Ængelfolc: "Intransitive verbs are the only English verbs that can use their past participles as adjectives" ; a bit too all-embracing, I think. "The swept volume", "The preferred choice", "The man chosen for the task"; these are all examples where the "past participle" of transitive verbs are used as adjectives, which are PASSIVE in meaning. The number of intransitive verbs with the pp.used as an adjective is quite small. This is oddity which I was wondering about - the past participle seems to vary in meaning depending on whether used with "have" to from a perfect tense, or used with "be" to form a passive, or as an adjective. Not logical!.
Re will/ would: thanks for the info; modals are quite a difficult area to teach as they have so many diverse, oddball, and overlapping meanings. Romance language speakers are still usually taught at school to use "will" for the future even today. This leads to unidiomatic sentences like "What will you do over Easter?" when they really are asking about your plans. Even when I was at school, we were taught to use shall/should for the first person and will/would for second and third. Quite why escapes me even now. I wish we could go back to the simplicity of will/soll/kann/mag/muss.
BTW the continuous forms ending in "ing" are actually a tribute to a Germanic god.
It is odd how "Academia" is to blame for everything.. or would it more accurately be the church?

Stanmund: sorry about the moniker: it was my mother's fault but she's dead now of course.
Teach yourself books are usually quite good at explaining things in simple terms, but you don't have to understand the grammar terminology to speak a language any more than you need it to speak english.

Ængelfolc: re will/would: thanks, what really interests me is when and how "will/would" replaced the german werden for future and conditionals. Was it Danish influence or just the Normans failed to learn werden?
The other interesting thing about will/would is how on earth did it acquire the frequentative meaning like "used to " as in "As a child I would walk to school every day".

Ængelfolc: I notice that Danish uses "will/would" like English instead of "werden/wuerden"
I know that OE still followed German for the passive but what is the story with will/would?
Secondly, how is it that the so-called past participle is active in meaning when combined with the auxiliary "have", and passive in meaning when used as an adjective? And what about intransive verbs like "swollen", "drunken", "grown-up", is there some mish-mash similar to what happened with the 'ing" form?
Thirdly somewhere I read that the continuous form is a Celtic transplant so perhaps there is bit more Celtic in English than a couple of words.

Stanmund: Frankly the best way to learn a language is go there, live with a family or something (eg girlfriend), get your listening and pronunciation sorted and learn lots of vocabulary. Get whatever work you can to survive, but try to avoid using your own native tongue. I would also by the relevant "teach yourself" book which will explain whatever grammar you need. Japanese, chinese, are really hard as you will battle tonal meanings and the picture-script. But you will learn a lot and it will change your view of the world.

Ængelfolc: Possibly you are not yet fully aware of how global English is. I have seen companies in Eastern Europe where management speak french or dutch among themselves, the working language is English and the workers chat in their local language. Or an american company further east, working language english, people chatting in russian at work and some speaking the local language at home. Companies in English speaking countries, management language Korean, office language, nominally English, but signs in the toilets to "wash your hands" in eight languages. Go to Amsterdam: you won't hear much Dutch around the city centre. Go to London: English is just for business, so many people chatting in god-alone-knows-what. Real native-speakier English, like Danish, is becoming rarer even in its native countries.

Ængelfolc: Oh dear, I must have baited you again! I am most penitent. (a nun-ish word)
"it is beyond hare-brained to have to learn an outside tongue just to understand the mother-tongue " : well put, and I absolutely agree.
Unfortunately of course, non-native speakers, need to learn "Global-speak" for international business and to study at university, as so many courses even in countries like Saudi Arabia are now run in English with textbooks in English.
If native speakers wished to do international business or academic study, they too would need to understand Global-speak. In this scenario Anglish would just be a hobby language for purists. Surely it would be better at least to attempt some albeit minor clean up of the worst borrowings? Indeed many business contracts now use "seller" instead of "vendor", it is just a matter of starting a fashion and the herd will follow.

Today's horror words that I had to explain off the cuff: "ethnographic" from Gk ethnos "nationality" and graphein "to write or draw". "neolithic" (Gk) new + lithos (stone)
paleo (gk) I guessed as meaning old. I guess students should learn Greek first too!

Ængelfolc: "real heritage" : I was teasingly referring to Celtic... I think we could allow them just one or two words borrowed into English..but let's not argue the birthright issue again, eh.
Now first you tell Stanmund to go learn latin so as to understand modifier and then you ask me why one should have to learn latin to understand english.... but seriously, if one is teaching english for academic purposes (EAP) any romance-speaker or latin-student is automatically about five to ten thousand words ahead of the rest of the world, way faster in reading and comprehension at least. Likewise german-speaking Swiss who have learnt french from an early age.
I have a suggestion for you to promote plain-speaking: would it be possible to go thru Wikipedia and change words like "inception" to "beginning". Just starting simply as the thin end of the wedge??

Teaching a Korean nun: almost my first words were: how much latin do you know? So we moved from "benedictus" to benefit to beneficiary.. Nunc dimittis.....