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>>Clearly the native Spanish speaker would have no trouble conjugating verbs adopted from English, but I seriously doubt the two sides would ever merge. English speakers are just too lazy to ever consent to adding "pointless" (in their view) complications.<< As a multilinguist, I couldn't agree more about the overall interlingual laziness of Anglophones (or should I just say Americans? How readily disposed to multilinguality are the British?). In fact, my high school French teacher once told me the following joke: ---------- What do you call a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual. What do you call a perosn who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call a person who speaks one language? American. ---------- I got a real kick out of this. Regarding the challenge you faced with getting used to the concept of a highly inflective verb system, I can't say I blame you. The idea of changing the ending of a verb to reflect the subject had never occurred to me until I set foot in a Spanish I class my freshman year of high school. I can easily understand why it would be a foreign concept to Anglophones. I guess what helped me get over the initial oddity of it was that I very soon saw the economy of such a verb system. I find it irresistably convenient that the Spanish verb has subject, tense, and mood embedded in it to the point that subject pronouns can easily be omitted without losing any meaning. In fact, the subjunctive mood was a minor disappointment simply because the first and third person singular form in all three subjunctive tenses were identical, which meant that either context or a subject pronoun was required to be really clear. I became so fond of the inflective systems of the Romance languages (except for French, which has a somewhat higher level of verb form ambiguity than usual) that I now find the English system quite primitive in comparison. I studied Spanish, French, and Italian before I ever even touched Latin (or, as I fondly refer to it, the Mother Language or Lingua Mater), so by then I was quite comfortable with highly inflective verb systems. What caught me off guard was 1) the complete lack of helping verbs in the perfect tenses (with the exception of passive voice, which use "sum"), 2) the concept of single-word passive voice forms instead of helping verbs or reflexive constructions, and 3) the entire noun, adjective, and pronoun declension system. But, once again, once I mastered the complex five-variety declension system, I found Latin to be even more economical and expedient than any modern language begotten therefrom. So, I find Latin even more appealing on this basis than Spanish, French, and Italian. Perhaps if I'd have studied Latin first, it would've been a much harder pill to swallow.