Dear friend, an interesting question you've asked, and may I present my view on the subject. You accurately define the term idiom, and it logically stems from the definition that all phrasal verbs are idioms, since their meaning, as a rule,

I think language is better learned by real contact with real language than through a quasi-mathematical approach with drills. It seems to me that mistakes are normal in learning, and there is no need to stress students with artificial exercises to

There are thousands of languages. It would be interesting to see examples of differences between English and your native language. I don't mean you should provide a complete list of them in one post, just some examples at a time. Your examples

<Mastering all the complexities and nuances of a verb is difficult in all languages. Complexities and nuances are not an exclusivity of English. What makes English easier than some other languages, in my opinion, is its simple morphology.>

Milky wrote: He has to go and He must go.> Well, I guess that would be part of the mastering part of the language - i.e. the complex part. It's easy for anyone to claim that English is not complex, or is much simpler than many other

Hi Forbes Thank you for your long reply. I do appreciate it. I would just like to say that I my opinion is based on the knowledge I have of the Germanic and Romance languages and it is of course very subjective. I fully understand that not

Hi Cool Breeze I thought that might be what you were getting at. I think it is a mistake to equate complexity solely with the degree of inflectional morphology of a language. I have never studied Finnish, but I would be willing to bet

The problem with "accounting for the ungrammaticality" of a sentence is that its ungrammaticality lies in the structure that a person imposes on it, not in the string of words themselves. How the structure deviates depends not only on the

a. I don't know what they're getting at with this one. It should be because of his poetry . Or maybe booed by his students of poetry , which is some kind of word order problem, but check your textbook for the specifics. Maybe someone else can

This looks a lot like homework to me, Civic. Why don't you Google some of these terms?-- inflection, adverb, affix, compound noun .