It really isn't arcane. Aspects, being nigh-omnipresent in any language that uses them, are pretty much the first thing you learn about the past tense in any natural Romance language class (except probably Spanish), even if they don't call it by name.

Okay, so it's a stylistic preference.

Well, that would be a really strange thing to emphasize in a language course for beginners.  It relies on a ton of prior linguistics knowledge, it focuses on an arcane aspect of the translation, and it's not easy to understand for someone who has never translated much of anything in their life.

The first language lesson is, like, "hey remember those 'verb' things you learned about when you were twelve?"

And, personally, I think a better sentence to start with would have been "John is going to the store," because it would've given a chance to demonstrate how Talossan doesn't distinguish the simple present and present continuous like English.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on December 21, 2024, 10:08:54 PMWhy?  Wouldn't that be "Ian has gone to the store," the present perfect? "Ian went to the store" is a simple past statement.

Because the two forms of the past tense, "tir + [past participle]" and "[stem] + -eva", are derived from the perfect and imperfect aspects in natural Romance languages, and "John went to the store" would be translated with the perfect aspect in (most of) those languages. Most of them don't distinguish between the simple past and the present perfect.

Quote from: Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial, UrGP on December 22, 2024, 04:15:10 AM

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on December 21, 2024, 10:08:54 PMWhy?  Wouldn't that be "Ian has gone to the store," the present perfect? "Ian went to the store" is a simple past statement.

Talossan doesn't strictly separate the two, but personally I think using veneva was perfect fine here.

English is different from a lot of other languages with how it uses those labels. So I don't even know, really! But it does seem like the literal translation here is the one I gave, unless there's a pretty unusual rule that I didn't know about.

Is the alternate translation here actually grammatically better as a translation, or is it just stylistically preferred? If it's the latter, then it's crazy to insist on it in the first lesson, since it would be much more complicated to explain unnecessary change of tense in the translation.

I chose this verb because it's extremely common (useful to know by itself) and it has very irregular conjugation (useful to show the skill of using the translator correctly and separating out different tenses, persons, etc). If it's necessary, I can focus on the grammatical gender skill in the first lesson instead, but I would prefer not to do that because it's downstream of agreement in general.

I would think for an introductory lesson, we'd not want to make things too difficult. I wouldn't teach some grammar concepts to my students who aren't ready for that level of language.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on December 21, 2024, 10:08:54 PMWhy?  Wouldn't that be "Ian has gone to the store," the present perfect? "Ian went to the store" is a simple past statement.

Talossan doesn't strictly separate the two, but personally I think using veneva was perfect fine here.

Why?  Wouldn't that be "Ian has gone to the store," the present perfect? "Ian went to the store" is a simple past statement.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on December 21, 2024, 06:03:43 PMReally? That's weird, I didn't notice that.  Okay, cool.  Anything else?

EDIT: I'm actually going to assume that one laconic comment comprises the whole of the errors, and remove the warning. If there's anything else, let me know.

I apologize for being late to this, but, while "Ian veneva àl marcă" isn't technically wrong, I still feel that a better translation would be "Ian tent venescu àl marcă."

Thanks!

It took about an hour all told, which wasn't too bad. I hope the government considers it well-worth the investment, and maybe we can continue the series in the future. Pretty fun, too.