NOrman's statement that a native speaker "literally spends a life-time learning his language" (rough quote) might be misunderstood in the context of the discussion on whether or not a highly inflected verb system (like Italian or Russian) is harder for native speakers to acquire than a minimally inflected one like English. Language acquistion studies show that Russian children, for example, master their verb system within the first years of life, effortlessly, just as English speaking children master theirs. It doesn't take a life-time. The English verb system has its own complexities. Things that are\ expressed through tense in inflected languages must be expresed through auxiliary verbs (model-have-be) and adverbs in English. Try teaching the many subtle connotations of models to a foreigner, and you'll see what I mean. What, for example, are the different degrees of certainty expressed by these verb phrases: He may be upstairs. He'll be upstairs. He might be upstairs. He should be upstairs. He has to be upstairs. He could be upstairs. He would be upstairs. He ought to be upstairs. --Bill Murdick