Re: Inspirational languages

On Mon, Jan 15, 2007 at 11:18:05AM +0100, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
> H. S. Teoh skrev:
>
> >Я люблю учить русски.
>
> Shouldn't that be _uchit'sja_? (_j_ /j/ != _y_ /i\/ :-)
Well, according to my textbook, учить is used for elementary and
secondary education, or to adult aquisition of a specific skill, whereas
учиться generally refers to higher education, or to mean "to study"
without reference to the subject of study.

Учить can mean both "to teach" and "to learn", the distinction being
drawn by the case of the nouns: "to teach" having the learner in the
accusative case and the subject in the dative, whereas "to learn" having
the subject in the accusative case (and the learner in the nominative).

Having said all this, though, I did make a mistake: the spelling русски
is only valid following the prefix по- (e.g., to speak *in Russian*).
The correct phrase should be: Я люблю учить русский язык.  Well, I hope
that's the right expression. :-) Yitzik, please correct me if I'm wrong.

<ObConlang> Any other con/natlangs that have such fine distinctions in a
verb based just on the case of the nouns, like учить/учиться?
</ObConlang>


> /BP, who is at approximately the same learning stage as Teoh...
[...]

Well, I'm still only 30% through my textbook of 40 chapters, and I can't
say I've mastered all the material I've gone through so far. I'll
probably have to go back and revisit the earlier chapters again later
(I've already gone through the first 10 chapters twice 'cos I wasn't
picking up enough of the essentials.)


T

--
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