On Saturday, Dec 13, 2003, at 14:07 US/Pacific, D. Jay Newman wrote:

>  My take on it is that most native
> speakers never had to really learn the rules of their own language, so
> they don't believe it really has these rules.

When I took German in Jr and Sr High school, we had a native German
in our class.  It was fascinating - she SPOKE fluent German, and
scored great on all the vocabulary and pronunciation tests, but
she was only average with the rest of the class on the grammer
exams.  I learned an awful lot about english (well, about language
in general) taking German.

My final year in german, we read (tried to read) a mystery novel
written in german.  It was awful.  We discovered how little of
the vocabulary we actually knew, and just how painful it was to
try to make sense of a storyline when it was a chore just figuring
out what the WORDS were.  sigh.  If I ever learn another language,
I think I'll start out with children's books.  (and I recomend
that to you younger folk too...)

BillW

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