The verb 'to be' sucks I've decided. I'm doing Latin at Uni at the moment, which has actually been incredibly useful for this project, however the verb 'to be' gave me massive amounts of trouble.
English uses the form of the verb 'to be' a lot even when the actual verb of the sentence is totally different.
ie. I was running.
In that sentence you get the form which sounds like the verb to be (from 'I was, I am, I will be') but the 'active' verb is 'running'. So now what? How do I do that for my language. "Was" is the tense indicator of the sentence. It means I ran in the past. So how is that different to "I ran" and do we even really need to distinguish between the two? This is my dilemma and the reason I hate the verb 'to be'.
Part of the problem here is I really don't actually get why we have to have the continuous form. 3 tenses seems enough to me. Either you did it in the past or you are doing it now or you will do it in the future. Why complicate it?
I've heard Russian has even more tenses than English. English has 12. I've heard Russian has 15! I'd like to learn a language that only has 3. Past, present and future. Why do we constantly over complicate things?
Eventually I'll figure it out. I've already decided that there are no continuous forms of verbs in my language, that combined with reducing the number of tenses will, I suspect, simplify things a LOT. I'm looking forward to Uni being over so I can work on this stuff more. This semester has been a crash course in Grammar. It's been useful and I'm looking forward to it being FUN!
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