Quote Originally Posted by Joooray View Post
This whole thread just made me realized how little I know about German grammer, me being a native German speaker. A shame really.

But I guess when it comes naturally, you don't really care too much about why you say it the way you do.
Yeah, you don't need to have a conscious understanding of your own grammar. You know it much more completely than I do, it's just subconscious. I couldn't have described English grammar with much accuracy or depth before I started studying it.

Quote Originally Posted by Husar
What I don't really get in either language is when it's "English" and when it's "english", the built-in spellchecker here wants me to write "English person" but to me it's "english person" since english is used as an adjective of person, if it were just "the English are coming!" then it's a capital E in german since "English" is a noun now but in English (the language, thus capital E, right?) it's a capital E since it's a distinctive name like first and last names or city names, which are also capitalized.
Yeah, we've got different rules for capitalization in the two languages, which throws me off all the time, too. For us, it's proper names that get capitalized, regardless of part-of-speech. I do pretty well capitalizing all my nouns in German, but I always want to capitalize proper adjectives as well, like Amerikanische Studenten.

Ajax