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tumblr post by seokoilua: it’s so wild to me that some people just speak english all the time… like they can’t switch it off to speak in a #real language when they need to
tumblr post by seokoilua: it’s so wild to me that some people just speak english all the time… like they can’t switch it off to speak in a #real language when they need to
For basic, daily conversation, there are more irregular cases than cases that obey the rules.
Past tense verbs for example.
You add “ed” right?
Except for go/went sleep/slept come/came see/saw eat/ate…
Then for some topics, there ARE no rules. It’s just “remember how every verb works.” For instance, how to combine two verbs.
For “like”, you can attach either the infinitive or the gerund.
But some only take the infinitive.
And some only take the gerund.
English is a mess.
Strictly, ‘like to eat’ and ‘like eating’ don’t mean the same either. ‘I (personally) like to eat’ and ‘I like eating (in general)’. Maybe you’re a chef and you enjoy watching others eating? Admittedly, that makes more sense when talking about eg. swimming or cycling, when you may enjoy the sport but not doing the activity.
Nice observations on other ways that English is a mess, though - I’d not appreciated those before. You can make them worse by negating them - all those sentences need ‘do’ support, with different forms of ‘to do’ to agree with the rest of the sentence.
Oh, absolutely. They have different meanings. But in a purely syntactic sense, which is the first step before learning nuance of meanings, just learning what structures are VALID requires a huge amount of memorization. It’s rightfully very annoying to students.