
Student or Learner
As I said, English is mostly case-free. But, there are leftovers from the old case system. That’s why we have “I”, “me”, “mine” and “my”. And why we have “you”, “yours” and “your”. And why we have “he”, “him”, and “his”, and “we”, “us”, “ours” and “our”. In each of these groups, it’s really the same word, just in different forms- different cases. So, part of learning English is learning a case system, even though it’s only used for a handful of words.
And English doesn’t even get the positive advantages from its case system. Even in a sentence entirely using cased words, like “I hit him”, word order is still important– “Him hit I” is totally incorrect unless your name is Yoda.
Does "Unless your name is Yoda" imply unless you feel that you don’t understand? Or this is unforgivable mistake unless you are not familiar with English grammar rule?
Last edited by Odessa Dawn; 20-Dec-2012 at 05:45. Reason: Adding "Or this is unforgivable mistake ..."
Yoda would never have said "Him hit I"!
Yoda's version of "He hit me" would probably have been "Hmmm, hit by him I was" or "Hmmm, hit me he did".
Remember - if you don't use correct capitalisation, punctuation and spacing, anything you write will be incorrect.
Yoda had funny word order, but was not ambiguous- Him hit I is so mixed up it's unclear who hit whom.
I'm not a teacher, but I write for a living. Please don't ask me about 2nd conditionals, but I'm a safe bet for what reads well in (American) English.
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