Language learning in the context of "Conversation"

The European Union (EU) has 24 official languages, of which the three most natively spoken ones are German, French and Italian. Previously, English, French and German were considered "procedural" languages, but this notion was abandoned by the European Commission, whereas the European Parliament accepts all official languages as working languages. Today, English and French are used in the day-to-day workings of the institutions of the EU. Institutions have the right to define the linguistic regime of their working, but the Commission and a number of other institutions have not done so, as indicated by several judicial rulings.

The EU asserts that it is in favour of linguistic diversity. This principle is enshrined in Article 22 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights (art. 22) and in the Treaty on European Union (art. 3(3) TEU). In the EU, language policy is the responsibility of member states, and the EU does not have a common language policy; EU institutions play a supporting role in this field, based on the principle of "subsidiarity"; they promote a European dimension in the member states' language policies. The EU encourages all its citizens to be multilingual; specifically, it encourages them to be able to speak two languages in addition to their native language. Though the EU has very limited influence in this area, as the content of educational systems is the responsibility of individual member states, a number of EU funding programmes actively promote language learning and linguistic diversity.

In language learning, the principal parts of a verb are the most fundamental forms of a verb that can be conjugated into any form of the verb. The concept originates in the humanist Latin schools, where students learned verbs by chanting them in the four key forms from which all other forms can be deduced, for example:

Not all languages have to be taught in this way. In French, for example, regular verbs can be deduced from a single form, the infinitive, and irregular verbs are too random to be systematized under fixed parts. But the concept can be carried over to many languages in which the verbs have some kind of "regular irregularity", i.e. irregularity always occurs at the same place in an otherwise regular system.