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?

Well all I know is that there are some right superior twats on this thread and that's shitty behaviour, in any language.

Mandarin is the most difficult language in the world to learn, but English is right up there with the most difficult languages... I am so impressed when non-English-speaking people learn it.

From Google.......

English is widely considered to be a difficult language for non-native speakers to learn. This is because English has a number of unique features that can make it challenging to master. For instance, English has a large vocabulary, with over 170,000 words in common use.

It IS hard, as we have so many words that mean the same thing... Fair means decent, light coloured, reasonable, and somewhere you have rides for children (and adults!) Then there's different spellings of this word that are pronounced the same. Fare... A charge for a bus or train. Fayre... things people are selling (though that's not used very often now.)

Then there's too, two, and to, and there and their, and bite and byte, and disk and disc. Then the confusion between of and off, and loose and lose. Easy mistakes for some people.

Just a small set of examples.

So don't anyone come on here and say English is easy/easy to learn, because it isn't. Even the OP who claimed to be soooooo good at it, (and claims she is a cunning linguist,) messed up!

It is taught in primary schools and examined on y6 sats papers but the way it’s taught has become very over complicated. We have several generations of undiagnosed dyslexics around as well, or so I suspect. Then bring in the use of texting language these days where people shorten words and which people use more often. And the fact that social media publicly outs everyone for their poor spelling and grammar or the fact that they don’t check what autocorrect changes things too.

@Q2C4 Where is the evidence that grammatical errors are any more common in U.K. English speakers than in native speakers of other languages anywhere else in the world. People in all countries have complicated lives and make grammatical errors.

There are, as others pointed out, plenty of French, German, Japanese, Portuguese and Russian speakers making grammatical errors all the time. The French are forever worrying about the declining standards in French, the Japanese are constantly bemoaning the fact that people can’t handwrite kanji anymore because they type everything now. The errors and difficulties vary depending on the language but I don’t see any evidence that people in the U.K. are any worse at “grammar” (by which the OP seems to mean written language more broadly, as a lot of the examples relate to spelling or punctuation) than Brazilians, Italians, Jamaicans, Spaniards or Kenyans.

Halleluia to that.

Ah, but ... how will they sound superior to everyone else if they don't tell you how easy it was for them to learn English when they were in the womb?

My biggest bug bear is bought and brought. They’re two totally different words with different meanings but the amount of people who went to the shops and brought pizza does astound me.

I wonder if dialect plays a part though.

I'm from a working class Essex background and would have been severely shamed and punished for saying "we was". I don't know how widely acceptable "we was" would be in spoken English among those not blessed with such strict parents, but I'm pretty sure your job application would go in the bin if it contained that kind of grammatical howler. In theory of course, the "we was" types would know not to use it in written English or in formal contexts, but if you're used to saying it, it might slip out unintentionally. I've tried to correct my DCs gently (not with the terrifying zeal my parents had) with mixed results. DS is an excellent language learner who has always read proper books for pleasure, whereas the DDs read garbage (manga/ teen vampire bodice rippers) and have impoverished vocabularies and sub-optimal SPAG as a result :( .

Amount and number are style issues, not grammar. It’s better style to use number for countable nouns but amount isn’t grammatical incorrect.

Have not read entire thread. Agree about some things, OP. The number of times I have read on MN "would of" instead of "would have", for example. But you lost me when I saw "amount of native English speakers". These things really grate.

These are generally L1 mistakes though. I don't know any non-natives who confuse to, too and two. We have homophones and homonyms in other languages. They're not a unique feature of English.

Amusingly, if I google "is English hard to learn" in English I get a lot of results from language academies and summer schools insisting it's hard (and almost always giving the -ough example, which I've never heard a non-native complain about!). If I google the same thing in Spanish, the results all say that English is easy to learn due to its grammatical simplicity...

I think you’re right. And then social media is where most people write as they speak and is where it is all shared. I wonder if all the people with ‘bad grammar’ on social media actually have good grammar if they’re using it in a more formal way such as job applications or essays for college. Perhaps context has a lot to do with this?

Also I’ve heard that English is very easy to master superficially but more complex when studied at a deeper level-don’t know if that’s correct though. I think it must be difficult for non native speakers to know correct pronunciation though as so many identical sequences of letters are spoken totally differently-so no easy rule to follow.

I think it’s easy, I was fluent by the time I was about four😁

Seriously though I think some aspects are easy such as one definite article for everything, no gendering inanimate objects, a lot of flexibility in sentence structure etc. The difficult aspects must be challenging though such as multiple meanings and spellings for the same sound word, contractions that don’t work in it’s full form (isn’t works as Is Not only sometimes not always). Same word different syllable emphasis (rebel, reBel) Etc

Or paragraphs.

Really OP, is this the best you can do to incite a riot on Thursday morning?

Yes, it's annoying but, we all are - including you. Most definitely including you.

I won't vote because I disagree with the premise of these stupid threads.

Primary education is quite heavy on the grammar, these days. It will be interesting to see if common mistakes in e.g. SM posts improve with time.

My guess would be no. Those with good grammar & vocab tend to get it from reading, not remembering what they were taught in school. That is unless they study linguistics and then, apparently, they get to judge everyone else 😂

Most people will have been taught the correct use of apostrophes when at school, spelling and grammar are taught as part of the curriculum and in most written exams marks are gained or lost based on spelling and grammar.

Just because something is taught doesn’t mean that somebody will feel it important enough to remember and follow once they’ve left school. Also, people do make mistakes. I’m a teacher and generally consider my written English to be good, however I recently sent out a report where I’d misused hear instead of here. I am fully aware of the difference between the two but had absent-mindedly used the wrong one and missed it when I proof read and it had been missed by my line manager when they proof read it too. Sometimes it’s not that people don’t know the correct grammar but they just fail to apply it in the moment. Bear in mind about 10% of the population are likely to be dyslexic too, I have a dyslexic friend who has his own business and the spelling and grammar he used on his early signs and advertising etc before he realised he would need to get other people to proofread was often almost comedically bad. It’s easy to judge someone for writing teddy’s and assume they haven't been taught basic grammar but in reality you have no idea whether they may have dyslexia, whether English is not their first language or whether it might just be a one-off absent minded mistake. Few people are perfect 100% of the time.

I'm sure many interview panels would disagree with you.

Verb inflections are a natural part of language that the human brain is extremely well equipped to learn as a toddler (even if it tends to be rather more difficult for adults). Children are capable of learning vastly complex systems of inflection in their native language even when they receive no formal education.

Apostrophe-s is an arbitrary rule of English orthography invented in the seventeenth century for no very good reason, that has no counterpart in spoken language and pretty much has to be taught explicitly.

The two things are completely different.

As I understand it English is reasonably easy to learn to the point where you can make yourself understood but very hard to learn to the point where you sound like a native speaker - this is why two non-native English speakers may have an relatively easy time conversing in English. IIRC there are more non-native English speakers in the world than native ones, so the theory goes that eventually most of us will end up speaking a thing called Globish - a simplified, streamlined version of English with all the weird bits and idioms removed. At least that’s what I read in the New Scientist once…

I often wonder this as well. I used to have a boyfriend who had been to a minor public school and who was fanatical about punctuation (aspiring writer) but he had an annoying habit of saying "you was" because he thought it was funny. "Mockney" was also a fad at that time.

I actually find affected bad SPAG ("this thread be weird") much more grating than inadvertent bad SPAG. Current boyfriend has a horrible habit of writing "sa va" for "ça va" and "t'en pis" for "tant pis". I read French well enough to know that it's wrong and irritating, but not well enough to know whether it's an accident or an attempt at trendy txt speak or being down wit de yoofs or whatever.

Not sure how all the people picking apart your post think they're negating your point that most people don't know the basic rules of English grammar? If anything they're helping your argument.

FFS OP - do not use "super" as a degree adverb.

"Super" is an adjective.

HTH.

"Would've" and "would of" sound similar.

@WhileMyGuitarGentlyWeeps Just look at the number of people who speak english in the world vs. french for example. Have you visited other countries and gotten by in your own language? Or have they tried to speak to you in mandarine and expected you to understand? Of course not.

It is the lingua franca (is this a proper expression?) of the world, largely because it is a very easy language to learn. To master anything is a whole another topic, but the basics of plurals vs. posessives, differences of /their/they're are easy.