To think it's embarrassing how English has one of the easiest grammar systems, and yet so many people don't know the basic rules...

[Skyeboat]

I'm a linguist, and the languages I studied have very complex grammar rules compared to English. So much so that native speakers have to memorise verb tables, moods, cases etc. at primary school level, and even those who didn't study to a high level know the basic rules.
English is one of the simplest languages, and yet the amount of native English speakers I see making really obvious mistakes is just embarrassing.
Is the problem that we just don't teach grammar and syntax in school?
For example, I saw a FB post today selling "Teddy's" (as opposed to teddies). That's actually the most common mistake I see - people, even businesses, not knowing how to use apostrophes and form plurals. I'd understand if it was a complicated rule that required memorisation with a lot of exceptions, but it's soo basic. It takes about 10 minutes to learn then you're all set.
I went to a pretty average state school, and I remember they did teach us these things, but we weren't rigorously tested on them or required to repeat them regularly. So I do believe the problem is with a lack of focus on basic English from a young age.
Am I being unreasonable or is this really embarrassing that we have such a poor grasp of our own mother tongue?

It’s widely accepted English is quite challenging and complex to learn so that’s just BS. May not be up there with Mandarin but still tricky. It’s different being able to get by asking for a pint but the nuances are certainly hard and many native speakers don’t even get it right.

I'm guessing you didn't go to school in Spain...

Actually that sort of error is not down to dyslexia. Dyslexic people are perfectly capable of understanding why there is a difference in the meaning of words. It's really quite offensive how often dyslexia is dragged in as an excuse.

Lots of people are stupid and lots more don't give a shit.

Does that help answer your tricky question?

Ever thought that the person that wrote teddy's instead of teddies could have been dyslexic?

What if English wasn't their first language, but they weren't a linguist?

They wrote the Facebook post on a phone and accepted the word that had autocorrected without paying too much attention?

English isn't that straightforward. Eg. there, their, they're all sound the same but have different spellings and different meanings.

I agree to a point that when things are included in more formal correspondence they should be correct, but isn't the meaning being clear the most important thing.

As a 70s child we weren't taught things in the same way they are taught now. We didn't have social media either though.

As a linguist you notice it and it bothers you- but most people don’t care i’m afraid- even if they were taught it in school. I was taught woodwork at school but i’ve never made a letter rack since!
Remember languages aren’t static either- just because someone set rules doesn’t mean they can’t be changed- for example the way we use pronouns is currently being turned on its head!!!

P.S. My personal hates are people who say draws not drawers on selling posts and people who deliberately spell gorgeous as gawjus (or some other ridiculous spelling).

Yes, it means someone called Chester who makes pictures😀

I live in a rural area, there is a very broad accent and a common use of bad grammar where I was raised and I have always worked really hard to speak as well as I can. My son has been raised being picked up on incorrect grammar, being asked to form his words correctly and was also sent to a grammar school, so is well educated.

He's now an adult, an despite all this, chooses to speak terribly! It's a real of contention for me. Obviously parenting and opportunity impact the way a lot of people speak/write, but I genuinely believe we as a nation seem to like to dumb ourselves down.

Tell that to my dyslexic daughter........ she knows that they mean different things, she can't spell them properly or sound them out though.

I once wrote a short story and my English teacher liked it so much she read it aloud to the class.
But she gave me a terrible grade due to the many typos & misspellings. That one instance made me hyper-aware of my grammar & spelling - and that of others - and now it jumps out at me.
It can be a curse as well as a blessing.

I'd welcome explanations of some of these 'simple' rules. The one that always gets me is when to use a hyphen between compound adjectives and when not to.

I went to a grammar school and didn’t realise I didn’t understand certain grammar rules until my mid twenties, so I taught myself.

Schools aren’t the educational havens that people think they are. Many children come out not having a grasp of various basic concepts and either manage without, or educate themselves later on.

I grew up in France where we were taught grammar, conjugation and spelling separately. We had notebooks where we wrote the rules and separate notebooks for exercises and practice. The rules were clearly laid out and we had to recite them to our parents.

I find the way my daughter is taught to be completely unstructured in comparison and highly confusing.

I work in a job in which I need to edit people’s copy and have often been made to feel like people didn’t trust my changes because I’m not a native speaker. This irritates and upsets me a lot.

Loads of us weren't taught any grammar at school at all. All I remember being taught is that a verb is a "do-ing word." It's caused me a lot of difficulty in learning other languages since I don't have the knowledge of English grammar to compare to, especially with German. It's also much harder to learn English grammar rules as an adult than if it had been taught properly in school. My son was asking for help French yesterday (he's doing it on Duolingo) and I asked my husband whether that was a reflexive verb... he had no idea what I was talking about. So, no, it's not unreasonable to think that a lot of native English speakers have a poor understanding of grammar, but it's because it was deprioritised by our education system for so long and there's very little that can be done about it now. Even though it is taught in schools again, grammatically incorrect phrases have entered common speech and will continue to be used. So you're going to have to get used to people "loosing weight," using the wrong form of there/their/they're and having bugger all idea where to put an apostrophe.

This is a poor example though. Chester draws can only be identified as chest of drawers by speakers with non-rhotic accents (or, I guess, people who've seen the endless threads about it on Mumsnet and Reddit). It will hinder communication in many cases.

On the app (depending on phone, I think) it is not possible to vote.

Though it was the 80s for me, this echoes my experience.

People on MN are always incredibly defensive, tipping over frequently into being positively aggressive, about grammar. People can and do regularly get away with being unpleasant about someone's driving, manners, housekeeping and cleaning standards, and how they bring up their children; but if they dare to venture politely into a suggestion that maybe "could of" is not the way to write, they will instantly get piled on. Beating someone up for preferring good grammar has become a form of virtue-signallling round here.

Yet we really ought to be concerned about these things, because we are in an age when our children are being taught that grammar matters, and when they will get penalised for using bad grammar. Given that most people on MN are or want to be parents, we should work on the basis that, on the whole, it really is better to set them a reasonably good example, particularly given that frequently it's actually easier to write things correctly.

Pointing out the bigger picture isn't defensive though, it's stating facts. It is possible to acknowledge that while grammar, punctuation, and spelling might not always be taught (or enforced) as well as they could be, there are certain aspects of English which are harder as well as those which are easier. We don't have genders or cases or really complex conjugations, but we do still have tenses, proper and improper knowns, contractions, lots of homonyms, and fairly complicated pronunciation (same letter combination giving different sounds, silent letters). I have been learning German for a little while, as an adult learner with no school experience of it, and while learning and/or memorising the rules for sentence structure, genders, cases and complicated conjugation rules can bring challenges, the pronunciation is so much more instinctive than English. I have dabbled in other languages too, French, Spanish, Dutch etc., and I found French the most confusing - I could read/write what I was supposed to be learning but just felt like my mouth needed more consonants when speaking! Languages are amazing, they are evolving all the time though, and that can be seen as good or bad!

This is what I was trying to say in an earlier post. I'm not a linguist, but I have worked in publications and have spent many years copywriting, editing and proofreading, so a badly written piece of prose does irritate me. I wouldn’t be so crass as to correct the author though.

I was only taught basic grammar at school, so it is probably only the glaringly obvious grammar mistakes - the misuse of the apostrophe, could of, would of, loose instead of lose, lend instead of borrow etc that stand out to me.

Beating someone up for preferring good grammar has become a form of virtue-signalling round here

I agree.

My parents had to pay for a tutor as they discovered I wasn't being taught grammar at school.

My first supervisor at work also had to help sharpen my writing skills.

(And I got straight A's in the 90's)

So yes, teaching in school was part of the issue.

But also when I make FB posts /Mumsnet posts etc I am often rushing so make sloppy mistakes that I wouldn't make at work.

My grammar was terrible at school and isn't much better now. I do though read some stuff on social media and wonder what it actually means. Yesterday a post on Facebook "a reminder im not in tomorrow at the hospital"

I started primary in the mid 80s. Like you I was taught no grammar beyond full stops, capital letters, commas etc. Although I do know where to use apostrophes. As a kid my dad often corrected me for "splitting the infinitive" (iirc) and I'm still not completely sure what that means!

Learning French and German was harder because I didn't know any grammar rules in English. I remember our French teacher describing it was the difference between who and whom. The entire class looked blankly as none of us had any idea what the difference was in English!

I had no idea how to help DC with fronted adverbial, compound sentences,subordinate clauses and a lot of other stuff that I've probably forgotten!

Same for me in the 80s. I remember my foreign language teachers at secondary school despairing as they were trying to teach teenagers who couldn't tell a verb from a noun in their native language.

English is actually a very difficult language.
The conjugation patterns are very strange.
For example
Good , Better ,The Best.
Strong verbs that don’t follow a tidy pattern.