Mark A. Mandel <thnidu at yahoo.com> wrote: > --- David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b at dd-b.net> wrote: > > > The fact that I dealt with German as a language learned as an > > adolescent, not as a child, may be warping my view here. But > > it seems to me that everything about grammar they taught us > > in English there was some German equivalent, and then there > > was about three times that much *additional* stuff that > > applied only to German, not to English. > > But that doesn't count the sh*tloads that you never had to > learn as a native speaker of English because native speakers > don't get it wrong, but that L2 learners have to learn by > study. For example: > > Give the big blue book to Jane. -- fine > Give it to Jane. -- fine > Give Jane the big blue book. -- fine > Give Jane it. -- WRONG!!! Hmm. Does it boil down to comparing whether it is harder to learn the case endings that make word order less important in a language like German than it is to learn the rules of word order in a language like English? Casey