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Peculiarities of the English Language I’m incredibly fortunate in that I grew up with & learned English. Listening to it every day & seeing it written daily also gave me a huge leg up on the people who are attempting to learn it as a second language, especially if they are adults! So, what do I see as the 4 peculiarities that make English so difficult to learn as a second language. First and foremost is spelling. Could you, in your wildest dreams, ever dream of learning a language that isn’t spelled as it’s pronounced? I would love to see a Jeopardy game of ESL learners and various spellings as the categories. Could you spell though, please? Or how about spelling bought? The only other language I have studied that is even remotely close was Russian. It still paled in comparison to English. Secondly, there is the redundancy of the English language. I taught English in the Southern city of Kausiung for a year. There I was able to surmise the reasons for Chinese grammatical errors in English I had heard growing up in San Francisco. Many times, the American Chinese never used “a” or “the in their sentences because they don’t incorporate those words into their own language. Also, in English, we say: we will see you tomorrow. In Chinese they say we see you tomorrow. The will is completely unnecessary, as is the “a” & “the” to get your point across. The English language could be simplified considerably & still have excellent comprehension of the idea that the speaker is attempting to portray in his/her expressions if we made a few simple changes to sentence structure. Next up are idioms. I took German for 3 years in high school & 2 years at the University of California Davis plus I worked on a farm for the Summer after my freshman year at Davis & taught Math & English in one of the German equivalents of a high school for a year, a Realschule. When I first went to Germany to work on the farm, I thought I “knew German”. I was in for the rudest of awakenings. German grammar is even more difficult than English grammar. My German teacher in high school really taught us thorough German grammar. What he didn’t do was practice our German accents & give us basic idioms that are used daily in the German language. One is “Ich habe Schwein gehabt” which translates literally as I had pig, but in everyday usage means I was lucky. I think that it is important that English idioms are sprinkled into daily lessons plans with vocabulary & grammar, so that our ESL students will also be somewhat competent in everyday use of idioms & understand them when they hear them. Finally, there are the various accents that occur around the United States like a Southern accent or a New England accent. It will be very difficult for ESL students to land in Alabama or Maine or Minnesota & attempt to understand what the locals are actually saying. There is no antidote for this other than to just go there & daily listen & eventually be able to understand what they are actually speaking about. English has its fair share of peculiarities, more so I think than the 2 languages that I am familiar with, German & Chinese. Because of this fact, learners of English really have their work cut out for them which, of course, is job security for people like me who want to earn $ teaching English. Thanks for an overall well-organized course, excellent information, & a non-comprehensive final!
