honestly I never even noticed that. But I did learn English like a native would - through near total immersion, and mainly monolingually instead of through translation. Whenever I learnt something new I was just like “alright so that’s how I say the thing”.
To be perfectly honest, if your language teacher points out that “I’m home” is a unique case I’d say that’s a bad move, because now you’ll second guess yourself every time you want to say it & might make mistakes you otherwise wouldn’t.
This goes for all linguistic quirks imo, so many “watch carefully for those little bits” that instead of helping you learn they make you confused. Imagine learning about through thought though taught tough throughout thorough all in one day because “they’re all very similar but very different! we put them all in the same spot to make sure you don’t get them confused :)” it’s a mental cluster fuck trying to remember which is which when you have all of them in one spot, the way to learn them is to have examples of their uses scattered across the ciriculum so that when you encounter one you can commit it to memory before you see the next one
It’s not amazing for anyone to understand if you leave out an unnecessary word. It happens in all languages, even those not connected to civilization at large because humans intuitively understand. You don’t need to explain how you immerse yourself in language or anything, it’s impossible to misunderstand the omission of an unnecessary word
I simply gave context to how I learn English, nowhere did I say that it’s amazing that I understood an omission of a word, in fact I said that I never noticed how it was omitted until it was pointed out. What are you on about?
One of my favourites to think about is “How are you?”. Taken literally that question makes no sense. “How are you?” “Well one day my parents had sex and I sort of grew from there…”
Not really, German here:
“Ich bin zuhaus(e)” -> “I’m home”
“Ich bin in der Bäckerei”, “Ich bin bei der Post”, “Ich bin bei den Großeltern” -> “I’m at the bakery”, I’m at the post office", “I’m at my grandparents place I’m at my grandparents” (or “I’m with my grandparents”)
In Hungarian it’s the same with “home” in particular. You say “I’m home.”. In Hungarian, I too say the exact same thing: “Otthon vagyok” (I’m home).
Your other two example works the same, you won’t say in Hungarian “I’m school” (Iskola vagyok (it means I am literally a school)). But you say “IskoláBAN vagyok” (I’m at school) or “PostÁN vagyok” (I’m at the post office. Notice the suffix in this case is completely different, but that’s another story of Hungarian)
okay, so this means the word ‘home’ is actually special accross languages 😆.
and not neccessairly the home as homeland like haza in hungarian ('cause that’s not even a noun (tho it is somewhat equivalent with home)), home like… your home.
Yes it does. I think it’s that way because it’s in locative case even though it doesn’t make the word itself look any different. English sort of has cases and doesn’t.
It works similarly in Latin. You don’t say ad domum. You only say domum.
What do you think of the Irish language? lol. Ouisce is ishkah is water, and that’s probably the only word that is spelled closest to how it’s pronounced. I’m just glad the bus lane is labeled “Lana bus”. I figured that one out just before stepping off the curb.
The problem is that Gaeilge (Gaelic) is the national language and it would simply cost twice the amount to paint Bus Lane underneath Lána Bus and the Irish government is cheap af just like most governments. And lazy.
Similar irregularities exist in Standard German (e.g. “Ich steige Stefansplatz aus”, “I get off [at] Stefansplatz”, when say driving the bus), and there’s a whole sociolect that regularises it to also say “I’m going school”. And, no, the “that noun is an adjective now” explanation doesn’t really work in German.
Understanding those kinds of (usually informal) uses is trivial if you know the language, it’s using them like a native that’s difficult. Forget studying grammar they need to be learned by osmosis. Grammars linguists produce, even highly detailed ones, have a very hard time capturing the possibilities, what’s acceptable when playing around with the language.
Absolutely. I’m an ESL teacher in Korea, and getting my students to use prepositions properly is a significant portion of my job. The difference between something like “He is coming to you.” and “He is coming for you.” isn’t obvious at all if you think about it, but there are definitely proper and improper use cases for them.
I remember a Vietnamese co-worker commenting that sometimes people say “Here you go” and sometimes they say “Here you are” when handing her things and wondered if there was a difference. I explained it was just two ways to say the same thing.
There’s a song with the lyric “If you need us we’ll be backyard in our new tree fort” and it fucks with me that it sounds as okay as it does. Reckon it makes a little more sense when the place-word includes a relative direction, like in “upstairs” or “courtside”.
I have heard some gems in the wild though, like “Ima go run bathroom”.
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