwójki
dwójkę
dwójką
dwójce
dwójko
-That was only for 'two'
second:
drugi
drugiego
drugiemu
drugim
druga
drugiej
drugą
drugie
drugich
drugimi
drudzy
drugich
Thats different between tenses and writings.
Kacper Włoch why so many?
7 case declination and three genders.
''dwie'' means 2 (females), ''dwaj'' means 2 (males), ''dwoje'' means 2 (mixed genders) and so on. Check out Paul's video about case systems.
Kacper Włoch Jesus Christ. German doesn't seem so bad after all. Huh?
I was celebrating when Paul speaks Indonesian without recording. It sounds better than plenty of Indonesians, to be honest. Thank for covering this topic, anyway!
😎proud being an Indonesian
Haitian Creole is a language without verb tenses. It's a surprisingly easy language for English learners to learn. But most people don't even realize Haitian-creole is a language of its own. They just think it's French.
To an extent that is true, but that's like saying French and Latin are the same. It's not completely true because one ended up existing because the other one influence its creation. Haitian-creole and French work in the same dynamic. And that's all I have to say.
I love these vids & comments. And I love languages; native English, university Spanish, converse in Italian, Portuguese. Fluent in Melanesian Pijin (Solomon Islands, Peace Corps), conversant in Marshallese (Micronesia, Oceania); so lots to think about. Languages adapt according to need - and shed what is 'unnecessary'. To wit, English has crazy vocabulary and a long written tradition. So there is 'high English' for plays/poetry, legal stuff, and some clever workarounds for tense and mood. We get by.
Romance languages have already been addressed. So let me comment on two 'botique languages'; :Pijin (Solomon Islands, Vanuatu where it is called Bislama, and Papua New Guinea where it is called Tokpisin), and Marshallese, in Micronesia (perhaps you have heard of Bikini Atoll, where the US did our nuclear testing - that is one of the atolls in the Marshalls.
The Melanesian Pijins are great second languages for English speakers because the vocabulary is based on English (with some hilarious differences of meaning for the same word which makes it a GREAT language to party in), but the grammar is Melanesian. And it has less than 10,000 words, just enough for daily interactions for the people (who have their 'home language' or tribal language - 65 of them.) So you already know the words, so you basically only have to master the grammar.
The language is generally not written, and is never used for, say, drafting legislation or negotiating a contract. (Those are done exclusively in English, which kinda sucks, since few islanders have complete mastery of written English.
The news (by shortwave) is spoken first in English, then in Pijin. So tense is somewhat important on the radio, or 'around town' or 'at work'.
Like English, anyone can make themselves understood entirely without tense, relying solely on context. Keep in mind, Pijin is everybody's second language, which means nobody is going to correct your Pijin. So, to say "Mi waka" (I work, worked, go to work, I was working, etc.) is perfectly fine in a conversation. But if you want to present yourself as a native speaker you have to step up your game. One way is to use proper "tense', by adding modifying words like we do in English. Here is an example (much easier to understand if you read the following out loud and overlook the phonetical spelling, to grasp the English-based words):
Mi waka (I work, I am working)
Mi waka finis - Past perfect (I worked finish)
Mi bin waka - Past imperfect (I have worked)
Baebae mi waka - Future (By and by, I will work)
Marshallese, another Oceanic language, is about as complex as Pijin, but they modify the personal pronoun to indicate past or future, kind of like we do in English; I'm working, I'd work I'll work.
My take on it is, that life on a coral atoll near the equator doesn't change much from day to day. Tense is needed for short term projects, like going fishing or planting the garden.
But where Pijin, Marshallese (and also Pohnpeian, another Micronesian language I have some familiarity with, but I am not yet conversant), and Hawaiian - where they exceed is in their well-developed PERSONAL PRONOUNS! And this is where English is very inferior;
In English:
I - you - they
we-you-they;
doesn't give you much to work with.
At least the Romance languages can express polite and familiar relationships between the speakers, tu - Usted, etc.
But in the Oceanic languages, lest there be any confusion between who is who, my tribe or your tribe, we have (in this Pijin example)
Mi - iu - hem (me, you, he/she/it)
In English we only have "we", but look at the precision of an Oceanic language:
Mitufala, mitrifala, miforfala, mifala (the origin of the word is me-two-fella, meaning the two of us - not including the person to whom you are speaking), me three fella, me four fella, and me fella = more than three of us, as in "all of us". Etc.
~and, also for 'the single English word 'we', Pijin speakers have access to ~
Iumitufala, imuatrifala, imuiforfalla, iumi (the two of us, you and me), the tree of us, etc.
~and~
In English we only have one word 'you', to express all of this:
Iu, iutufala, iutrifala, iuforfala and finally iufala.
Thanks to our southern dialect, we have the workarounds y'all and "all y'all", but diplomats and politicians don't have these handy words at their disposal.
This same structure is taken directly from Melanesian grammar. In fact, all Pacific Island languages use this system. Once you know the rule, you can write it on a napkin and memorize it.
So you can see how useful this is, when dividing up work for a task, or for settling disputes between tribes or families, or when recounting stories of things past, or in hula expressing love.
Yes, 'you' and 'we' are totally inadequate. Hard to imagine a language that allows such a lack of specificity for a particle of speech as important as a personal pronoun. (OK, English and Romance languages DO require the proper gender in our personal pronouns, and Oceanic languages don't, but in the end, getting the 'he' and 'she' correct is really not useful at all, IMHO).
The Oceanic languages are also very rich and specific when addressing where an action is taking place (so much so, that in Marshallese, you modify the subject or direct object to identify an action that is taking place within reach of the speaker, in between the speaker and audience, in the general vicinity of everyone present, nearby where we can all see it, over there by you, by the two of you, by the three of you, in between the two of us, etc. And then there is here but we can't see it (taking place in this village or on this island), and finally, waaay over there, in an abstract sense.
So when talking about "a red ball", to be correct you must specify where the ball is in relation to everyone, i.e, the red ball (in my hand), the red ball (here,at our feet), the red ball (over there, by you), the red ball (in this soccer field), this red ball (over at my house), the red ball (that drops on Times Square on New Year's Eve.)
How the heck can anyone talk about the red ball, without identifying where it is?!
Again hugely useful when forming a hui (a Hawaiian word) meaning a group of people who come together for a task that can be completed as a project, like building a house or cleaning a fish pond). When , misunderstanding an urgent cry, something like "Get the boat!" - can be the difference between life and death if you get the wrong boat!
There are lots of other examples of how languages evolve depending on the physical environment, the need for specificity, whether written, spoken or rapped.
Whatever it takes to get the job done.
Oceanic languages are even more complex than I imagined, and the whole inalienable/alienable possessives (at least in Polynesian ones) with 'o/'a and other features makes them insanely difficult grammar-wise but they're so addictive to study.
Wow thanks for letting us know about some original languages.
It's a shame that in language studies its almost always the same 20 most spoken languages that come up for examples and we almost never get to see how the 6000 other languages work, even tho they can be equally - or even more - interesting.
tl;dr
I didn’t know there was a Melanesian pidgin. That’s cool. I’ll have to look it up
Thanks for sharing about the Melanesian Pijin. I went to the Solomon Islands before and I could understand a little of it, but this comment of explanation helps me grasp the concept better.
In Hungarian, you don't always have to use the future tense when talking about future actions. You may only need to use the present tense and it can mean present and future at the same time (you can figure it out by the context) BUT you can use the future tense which is usually the present tense + something pointing to the future (the Hungarin equivalents of "soon" or "later"), but it's not necessary, just optiona. Some words do have future conjugations though, and you HAVE TO use them in the future tense.
By the way, are you planning on doing a video on the Hungarian language at some point, Paul? Because I would love to see that, and I would also be more then greatly honored to help you out with some audio (sentences) and some grammar if you need. :)
Keep it up man, you're fantastic!
Also in Italian, but it is considered as an error by teachers (at least, when I went to school it was heavily highlighted). Nowadays it is still seen as a mistake, but somehow accepted... probably because few students are actually able to use tenses correctly!
It's not considered an error in Italian...the future is only used when making plans for a distant future (usually) or making assumptions.
Many of the languages of the Gran Chaco are tenseless, Nivaclé & Pilagá (among others) use directional / deictic / evidential demonstratives to give contextual temporal information when needed. The Nivaclé demonstrative meaning something which is known but no longer exists can be used to indicate the context of the past tense.
Vietnamese has no verb tenses either. We work with aspect and context. Haha sometimes when my mum and I talk on the phone while I'm distracted, she's telling me something and I'm like "What, wait.. DID you already do that thing, or WILL you?" 😂. It rarely happens but it's however possible when you don't pay attention to the context, or when you don't use those word markers.
i think he doesnt like vietnam he has never mentioned vietnamese in all his videos
@@fechuwntt5474 Haha I haven't seen any videos about Vietnamese language throughout his channel either which is just a pity, since the Viet language is actually quite interesting with its different dialects, similarities to Chinese, and words of French origin due to its history.
@@weirdowhisper
I love Vietnamese, and I’m surprised he hasn’t done a video on it! Especially nowadays VietnNam has been becoming more recognized!
@@fechuwntt5474 Finally! He's recently uploaded a video about Vietnamese 🙏🏼😍
@@gachi1297 I suppose he read our comments on that issue bc there's finally a video. 😅 ua-cam.com/video/vQNud-Ra2Gw/v-deo.html
1:46
"Why'd you put the keys up on the table?"
"You wanted to"
Hahahaha I would not have expected to see a Chop Suey reference on this channel 😂🤘
Omg i got that
Hi Langfocus, i'm from Malaysia and i'm using Malay language on my daily basis. I love you pronounce some of the Malay words. good going mate :)
Azmi Fakhrul Radzi Apakabar
Nice Indonesian pronunciation, Mr. Paul
It is actually hard to say Indonesian words when your tongue is English...
edit: I mean "to say correctly"
3C Kitani yeah, also the other way around
It’s funny how he didn’t even tried pronouncing Chinese
3C Kitani if you can speak hard R like in Spanish, it's easy to pronounce perfect Indonesian.
Also Indonesian is phonetic language which means it's pronounced exactly as it written. This may confuse English speakers, since pronunciation in English is different form its spelling.
Rizal M& 3C Kitani. And the most important if you can speak "NG" like Indonesian do for "mencenggangkan, enggak,etc".
In Polish, we have one past tense, one present tense, and one(kinda) future tense but several verbs to show aspect whereas English has several past, present and future tenses to show aspect. For example: In Polish, we have the verbs "kupić" and "kupować" which both mean "to buy", but they will be translated in different tenses in English. For example, the sentence "Kupiłem książki", with the verb "kupić", will be translated by "I bought books", whereas the sentence "Kupowałem książki", with the verb "kupować", will be translated by "I was buying books". The particularity though, of the verb "kupować" is that it cannot be conjugated in the present tense, and in the future tense it requires an auxiliary verb. So for another example: "Kupię książki", with the verb "kupić" and without an auxiliary verb, means "I'll buy books", and "Będę kupował książki", with the verb "kupować" and an auxiliary verb, means "I will be buying books". So in conclusion, in Polish, the aspects are shown with verbs, and in English with tenses.
Oh, sounds totally like Russian perfect and imperfect verb aspects (купить and покупать). Maybe that's the situation with all Slavic languages.
Yes that's totally possible. And... I think it is actually the case.
Krzysztof Jablonski Hello, another Polish pal here. Just wanted to point out that there is no verb "kupywać" in Polish, only "kupować". ;) If you can, pleese edit the comment. Thank you.
Thank you! I did change "kupywać" to "kupować". Sorry for my mistake.
Also the pluperfect still lingers in Polish, even if nowadays it's strictly dialectal.
I was shaken initially when studying Mandarin, to learn that there are no verb tenses. The fact is, though, that all languages have logical, workable ways of overcoming what a non-speaker of a language might consider a deficiency. Fascinating !
Languages are not logical at all
My native language is Hungarian. It has two "normal" tenses, present and past, and future is expressed by either the auxiliary verb 'fog' (coming from its archaic meaning "to start"), or by time determiners, or just by context. As for the aspects, the progressivity is indicated by the word 'éppen', and the perfect aspect is expressed by adverb particle 'meg' (related with the words mögé/megé/mögött/megett meaning behind).
Tenses, conditions and modes are mostly indicated by markers (and by auxiliary words when multiple markers would be necessary).
The language use to have a normally expressed future tense, but it died out long ago.
Do you know how this old future tense in Hungarian was formed?
in Hungarian you can express the future in two ways: one is similar to japanese or indonesian, where you use present tense and add something that refers to a future time.
But smimilarly to English you can use the present tense of the verb "fog" plus an inifinitive form of another verb to express future as well. Although the second one is mostly used for promises. For example "holnap befejezem" means "I will finish it tomorrow" in a general sense while "holnap be fogom fejezni" while technially having the same meaning has a kind of convincing or promising sound to it. It's a really weird aspect of the language.
Speaking Chinese would feel like..
Yesterday, I go done a home of grocery store to buy food, but I no have money, so I sneak out done grocery store, but I have police catch, they make me take to the police department, then I am make question.
Reading Chinese would feel like: BLABLABLAIWENTTOTHEGROCERYSTORETOBUYFOODANDGOTCAUGHTBYTHEPOLICE
I'm dying of laughter hrlp
阿彌陀佛
Well as Chinese I'm not quite sure about that... Because of the structure of hanzi(Chinese character s) it's actually superbly ez to break and understand between words.
It's totally different when watching English alphabet mixing together... Or to say, it's awful.
@鹽巴 中文连在一起明明比分开更易读
@鹽巴 楼主那个意思是指中文全都连在一起很难读吧，我是想说实际上并非如此
For teaching purposes, will-forms _are_ tenses. At least, when you teach English to people who speak languages with tenses. For nerds (including me :) it gives some food for thought and discussions ))
In Russian, aspect is built in verbs. In most cases _imperfective_ verbs don’t have any prefixes, while _perfective_ verbs have prefixes that also modify the meaning of the verb root. There are no clear cut markers that they have in English. E.g.
- pisat - write (imperfective) (*pis* or *pish* is the root)
- vpisat - inscribe, fill in (perfective)
- dopisat - finish writing (perfective)
- vypisat - write/copy out, make an extract, subscirbe (to a magazine), dismiss (a patient from hospital) (perfective)
- zapisat - record (perfective)
But the rule does not always work, perfective verbs with prefixes may become imperfective by adding suffixes:
- vpisyvat - is perfective of vpisat
- zapisyvat - is perfective of zapisat
Imperfective verbs may be in imperfective past (pisal - wrote)
or in mperfective future (budu pisat - I will write; where _budu_ is future for byt _be_).
Perfective verbs may be in perfective past (napisal ≈ have written, had written)
or in perfective future (napishu ≈ I will have written).
The root is conjucated just like that of the imperfective cognates:
- pishu - I write, I am writing (imperfective present)
- napishu - I will write, I will have written, I gonna write (perfective future)
- zapishu - I will record etc.
Compare the past:
- pisal - wrote
- napisal - has/had written
*Sub-total 1:* a prefixed verb is usually perfective, a non-prefixed verb is usually imperfective.
They both have their pasts (perf. and imperf.), but perfective don’t have any present forms.
Perfective verbs' present form has a future meaning.
Verbs of motion can distinguish between continuous and simple:
- idu - I am walking
- khozhu - I walk
These two derive from two completely different roots! Root _i(d)_ is always continuous, rood _khod/khozh_ is always simple. To make things even worse:
- shol - I was walking (ˣidyol would translate as ˣgoed)
- khodil - I walked (the same root)
Any prefix makex these verbs perfective (well, not always):
- poidu - I will walk
- pokhozhu - I will have a little walk
- doidu - I will reach
- dokhozhu - I usually reach / I am reaching
Most common verbs of motion distinguish between continuous and simple aspects:
- letet / letat - be flying / fly
- bezhat / begat - be running / run
Prefixes modify the meaning:
- poletet - start flying / poletat - have a little flight
- pobezhat - start running / pobegat - have a little run
*Sub-total 2:* Some Russian verbs of motion have simple and continuous aspects.
Prefixes modify not only perfective and imperfective aspects but add some additional aspects or sometimes completely change the meaning.
Some verbs may have a past or present routine aspect:
- khodit - walk
- khazhivat - have a habit of walking (this verb is becoming obsolete but is still recognizable and may be used for stylistic purposes): oni khazhivali k nam v gosti - they used to come to us as guests (word for word, i.e. they would visit us sometimes)
- pisat - write
- popisyvat - have a habit of writing (may sound ironic nowadays)
- sidet - sit (imperfective)
- sizhyvat - have a habit of sitting
The verb _byt_ (be) is another long story.
First, we never use it in the present:
- ya doktor - I doctor.
In the past and future it is followed by an instrumentative case:
- ya byl / budu doktorom - I was / well be a doctor
And there is the verb _byvat_ which means _go from time to time_, _frequent_:
- ya byvayu v Moskve - I visit Moscow sometimes
Sometimes imperative forms may have the meaning of a sudden event in the past or subjunctive mood:
- napisat - write (perfective)
- napishi - write! (perfective iperative)
- on vozmi i napishi - he up and wrote (napisal - wrote)
- napishi on - had he written (if he had written)
*Grand Total*. Russians say that Russian tenses are very easy: Past, Present, and Future.
But they are much more complicated than those in English.
I have hardly covered 1% of the tricks Russian verbs have up their sleeve.
Depending on what aspect of the verb you're using in Russian you have (technically speaking, of course) two full grammatical tenses, which for imperfective verbs are past and present, but for perfective they are past and future, so when speaing about future tense with imperfective verbs one has to use strategy similar to that in English, namely use modal auxilliary, but when using perfective verbs, speaking about present (equivalent of English Present Perfect), you have to use context and specific words to mark that you are speaking about present and not the past. Because of this quite a few russians have problems distinguishing and correctly using english "tenses" besides the three basic ones (them being simple present, past and future).
My languages (Welsh, English, French, Mandarin Chinese and German) are all completely different - knowing all of them broadens one's horizons considerably regarding the distinctions of tense!
Inky Scrolls are you a native welshy or learned it for pleasure? wonderful variety of languages you speak!
You should try to speak Pernambucan, it's very cool.
+shinra corp Learnt it for pleasure - sadly not native! Alas, one cannot be everything I suppose. ;-D
Awesome, I know 3 languages myself (Mandarin Chinese, English and Malay) and a little Spanish and some other Chinese dialects. Where are you from though?
+Kun Shun 我是英国人。 你呢？
In Czech we have basically "will + verb" structure. But we also have a set of prefixes and a few suffixes that (presumably) mark the aspect. It works like this:
A verb _"dělat"_ means "to be doing" and is in its infinitive form (is independant from time and person) (most often denoted by the "t" suffix). To express the future, I can say _"budu dělat"_ , where _"budu"_ is the first person form of an auxilary "to be" verb. However, the _"dělat"_ form also expresses a progressive aspect, so _"budu dělat"_ means "I will be doing".
To express a perfect aspect, I can prefix the word with _"u"_ prefix to get _"udělat"_ , which is still in an infinitive form, mind you. If I want to express *present* tense with _"dělat"_ it's _"dělám"_ and means "I am doing". A grammatical *present* tense of _"udělat"_ is surprisingly _"udělám"_ , but it means "I will do", a perfect variant to the progressive _"budu dělat"_ . On top of that, _"budu udělat"_ makes no sense. It's combining the two futures and just doesn't work.
It gets weirder. Because we use the present tense form of the perfect verb to express future, the verb itself cannot ever express present, not in the form akin to the progressive verb. With the "u" it's somewhat logical because, well, it's a future tense prefix, right? But another prefix _"pře"_ carries the meaning of "re-" (as in redo) in addition to making the verb perfect. If you want to express that you are redoing something *right now* , you must change the _"ám"_ suffix into _"ávám"_ suffix, that is _"předělávám"_ . Funnily enough, if you use that suffix on the progressive verb, as in _"dělávám"_ , it gets a meaning of "I usually do".
Luckilly, it's not that crazy with the past tense. past tense of _"dělat"_ is _"dělal"_ (meaning "I was doing") and past tense of _"udělat"_ is _"udělal"_ (meaning "I did"). Instead of a _"al"_ suffix, you can use _"ával"_ suffix, a past tense cousin of _"ávám"_ , to make _"dělával"_ (meaning "I used to do"), and do _"předělával"_ (meaning "I was redoing"). Both _"udělávám"_ and _"udělával"_ , theoretical perfect "I usually do" and "I was usually doing" have no meaning, which makes sense because you can't logically have a thing that you usually do and will do again and have it somehow finished at the same time.
I didn't mention that some verbs make their perfect/progressive pair not with a prefix, but with a sort of a suffix. It's not really a suffix because it changes the root of the verb often too, but it is predictable, so... like _"koupit"_ (meaning "to buy") and _"kupovat"_ (meaning "to be buying"). Do not study Czech.
(Side note: there multiple prefixes that will make the verb perfect that also carry other meaning, like "dodělat" which effectivelly means "to finish" or "předělat" which means "to redo/remake". Other prefixes that make the verb perfect can bring entirely new meaning - like _"vydělat"_ meaning "to earn" or _"zadělat"_ meaning "to prepare the dough" (yeah). These prefixes may bring slightly different meanings to different verbs - verb _"stavit"_ is a pregressive of "to stop", like "to repeatedly stop", while _"zastavit"_ makes it perfect and means "to stop (once)", so it essentially acts like the _"u"_ prefix. However, _"ustavit"_ has entirely new meaning, which is "to set/establish" or even "to pass", as in "to pass a law". Also, some prefixes cannot be used with some verbs, even though they make grammatical sense, they don't have any real meaning.)
Jesis Maria ! ;-) Zajimavy, dik.
I have never realized how weird Czech language is. Dobře jsi to vysvětlil :)
I am very happy that i am Ukrainian, but not Vietnamese, so it wasn`t really hard to become able to communicate well in Czech Language. I already do have the basics of Slavic languages in my head (my native languages are Russian and Ukrainian) and after finding how is the grammar different in Czech I easily started using all the system. Yeah, but if i were a person from Vietnam, then I wouldn`t probably have been able to start understanding and speaking Czech, being in the Czech Republic only half a year and studying the language. I still can`t freely read Czech books, that normal people from Czech Republic can read, because (as it seems to me) 50% of that vocabulary is unknown for me, i need to use translator. But if speaking about understanding of what people are talking about or possibility to say grammaticly (yeah, i have lack of vocabulary, but) exaclty what i want to - It goes well if the example is me. Děkuji :) Teď rozumim, že mi to velmi povedlo s tim, že jsem Ukrajinec :)
@@taisiadreams I'm happy to hear that! IT doesn't help that Czech also is one of the languages with large vocabularies... but that only takes time and reading. Speaking a Slavic language is a big help, as I assume a lot of the stuff is similar. I have never paid much attention to Ukrainian, but now that I hear some spoken here and there, I can tell some words apart, and the sentence structure seems to be very similar.
I hope you're getting by fine! Slava Ukraini!
@@btCharlie_ Herojam Slava! Yeah, thank you, I am fine. I am studying in the Czech school right now. Czech language is really beautiful and harmonic, I understood this fact after spending some time learning it. But at first i didnt really care about it, learned only because it was needed. Now I enjoy hearing some people fast talking it naturally, and it`s even more exsiting to understand them then only to hear the sound of their language.
And about the difference between the languages of us: yeah, there is, but it is small. The main thing, I would say, is that Ukrainian language doesn`t really have obligation to use "am/is/are" word "Je" (We don`t have variations of it, also) like "jsem/jsi/je/jsme/jste/jsou" in Czech. We say only "Já v pohodě" (i allright). The same thing about past, we say only "Já býl" without "jsem", and it doesn`t automaticly mean that the speech is about 3rd person, as in Czech it is. There is no "Bych/Byste/Bychom" variations, here is only "By" in Ukrainian. We usually more often use nouns, then verbs. Another difference is that we have the part "Se" connected to the verb`s ending, for example: Czech "Oni SE sejšli", and Ukrainian "Vony ZijšlyS`A" (Вони зійшлиСЯ). And maybe something more here would be also, but i cant really remember, so. That`s it.
It's clear that Bahasa Indonesia is language without tenses and futhermore without gender also. Sometimes it's helpful if you want to make riddle or hide something so you just make a general sentence without specifying it.
So it's one of the easiest languange to learn. So, when travelling to Malay family languange speaking country, Indonesian would be the best languange to use.
andreas michael well every language has its difficulty. You can see Paul's video about Indonesian / Malaysian
10 OG oh man I feel your pain. Your comments made my day. Malay and Indonesian has minor differences but it is still understandable. But if an Indonesian spoke in their regional dialect, then the game of charades begin. Because of Indonesia has many languages spokes in different region and they mix it with their standard Indonesian language. Standard Indonesian are not very different from standard Malay.
10 OG its not because of spain, tagalog is more complex than malay and bahasa because it retains more characteristics of proto austronesian language like particles , verbal focus , verbal trigger , verbal mood and verbal tenses so it conjugate a lot... it has 700 more or less prefixes infixes and suffixes sometimes it circumfixes and reduplicate too to form words, other than that tagalog uses a Verb-subject-object grammar, which is rare only 9% of all languages uses this system... malay and bahasa is subject-verb-object like english and most european languages so westerners find tagalog grammar more unusual... personally i find tagalog grammar more complex than japanese
zuhaili shufller that is exactly when javanese dialect were mixed up with standard bahasa indonesia, you have to deal with "medok" characteristic (especially in Yogyakarta)
Verb tenses is one of the hardest things I have struggled with when I learned English while I was little. I'm Chinese.
Diavolo Kelevra And you didn't study Romance Languages...
The hardest thing that i've tried to learn in Asian languages were tones. The way in which you use them in Chinese is a mistery to me.
Now tell me about those classifiers again? ;)
Rivers and ties use the same classifier because they are both long, thing, bendy things, right?
Chinese is ideographic language has a bunch of character ,
It's not easy to learn bro
I would rather learn english than chinese
Diavolo Kelevra 你英语好棒! 加油!
minh tu do It's not easy, yeah, you need time but you learn. Oh well, i had studied Japanese before, so i already knew some ideographs. That was not new for me.
I've watched this before, and it is an old video but oh well.
When I learned Spanish in school, I got so confused by the preterite and imperfect tenses. I learned more about English from that and I saw that Spanish has a true future tense. Spanish aldo has perfect aspects as well as the progressive aspect. I recommend Spanish because it is quite simple
我吃飯。 I have my meal.
我在吃飯。 I’m having my meal.
我在吃飯了。 I’ve already started eating.
我吃飯了。 I (have) had my meal.
我吃了飯。 I had my meal.
我吃過飯。 I’ve ever had a meal.
我吃過飯了。 I’ve had my meal already.
我吃了飯了。 I’ve had my meal already.
@0314
With knowledge of Chinese characters, but zero knowledge of the Chinese language, this is what it looks like literally to me:
"me eat meal"
"me present eat meal"
"me present eat meal complete"
"me eat meal complete"
"me eat complete meal"
"me eat too much meal"
"me eat too much meal complete"
"me eat complete meal complete"
I say this because 過ぎる is added to verb stem in Japanese to mean "too much".
現在 = present and 完了 = complete, and these are words which have one of those characters.
Amusingly, 吃 means "to stutter" instead of "to eat" in Japanese.
Kekeke88 Well, 过（過）in Chinese means “to cross, to go beyond, to spend time”, a noun of fault, as well as “excessive (which is the meaning of 過ぎる, albeit the character can mean everything above), and it can also act as an auxiliary to mark that anything has been done already.
A character can mean so many things, this is the same in both Chinese and Japanese. For 吃, initially it was 喫 or 啖, but as the language evolved, it gradually changed to the current one. For the Japanese, they invented an exclusive character; that is 喰.
Quite ridiculous, isn’t it?
Haha, yes, it sure is. And I see that those two characters, 喫 吃, are homophones anyhow. Actually 過 has some of those other meanings in Japanese too, but when added to the verb stem, it only means "too much". Like 見過ぎる means "watch too much", but 時を過ごす means "spend time".
"我吃饭了" also means '(telling someone) I am about to have my meal(now)'.
棚客0314 That’s very interesting. I’ve been learning Chinese for 4 years yet I still have trouble comprehending how to use 了. This comment might be very helpful for me.
很有趣。虽然我已经学中文学了四年了，我却觉得了解 “了” 这个字很难。这条评论可能会对我好帮助。
Let me introduce you to the bulgarian tenses and aspects and such
ям - I eat / I am eating (not completed)
изям - I eat/ I am eating (the whole thing)
изяждам - I eat/ I am eating (the whole thing but progressive)
ядох - I ate / I was eating (finished eating, not finished eating the whole thing)
изядох - past finished eating and finished eating the whole thing
изяждах -past not finished eating but finished eating the whole thing
ядях - past not finished eating and not finished eating the whole thing
изядях - past not finished eating but finished eating the whole thing again and again
ял съм - I have eaten / have been eating (not finished eating the whole thing
изял съм - the same but finished eating the whole thing
изяждал съм - the same but finishing eating it again and again
ще ям - I will eat (some food)
ще изяждам - I will eat (the whole thing again and again)
ще изям - I will eat (the whole thing)
ще съм ял - I will have eaten/have been eating (not the whole thing)
ще съм изяждал -the same but the whole thing again and again
ще съм изял - the same but the whole thing once
бях изял
бях ял
бях изяждал - the same 3 but this time but the tense is the same as I had eaten/had been eating
щях да ям
щях да изяждам
щях да изям - the same 3 but the tense is I was going to
щях да съм ял
щях да съм изял
щях да съм изяждал the same but I was going to have eaten/have been eating
ядял съм - ugh... now I have already been in the process of eating
изядял съм - no w I have already been in the process of eating the whole thing again and again
бил съм ял
бил съм изял
бил съм изяждал - someone told me about me eating and I am reporting it as it being told to me
щял съм да ям
щял съм да изям
щял съм да изяждам - I was going to have eaten but someone told me that and I am reporting it
щял съм да съм ял
щял съм да съм изял
щял съм да съм изяждал - I can't
Those some of them, you can construct more and more. Also these are in 1st person singular male so yeah... I've read that there are around 3000 forms of a verb but it all depends of how you count them.
The bulgarian tenses are the most difficult in all Slavic languages and I like it
Shit! You're language is shit! 😰😰
Very interesting. I think each language is a way to express a specific (special) reality. That's is why I feel so limited knowing 2-3 languages....
I wonder why human need to think so much just to express a verb and maybe could have just strengthen with adverbs...
😵😵😵
Malay and Indonesian (time aspects) -
Past - sudah/telah
Present - sedang/masih/(tengah)
Future - akan
Tense is a nightmare through my English learning journey, the other is plural. I am Chinese.
You forgot to mention that "akan" serves as the modifier "will" in Malay/Indonesian
My mother tongue is Spanish, and now you can realize that there are so many time tenses like in French. I dare to say more than French, and we have to decline all of them for 3 singular and 3 plural subjects. Plus, there are many irregular verbs that we use every day. I like very much your videos, thank you because I'm always learning more and more.
Southern modal auxiliary: "fixin' to"
Don't forget the southern ebonics form "fi'n to"
finna
@@spinnis So that's where "finna" comes from.
That is one of the things I LOVE about Japanese. Few verb tenses. Also, no gendered words like many other languages. Also also, it is SO GOOD at following its own rules. Learning Japanese as a foreign language is a pleasure, honestly.
hmm what about the writing then? katakana, hiragana, and lots of kanji
@@grassgrass1186 Kanji is a beast from hell sent to torment us, this is true.
How about 彼(kare) for he/his and 彼女(kanojo) for she/her? So far that's the gendered words I found
@@slumberfloeey6851 Almost! Those are words that describe gender, but the words themselves aren't male or female.
One more brilliant video. It is fascinating how You can render linguistics easily understandable for the non-specialised and help clarifying common misconceptions and confusion, like for instance the tense-aspect issue. I am a native speaker of italian, whose verb conjugations are way richer and more complex than English, as You surely know very well. Yet being able to distinguish tense from aspect helps a great deal. Curiously, we are not taught that in primary school in Italy, and that sucks. Not that we need that to speak our own language, but it would prepare us to study other indoeuropean languages. Guess we spaghetti eaters should really learn something about applying linguistic knowledge to language teaching from people like You.
Unlike Italian but like English, Sicilian doesn't have the future tense.
@Local host he is saying not in Italian but in the Sicilian dialect
As a native speaker of Malay, I never realised our language has no verb tenses!
Yang penting bicara saja
I like ur dp
sama dengan bahasa indonesia
Really? that sounds hilarious!!! Lol
One helluva video. Thanks a gazillion for your efforts!
A little mistake at 4:33. “休息” here means “don’t have work” so the whole sentence means “I didn’t have work yesterday”. If you interpreted “休息” as its other meaning which is indeed “rest”, this sentence is grammatically wrong.
Great video! This was something I struggled with when studying Chinese.
I may be completely incorrect, but I feel like the example 我在去学校的路上 might not be the best for showing the perfective aspect marker 在. I feel like here, 在 is a preposition meaning "on" in "On the way to work," but a better example would be something like 我在吃饭 or 我在听音乐，(I am eating or I am listening to music.) But great video all-around, as usual!
As naitve Chinese, I say you are absolutely right. This is the point that caught my attention too
Why we need to have tenses in a single verb? Once we need, we need them far more!
我在吃饭, I am eating
我正在吃饭, I am eating right now
我正要吃饭, I am about to eat now
我快要吃饭, I am going to eat soon
我吃饭了, I ate my meal
我吃过饭, I have eaten
我剛吃过饭, I have just eaten
我會吃饭的, I will have eaten
我要吃饭, I want to eat, I will eat
我要再吃饭, I want to eat again
我還要吃饭, I have to eat
I love your videos so much, they are deeply motivating me. Please make videos of more languages of South East Asia 🥺💜
I am a native Chinese speaker, and my language does not have any verb tenses. But the most tricky thing for foreign Chinese learners is that our aspect marker can have many possibilities in the same period of time.
Signed languages do not have tenses through the verb can be modified to indicate aspect. However signed languages make exensive use of time markers and placing eventson a "time line" signed in physical space
That's really interesting. Is it actually possible to modify words in signed languages, such as tenses and plural forms?
Are the people from different country (completely different languages) understand each other when using sign languages?
@@Lundy.Fastnet.Irish_Sea yes - there is considerable more modification possible than in in spoken English. Sign languages all have this in common - you can modify for intensity comparison repetition number, verbs can be modifies to show if something is done fast, slow, abruptly, repeadedly or to one person or many people. Vocabulary is smaller but the almost infinite way signs can be modified makes up fro it as one sign when modified can carry the meanings English would use many different words to express.
@@kikifade12 Sign languages are different and American Sign Language (which is in the same sign language family as french Sign language is quite different to British Sign Language though we both use the same spoken language.
Australian and New Zealand Sign Language is quite close to British Sign language but has a lot of divergent vocabulary.
In British Sign language which I know there are also considerable regional variations.
In Britiah English regional variation is greatest in names for baked goods and names for hills, valleys and rivers. However these are consitent in sign language but there is considerable variation in regional signs for colours and numbers.
But back to your original question - at first when two signers meet who do not know each others sign language it will seem quite foreign - as the signs are quite different - however they will learn each others signs much quicker than hearing people learns each others words and quickly establish a mode of communication and a common vocabulary much faster than we do.
Signs for concrete object tend to be quite iconic and a re more recognisable if you are used to the visual medium and sign language grammar is remarkably consistent across different sign languages - it differs but usually in small ways - eg all will use placing ideas things and events on several different time lines (in different places int eh signing space to convey time, sequence , past and future etc BUt some languages may reverse the direction?
Others sometimes import aspects of spoken language in the surrounding such as incorporating the handshape that represents the initial letter of a word into a sign or using lip patterns that partially match or are derived from that word - however British and American sign language use different finger spelling systems so this won't match sometimes even in areas that use the same spoken language language. In Ireland for example you find a regional variant of British Sign language in the North and Irish Sign Language (which has more in common with Ameican and French sign language in the South and in some Catholic communities)
Sign languages are as rich and varied as spoken languages.
There does seem to be something innate in humans about sign languages - Deaf Babies with Deaf signing parents for example aquire complex language a long time before their hearing peers manage to utter there first words .
This could be because of the time needed to control our vocal apparatus - but the rapidity of signed vocabulary aquisition in children and there instinct for picking up its grammar - raises the question whether we have been using signed language longer then spoken language in our evolution and whether the structure of sign language reflects some underlying structure in our capacity for language ?
An interesting discussion.
Thank you Paul, I really love your videos! :)
What you said about English not having a future tense made me realise that it’s exactly the same in Swedish and German; using “will” before the neutral verb form to show it’s something that’s going to happen. This is not the case in Romance languages, so I figure it might be a Germanic thing?
Latvian here.
Our verbs have a few classifications. Not mentioning infinitives and participles, there are two moods (if I understood it correctly, passive and active), five aspects (including the main one with all the simple forms) and there are at most three simple and three compound cases.
On a sidenoteLatvian werbs are categorized in three conjugations (i.e., paradigms for verb forms) based on three stems - infinitive (used also in future simple), preset simple and past simple, which are generally distinct. Example for "Skriet" - to run: skrie_- skrien_ - skrēj_. Only three verbs in Latvian are irregular - "Būt" (to be, no surprise here, it's irregular almost everywhere where it's a verb), "dot" (to give) and "iet" (to go). Their stems are respectively bū_-es_-bij-, do_-dod_-dev-, ie_-ej_-gāj_.
If you're sometimes interested in doing a bit about Latvian or Baltic languages in general, give me a pm. I'd be glad to help :)
You mix the grammatical terms. We have two aspects (perfective and imperfective) and five moods (indicative, relative, conditional, debitive, and imperative).
Ivar Kich thank you. I admit, I was guessing there :)
Oh so THAT’s why my teachers always say “No! ‘了’ is NOT past tense!”...
THANKS SO MUCH, YOUR VIDS ARE AWESOME
As a Mandarin teacher myself, I _hate_ when other Mandarin teachers teach 了 as "past tense" (yes, they exist). That's just flat out lazy! I know 了 is hard to explain, but give students the honest answer instead of misleading them!
@@ZhangtheGreat I wish English Grammar books were as honest as you. I hated them because they try to sell you everything so perfectly at the beginning with the "FUTURE" tenses or the perfect tenses making you believe they mean past to present, but as you keep going on learning, everything just turns into a fucking nonsense mess !!! I wish I could find a great accurate Grammar book that teaches me things as they are (even though if they were hard to understand at the beggining, I would prefer that than having a mess in my head later on )
When it comes to tenses, chinese , cantonese is a bliss. aspect + context is all you need
Actually depending on what language you speak, you can "try" to understand what the other person is trying to say. I think regardless the language you may need more than one information to understand and keep a conversation, expecially if the other person is a foreign guy. In portuguese we have, at least, 7 verb tenses.
I just dabbled in German Sign Language (so please do correct me), and if I've understood correctly, tense can be indicated by position in space: behind the speaker is the past, close to the chest is the present, in front of the speaker is the future. I found that very intriguing. What I also found intriguing is that you can assign positions in space to participants of a scene, and then when you make a gesture, the positions it connects indicate the participants. So for example, if the man is on the left and the woman on the right, and I indicate "book" and "giving", the direction of motion of "giving" would indicate whether the man gives it to the woman or vice versa. Not sure if there is a limit of positions in space that are easy to understand, but I guess three is not a problem. I think of this like pronouns. I wonder if there are other languages with such different approaches.
I love this video. Someone should make you a statue or something.
I was in love with complexity of languages, grammar, verbs etc, but lately I realized that i like the idea that languages should be like design: you obtain a perfect design when there's nothing to take off anymore. So tenses can be taken off. And that is great. Less effort to express the same thing. I'm italian but i do recognize that chinese mandarine really minimizes everything. Just thing about the fact that it's a tonale language too, so the same syllable gains different meanings according to the tone you pronounce it with. 4 tones or pinch. That's amazing.
In italian, thanks to the context, you can express almost everything with the present tense, even if sometimes not: when we tell things in the past, to emphasize things we use the historical present (and many other languages do). Sometimes we use present tense instead of "am doing" we just say "do", like "cosa fai? - leggo" (literally means "what do you do? - I read" meaning "what are you doing? - reading"). And for the future It Is very common to use the present tense plus an adverb of time, an expression of time etc.: "L'anno prossimo vado in Grecia" - "next year i go to Greece" meaning next year i'm going to Greece.
Learning english at School (especially in Italy where trachers are not good) was very difficult because learning how to use tenses was impossible. Italian doesn't have the "duration form" and so many basic things cannot be expressed easily. By the way, to express the duration form, we use the present 😉. There Is a famouse english Professor here in Italy, professor John Peter Sloan, he is Always hilarious, who says that we italians usually speak like tarzan because we always use the present tense trying speaking english 😂
Of course we diohave tenses and use them a lot when we want to be precise and less colloquial. Indicative mood 5 + 5 compound, conjunctive mood 2 + 2 compound, conditional mood 1 + 1 compound. Then we have the non-conjugated Moods: infinitive 2 not conjugated tenses, gerund 2 not conjugated tenses, participle 2 not conjugated yet inflected tenses. Plus the periphrasis to explaine the famouse "aspects" youn mentioned in the video. And I know portuguese has more tenses and conjugates the infinitive mood. So yeah... Better chinese.
In my language, Italian, actually we don't use future tense when speaking in everyday life, I'm sure we do like that in the north, maybe in the south of Italy they use it more often, as they do with the simple past. Anyway we rather say "domani vado" in present tense than "domani andrò" in future tense. Moreover when speaking we often use "imperfetto" tense rather than conditional, like "volevo chiederti una cosa" instead of "vorrei chiederti una cosa"
sticazzi
Then why do I sometimes see the future tense used in some translations? Even when the situation in that translation is informal.
Nel parlato va bene, ma per iscritto (almeno ai miei tempi) alla prof venina un attacco di cuore.
@@mep6302
It depends by the translator. Anyway, a good job must respect the different writing registers used in the original text (I am a translator!)
GoodMusicManiac999 Z chi era la prof VeniNa
This is absolute top-quality content bro. A+
Never even thought of this! A remarkable video!
Polish - past and non-past tenses, using aspects or modal verb "być" (to be) to express future tense.
Same for Russian and other East Slavic (except for we don’t use “być” for the past anymore and got rid of persons, so “ja czytał” and “on czytał”, not “czytałem”)
I'm Romanian. Romanian has basically the same structure as French, as far as verb tenses / aspects are concerned. And as many, if not more, irregularities in conjugation :), although we still have 4 verb conjugations. I've been told it's quite difficult to learn :)
Da, eu vorbesc franceză și portugueză și învăț limba românâ dar eu cred că română e fuorte mai dificil pentru să folosesc timpul trecut.
Salutâi din Pernambuco (Saudações de Pernambuco, I think)
I'm Italian and my language is so directly connected with Latin that's got 8 tenses for the "indicativo", 4 for the "congiuntivo", 2 for the "condizionale", 2 infinitives, 2 gerunds, 2 participles and an imperative. It's kind of difficult for us Italians too to use the right one...
There is in Ukrainian we have 2 ways to express the future one via inflection and another one via modal auxiliary. Inflectional forms tends to be used quite rare but still to be valid. Present and Past forms are present as well and realized via inflection, but western dialects starts to use modal auxiliary to express the past. It looks like we can see how a language becomes more analytic.
I don't think so. We saw that Indo-European languages had to form the synthetical tenses not that long ago from agglutinative or analytical ways of expression, like in the Germanic the preterite/past -t/-te/-ed etc. comes from the word to do on Germanic languages attached to the end of the verb stem. Or in Latin the -ba- infix from habere.