Quote: Original post by Kirl
It's strange because it's directly translatable to dutch, saying exactly the same, but we take it to mean the direct opposite. The "everything" in our saying refers to all of X's direct opposites.

I've been using some software thats written in Dutch so I've been using iGoogle to translate the weird jumble of characters you guys call words. Some of the direct translations are quite weird. Certainly not how you would say it in conversational English. One of those cultural things where it makes sense if you were brought up with it but doesn't make to much sense when looking at it from the outside.

Quote: Original post by Rycross
There is a past tense for words in Japanese. There's no explicit future tense, however. Its implied based on context.

Ah, faulty recollection, but thinking about it, English doesn't seem to have a future tense either, does it? It's also implied by the context of the sentence.

I do.
I am going to do.

Or did you mean the context of the conversation?

Quote: Original post by Kirl
Ah, faulty recollection, but thinking about it, English doesn't seem to have a future tense either, does it? It's also implied by the context of the sentence.

I do.
I am going to do.

Or did you mean the context of the conversation?

Thats simple future tense.

In English, you'd get something like this:
I will go to work tomorrow.
I go to work every day.
I'm going to work.

While in Japanese you'd get:
Ashita shigoto e iku.
Mainichi shigoto e iku.
Shigoto e iku.

Where "iku" is the verb here.

With normal Japanese verbs, usually if you want to communicate that you're doing something right now, you'd use the -te form and add an iru. So if I wanted to say "I'm playing," I'd say "Asondeiru." However, some verbs, including the basic movement verbs iku and kuru, have a special case where using -te form and adding an iru actually indicate a current state due to a previous action. In this case, itteiru actually means "I went someplace and am now there."

So yeah, pretty much every language has special nooks and crannies of legacy or non-standard behavior that you have to learn. English is just particularly bad.

Quote: Original post by jtagge75
the weird jumble of characters you guys call words.

Dutch is probably one of the closest relatives to English :