Re: TECH: Official languages of the list
| From: | Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Thursday, August 19, 2004, 16:24 |
|---|
On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 12:00:08PM -0400, Trebor Jung wrote:
> Hmm. I've taken French for seven years or so. I think it's that Canadian
> foreign-language education is attrocious. We haven't yet learned about the
> conditional
What?! That makes no sense. We learned the conditional in the second
quarter of high school French. I also studied Spanish in HS, and we had
all of the grammar rules covered within two years. After that it was
all vocabulary enrichment, listening comprehension practice, reading
Spanish literature, etc.
Anyway, the conditional tense corresponds to English "would" (ignoring
the dialectically-mined "should"/"would" alternation for the moment),
and just like "would" (which used to be the past tense of "will"), it's
formed with a combination of future and past tense rules: the future
stem (i.e. the infinitive, possibly modified a bit) plus the imperfect
endings. Most common example in French is probably "je voudrais" = "I
would like".
-Marcos