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I am a retired computer software engineer and prof, living in rural New York State, about half way between New York City and Toronto, Canada. I am passionate about cooking, motorcycles, jazz (I worked as a musician for 14 years), visual arts, and languages. For 20 years, I was a co-owner of a small house in a village in the south west of France (47). I normally spend 2 to 4 months each year in France, both in the southwest, and in Lyon. I studied French and German in high school and at university. I've also spoken Mexican Spanish a bit, because there is a Mexican branch of the family through my ex-wife, but my Spanish is rusty. I've studied just a little bit of Italian, Russian, fusHa Arabic, and Moroccan Derija. I would like to speak French more fluidly and idiomatically, and would like to learn Occitan, Derija, and Brazilian Portuguese, as well as to continue to build from my small base of Italian. I am interested in spoken language, not writing.
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  • Commented

    Hello, Daniel — there are a couple of interesting grammer points in your post to be found within the following phrase: "I am here since 3 weeks..." 

     

    That's a direct translation of "Ich bin hier seit 3 wochen...," but it's not correct English. English has a verbal tense called "Present Perfect," which doesn't exist in German, and which is formed by using the present tense of the auxiliary verb "to have" and the past participle of the verb representing the action of interest — in the current example "to be." The job of the present perfect tense is to indicate that an action has begun in the past, but that it is still continuing in the present. (Notice that in my last sentence, I used the present perfect verb form "has begun," because the situation I am trying to describe is itself best described using the present perfect.) Some other examples are "I have been thinking of her since I met her...," "I've gone to the gym three times a week since April...," and so on. 

     

    So, to form the present perfect, you could have written "I have been here since 3 weeks." However, that's still not quite correct English, because "since" is a direct translation of "seit." Unfortunately, the use of prepositions is very idiosyncratic from language to language, and English would use "for" in this case, not "since." There are no perfect rules for the use of the correct prepositions; you just have to hear and use the patterns until the patterns are natural to you. 

     

    At any rate, good luck in finding good partners. If your objective is only spoken English, we could talk on Skype now and then. I haven't spoken (present perfect tense again!) very much German during the past 10 years, but that would be fun for me. I do not, unfortunately, have enough time to correct written English on any regular basis, because of my own projects. Tschüß!

     

    0 voted
    September 16, 2015
    0
  • Commented

    In fact, the difference between the two forms is not so well-defined; if you use either one, it will be understood that you are describing an action in the future. The problem is that English has lost an inflected verb form to communicate the future time, so helper words must be used. "Will" is used to indicate the future time, as is "shall." They are both a little bit more formal than the "I am going to <verb>" construction, with "shall" indicating a little bit more certainty or resolve than "will."

     

    As far as time scale and certainty are concerned, at least as much information about how far in the future your action will be performed, or about how certain that action is, will be communicated by non-verbal means (facial expressions, hand gestures, and so on), and by the way you "sing" the sentence (prosody). So I could say, for instance "I'm going to have a wild romance with Juliette Binoche," but anyone hearing me say that would know that that event is certainly not on my calendar for the next week!

     

    By the way, I'm interested in your 50/50 Italian/English exchange. I studied Italian intensively just for a few weeks about 10 years ago to prepare for a trip, but haven't used the language since. I do know a lot of French and Spanish, though, so I have the "hooks" to hang Italian on. If you're still looking for partners, please contact me. I'm a very precise English speaker, having received writing awards from two universities, and having gotten a perfect score on the Graduate Record Examination. My mother was an English teacher at one of the New York City "genius" high schools. In my childhood, we very commonly ate our dinner with a dictionary (or two or three) on the table, there to support our arguments about word meanings and derivations. 

     

    0 voted
    September 15, 2015
    0