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?

I’m appalled at the amount of grammatical rules my junior school age kids are expected to learn. Really complex stuff. No wonder they say they hate school and say learning is boring.

Pluralisations?

’what I’m talking about is the super basic rules’

’what I’m talking about are the super basic rules’

Maybe English isn’t as easy as you make it out to be.

I completely agree. But it is amazing how many people don’t even know where to start. I’ll often check if I’m using the correct preposition or if the true meaning of a word matches my understanding. Not that many people do.

Sorry but what is the name of the tense is ‘I do play?’ I know the other ones are present simple and present continuous but I didn’t know about the other one.

Maybe they are irregular verbs. In French it would be:
Bon
Mieux
Meilleur(m)/meilleure(f)

Surely that’s not correct! I will play?

Would a linguist say ‘super basic’? I would have thought a linguist would be quite pedantic about grammar and phrasing. My biggest bugbear is writing of instead of have. Speaking it I get because of sounds very similar to ‘ve but it shouldn’t be written.

@Fizbosshoes

Splitting the infinitive: the infinitive form of a verb is: to ___

E.g. to walk is the infinitive of the verb. To run. To eat.

Splitting the infinitive is putting something between the 'to' and the word.

Splitting the infinitive= to quickly walk.
'correct' = to walk quickly. See, you haven't split the infinitive.

Such rules came from people who were modelling English after Latin.

A famous example of a split infinitive is the star trek intro: to boldly go.

'Correctly' it would be to go boldly, or in a more poetic style, boldly to go.

@MottledPie

I was not joking about the order thing. And pp kindly explained it.

"Am I being unreasonable or is this really embarrassing that we have such a poor grasp of our own mother tongue?"

Yes it is embarrassing. English is an easy language to learn (exception is the pronunciation, but spelling and grammar are easy enough). It's that many English people just don't care about using the right spelling and grammar. I have learned many languages, and have actually put some effort into learning English correctly. The rules are so easy to remember. Not like some languages that are constantly evolving and changing, and where spelling/grammar rules change every few years!

What is stopping English native speakers from taking some care to remember a few straight-forward rules? I am often noticing the mistakes native speakers make, including the difference between 'amount' and 'number'. I am shocked you are making this post and get it wrong yourself. So yes, YOU should be embarrassed as well, but at the same time, well done for raising this issue.

There are so many awful things I'm embarrassed by, I'd be in crisis before I thought of our grammar... Start with our ancestors killing neanderthals and then work your way down to today. You won't manage to get to grammar.

I will hold my hands up that my spelling and grammar isn’t always great.

However I can solve complex chemical equations which the general population can’t.

The phase from Einstein comes to mind about judging a fishes ability to climb a tree.

English might not be as hard to learn as some languages but it's difficult to get absolutely correct as it is notoriously irregular with so many exceptions to so many rules.
There are also so many (lovely and interesting) variations in spoken English, and in colloquial contexts people will write the way they speak - nothing wrong with that. E.g. on here you often see people write something like "His gone to the shop" meaning "He's gone to the shop" but they write "his" because that's how they say it in their accent. I think it's cute because I can imagine how the person talks. Same on facebook.
Most people know how to write correctly for professional or educational purposes, and if those that don't get an apostrophe wrong on facebook, what does it matter if they can make a buck selling the bloody teddy.

I'm 100% sure that Spanish or Chinese people with perfect language skills looking at Spanish or Cantonese facebook see exactly the same kinds of errors.

The "teddy's" error is known as "the grocer's apostrophe" because it was so ubiquitous in shop signs- "tomato's", "carrot's". Snobbery about someone who probably left school at age 10 just doing their best to use punctuation because it feels correct.

That sounds like my kind thread. I must seek it out 😁

English is considered one of the hardest languages for a native to learn to read and write. It takes 18 months compared to 6 months for languages Italian, German and Finnish

This is rubbish partly because there are a million exceptions to the rule and most linguists agree that English is a tricky language to master. It’s actually ranked quite highly as one of the harder ones to learn.

@BMIwoes
I don't want to quote your entire post, but I agree! The idea that correcting mistakes is somehow 'unkind' is so damaging. It's a patronising, elitist viewpoint, which amounts to, 'don't tax the poor little brains of the hoi-polloi, they can't possibly cope with this level of knowledge.'

I loathe the fact that I am limited to correcting 'no more than 5 mistakes in spelling of grammar per page of writing' in GCSE essays. Unless I maintain a spreadsheet per child to note which mistakes I have corrected previously, it's statistically likely that I will never correct at least one type of mistake over the entire course of their GCSE. That is doing my students a huge disservice. It's also not what students want - they actively ask for feedback on their writing style, syntax, grammar and spelling.

A correction is not a criticism.

They are adjectives, not verbs.

Extremely common adjectives such as good and bad often have an irregular comparative/superlative form in European languages:

Good / better:

ES: bueno / mejor
PT: bom / melhor
CA: bon / millor
IT: buono / migliore

Etc.

Many languages have far more irregular comparatives than English. Off the top of my head, in Spanish big/bigger, small/smaller, old/older, and young/younger are all irregular, as well as good/better and bad/worse.

Comparatives and superlatives are usually taught at A2 level. They are generally considered an easy part of grammar.

Start with our ancestors killing neanderthals

Reparations now! Oh wait.

It's that many English people just don't care about using the right spelling and grammar.

Clearly, judging from the defensive responses on here.

The problem is with English is the rules aren’t consistent and there are lots of irregularities and exceptions to rules. Quite a bit of that is because English has lots of roots, it’s fascinating! I’ve studied German, French and Italian and found German the easiest. The grammar was more complicated but once you got your head around the rules, you could stick to them. There weren’t lots of exceptions to learn.

So take apostrophes in English, where you frequently see mistakes. Apostrophes can denote possession or contractions. However take the case of it. It’s stands for it is but its means something belongs to it. (My autocorrect is determinedly trying to change them which also doesn’t help!)

So it’s not surprising that even native speakers struggle to remember the vast amount of exceptions we have, together with written English can come across more stilted. We don’t write as we speak but especially on social media we want to come across as us so I suspect grammar gets forgotten. (That’s probably going to send me down a rabbit hole investigating that further!)

In my childhood, grammar wasn't taught very well....certainly some basics and a huge concentration on spellings, but years ago grammar itself wasn't a huge topic in schools (60s and 70s). Consequently, when I began to learn other languages I had no idea what a 'pluperfect' was or even the difference between an adjective and an adverb. I had a huge amount of catching up to do!

My children had much more grammar training than I did, I think schools have changed on this topic over the years.

English is about midway in the chart of complex languages to learn.....if you want something incredibly complicated, try learning Icelandic! On the other hand, a really easy language is Norwegian (at least, Norwegian Bokmål) - the grammar is intentionally streamlined, makes it so much nicer to learn!

You could have made it clearer. I'm just about to list my back yard bred XXL American Bully's puppy's online, Need gone.

Edit ''Could of made it clearer''

Most grammatical ‘errors’ are deviations used in local dialects. But as a linguist, I expect you know this.

My pet frustrations are on written English. For example, when people write ‘could of’ instead of ‘could have’ because they say ‘could’ve’ but this reflects something common to all language speakers: we say what sounds right without thinking much about the grammar.

I learnt German and Latin through the use of endless tables, but I know that for German this is considered very old fashioned and unnecessary. My grandmother spoke Hungarian, which is notoriously complicated. She didn't have much schooling, which was common for girls of her generation. She didn’t need to learn grammar tables to communicate!