10 Crazy things about the English Language
While procrastinating the other day I came across a brilliant Guardian article about immigration, cultural assimilation, and learning English. It began by challenging the classic adage: “If you come to this country, you have to learn English”, a sentiment echoed throughout generations and across borders of various English speaking countries, generally to the sound of murmured approval. And in doing so it raised a number of important questions about the practicalities of thoroughly, or at least functionally, learning the language.
English is widely regarded as being quite an easy language to learn
, and it is in many ways. Its grammar system is very simple – almost every verb has only three forms; four if you count adding an “s” to the end of third persons (“he”, “she”, “it”) and it doesn’t assign gender or demand word agreement. It’s also universal, the lingua franca, the go-to language should people from France, Mexico, China, and Italy, for example, come together and have to find a common tongue.
Difficult to learn? Probably not, especially given the amount of resources (literature, music, film etc.) out there. Difficult to master? Absolutely. Precisely because of the depth and breadth of the English language, it’s a limitless void or cultural and national differences articulated through a bastard mix of Germanic, Anglo-Frisian, French, and Latin amongst others. And it’s also a language many of us speak but with which most of us are surprisingly unfamiliar.
I don’t think I’m overgeneralizing when I say that, for most of us, we don’t learn about our own language until we start learning another. For me, it was learning Italian that opened my eyes to the ridiculousness of English, and it was while subsequently training for a language teaching qualification that my knowledge of its madness became solidified. Here are 10 examples of English at its most barmy and brilliant.
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