[kmicklas]

> The difference is subtle to non-native speakers of European languages.

I don't think that's an accurate generalization. If anything, European languages are probably _more_ likely to morphologically distinguish nouns and verbs than normal, with English being an exception. (I don't have hard data to back this up though, could be wrong.)

[KMag]

I expect native speakers of English and other European languages to have less trouble than my girlfriend, who is not a native speaker of English or any other European language.

If (as you suppose) English and other European languages are likely to make large distinctions between nouns and verbs, then native speakers of those languages would more naturally notice the distinction in the sentence without having it pointed out to them, correct? I believe we're in agreement here.

Perhaps I went a bit too far in trying to reduce the wordiness of my statement and should have left it as "those who are not native speakers of English or any other Eurpean languages".

[kmicklas]

The point is that the reason for trouble here is that English is _not_ making a morphological distinction. Since most European languages do make more of a distinction, speakers of European languages should be _more_ confused. Of course many non-European languages make distinctions as well, although the most spoken of all (the various Chinese languages) don't, just as English.

Basically, there's little reason to expect a Czech speaker to find this any easier than a Japanese speaker.