I like gerund

[avrelia]

I have a question for my friends’ list and the passers-by.

How did you feel when you first discovered (was taught about) the existence of gerund?

Today we studied verbal phrases, gerunds, participles, and infinitives in my grammar class. Two thirds of the class are people for whom English is the native language. Only I and two Chinese girls were rather nonchalant about the whole gerund thing. Confusion, puzzlement, and some kind of torpor ruled the others. But I remember the first time I found out about gerunds: I was fifteen, and I was indignant about their existence. They didn’t fit into my view of the languages, and I had enough trouble to reconcile with tenses to be bothered by gerund.

Eventually I got used to them, and now I like gerunds very much.

What about you?

Comments

[dtissagirl.livejournal.com]

Portuguese is a somewhat gerund-heavy language [specially when spoken], so it's not so much a question of liking them so much as needing them.

But something funny is happening lately. The "going to [verb]" form -- you know, that indicates immediate future -- that the English language has is being incorporated to the Portuguese spoken by telemarketers, secretaries, office people. We actually call this weird phenomena "gerundism" [well, but in Portuguese *g*].

Now. Our verbes have tenses and conjugations. So you *don't need* that kind of aggregation of verbs to speak -- you can simply turn the verb into its immediate future tense [because we actually have that]. But people insist on using the English way, only in Portuguese. It sounds downright silly.

So there you go. :)

[avrelia.livejournal.com]

And Russian doesn't have gerunds at all. And only three tenses - it has other things to express various time relationship, and I was terribly confused with English tenses, so the existence of gerund was the last straw at the moment.

I haven't seen Russian incorporating English grammar constuctions (though I am guilty on using them occasionally), but a lot of English words have been recently adopted, and they look really ugly and often unnecessary.