[daan]

LoL, yeah .. that's what happens when you learn a language from scratch.
I studied Spanish a year in order to be able to pass the hardest oficial government exam,.. which is amazingly dificult ( believe it or not, a large part of the natives would fail ).
It's a completely different approach than the one the natives have,.. mine is completely gramatical, their's is intuition. I actually had spanish people telling me that I didnt need to know the subjuntivo since no-one ever used that, and actually using the subjuntivo four or five times themselves while explaining -without them even realizing it-.
Simple words such as Tenedor are to me a special conjugation of the verb "tener" (to have), with the -dor transforming the meaning to "grabber/ something that -has-" ... to a spaniard it just means -fork-.

The most amazing thing was when I learned that several female words in spanish sometimes have a male article. This happens with words that begin with -A or -Ha and have the accent on that beginning ( the A-sound is pronounced strongest ).
To prevent the acoustic chaos (repetition of the -A- ) from trying to pronounce " La Agua, or La Hada", you change it to: El Agua, or El hada.
The word does still remain female though, meaning that everything that adapts to the word, does so in a female way: El agua fria.
Whenever it is possible, the female-side of the word pops out:
-Este agua ? ( Este has to be male to avoid chaos ) ...
*No, esta. ( by just saying "esta" and leaving out agua, as context will fill that in, you give it the freedom to change to female ).

However, a lot of Spanish people dont realize this at all .. and trying to explain this to them is funny as hell, because they dont get it ... But somehow still manage to do the gender-swapping-trick flawlessly, sometimes treating the word as female, sometimes as male, without realizing it [img]smile.gif[/img]

It actually changed my way of looking at any language ( my own as well ) dramatically. Studying Spanish is great
( though its agonizing to not be able to write a -Curiculum Vitae- in my own language, but excelling at it in Spanish,... which doesnt help me at all now that I'm back )