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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

  • addie@feddit.uk
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    10 hours ago

    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.

    • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      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.