Posted by Riccardo (195.103.80.194) on March 14, 2001 at 02:11:03:
In Reply to: and then....PAY for this! I have already... posted by Riccardo on March 14, 2001 at 01:41:14:
Latin people (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese...) are in huge difficulties with english, because the position of verbs, adverbs and adjectives is totally different from English.
This is not so huge with North Europe (German, Swedish, Dutch...) , having the same English ...'format'.
About Italian, we have two other 'bad matters':
Ancient Romans left a gift to Great Britain... a lot of latin words, but the meaning is changed in the years. Then we have many words with different meaning for ex.:
apology means to defend an idea
brave = clever
actual = present
Ingenuity = ingenuousness
Parents = relatives
Effective = actual
Delusion = disappointment
Terrific = horrible
Scholar = schoolboy
Trivial = vulgar .... and so on
and the 2nd thing is the .... brain....: with the Italian language, each letter has to be read with one (and only one!) pronunciation.
We are highly handicapped with English, where there are many way to pronounce letters. This is the most important cause we write much better (go figure!) than we speak and (mostly) understand English.
Hope this may be useful, almost interesting, for you all... :-)
Ciao