potoooooooo ✅️You wish you WERE never born, actually. Subjunctive mood.
pythonI never learned about that was/were distinction in English class (I’m in Germany, so English is taught as a foreign language). Does anyone have some pointers on where to read up on this grammatical rule? I definitely questioned it a few weeks back but don’t remember what the context of that was.
There’s at least the wiki article on the English subjunctive.
Personal disclaimer: To me (though I’m not a perfect reporter), (American) English feels like it barely has a subjunctive mood in practice anymore. If you’re familiar with the pragmatic application of the subjunctive in your own language or others, that may help, but YMMV for how often and how consistently you’ll hear it used in everyday English speech (at least in the US).
If you’re familiar with the pragmatic application of the subjunctive in your own language or others, that may help
When I tried using my dative and accusative case knowledge from German with the objective case “whom” it made me sound weird to the native English speakers I know (American, Australian, Northern English), who mostly stopped using “whom”. So in general I’d advise caution with this approach.
That makes sense. I should have specified that if/when the subjunctive shows up in speech, it should exist for largely the same purposes it serves in other languages… granted, even in that case, it’s less complex than in other languages.