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?

You are a Portuguese speaker. Whilst you may not recognise it, Portuguese is a language that is easy for English speakers to learn and vice versa. It’s a category 1 language on the US state department scale, along with Spanish, Norwegian, Dutch etc. It takes less than 600 hours to reach professional working proficiency for English speakers. Whereas category V languages like Korean, Mandarin, Japanese, Cantonese and Arabic take over 2200 hours to reach the same level.

If your native language was Japanese you might have a very different view about how easy English is relative to Korean.

If your native language was Farsi you might laugh at the idea that Arabic is harder to learn than Norwegian.

English was a piece of piss because you already spoke two of the category 1 languages. Lots of Chinese people will speak at least two of the Chinese languages classified as Category V for English speakers.

Chinese languages aren’t inherently more complex than European ones. Difficulty depends on the linguistic background of the learner as much as the “complexity” of the language. If you already speak a tonal language and can read Chinese characters then it’s a lot easier for you to pick up Mandarin or Hunanese. Just like speaking multiple European languages already makes picking up English much easier.

How easy an individual person found it to learn a language is, for reasons that should be obvious, a bad indicator of overall linguistic complexity.

I'd say Spanish is harder than English to reach to B1/B2 level, then English is harder for C1/C2.

Spanish grammar is a lot more complex. Pronunciation is simple but unforgiving. Depending on their language background, a lot of Spanish learners struggle with syllable timing to the point of being totally unintelligible. The r and rr are also really difficult for a lot of learners.

@ThanksItHasPockets

As explained now by multiple posters, English is relatively easy to learn for the purpose of functional communication but difficult to master to fluency.

Exactly this. I know quite a few people who came here from other countries, in their 20s or 30s (some 15-25 years ago,) and they can communicate in English/speak English OK. But it is quite basic with most of them. Even after 15 to 25 years of living here.

I'm not knocking them. I think it's absolutely brilliant that they can speak English - and I'm really impressed by them learning to communicate in another language.. But at the same time, as I say, it is basic, limited English because it IS a really hard language to learn properly. Even people who were born here/raised here struggle with it for goodness sake!

I don't think there's actually anything terribly wrong with correcting people sometimes, because people need to know they're doing it wrong, so at least they can try and correct it if they can, (although it doesn't matter if they do get it wrong as no ones perfect!)

But it's the patronising and demeaning and obnoxious way that some people go on about it, (especially on message forms like this,) and the way they put people down, and mock, and berate, and deride them for getting it 'wrong...'

Like, you know, 'you must be a bit thick' putting TOO instead of TO, and 'could of' instead of 'could have' ... It's just the snarky 'I'm much better than you because my English is better than yours' attitude.

My husband's English and grammar is a little bit questionable, even though he's an intelligent man and very good at things like I. T. electrics, carpentry, and art... Even he thinks that he's a bit 'thick' (and not as intelligent as me,) because his grammar and spelling is not brilliant and mine is quite good. He's no more 'thick' because his grammar and spelling isn't brilliant - than I am 'super intelligent' because mine is reasonably good. I am also not in a higher social class than him because my spelling and grammar is a bit better, (like someone suggested further back in the thread!) We are both working class!

I am fairly good at English, spelling, and grammar, but do make mistakes sometimes, and I am definitely no more 'intelligent' than anyone who isn't very good when it comes to the English language!

The snobbery (from some) around spelling and grammar is horrific. I'm embarrassed for them. Also, as a number of posters have said, language evolves, and some people are not 'wrong' in what they are saying. Also, what some people claim is something being said 'incorrectly' is just someone's regional dialect. Drop the snobbery! It's not a good look!

Hasn't this gone off topic? The post was about incorrect grammar and spelling by native English speakers, wasn't it, not how difficult it is for non-English speakers to learn the language?

Why wouldn't you be encouraging children to express themselves beautifully and creatively using the correct grammar?

Maths is an abstract concept. 2 + 2 is never going to equal 8 "because maths evolves".

What the fuck does that even mean.

Applied maths is just as useful as English, but you'd get torn to shreds if you started a thread ripping the piss out of someone that couldn't work out how many metres of carpet they need, or how to work out the percentage discount in a shop. It's generally accepted that some people are not very good at maths, but English is shameful for some reason ?

This is a really good question. It's interesting when new words appear, and the relevant bodies decide which rule to apply. For example, the word covid was declared masculine in Spanish because virus is masculine. However, in Catalan it is feminine because malaltia (illness) is feminine. As a result, those of us who primarily speak Catalan often make the mistake of saying "la covid" in Spanish.

It was about the idea that we should be embarrassed to make mistakes because English is so easy. It’s literally (notice the correct use of literally ) in the title of the thread.

Poor grammar and spelling make me roll my eyes all the time. Our local Facebook page is a hotbed of prime examples. Trying to recruit employees is a nightmare of picking out the candidates who have anything like a decent command of written English and it's definitely become much worse over the past few years.

It sounds as though you spend way too much time on Facebook.

Rather a leap, isn't it, to say that? No, I went on our local forum (last visit was probably February) to see what examples I could fine.

I deed these threads are daily now at just how terrible the uk is compared to.the rest of the world in just about everything.

I was led to believe that English is more irregular that multiple other languages and we have words with sound the same/ are spelt the same with different meanings. I don’t think it is one of the simplest languages. Grammar is absolutely hammered in schools these days to the detriment of more useful skills. I think you’ll find a large amount of people have a disability which makes difficult for them. But of course that’s ‘embarrassing’. People also use phones a lot which frequently change to incorrect use of grammar with the spellcheck.
and yes the irony of a poster using incorrect grammar in a post deploring the use of incorrect grammar..

As a linguist I suppose you'll have heard about the importance of being descriptive rather than prescriptive. A standard grammar helps people communicate but isn't descriptive of a wide range of different accents, many of which use "we was" or drop articles as in the case of the Yorkshire dialect "going t' shop". Language changes across regions and time. I think it's okay. Of course schools are supposed to teach a standard and the poor national grasp of this says a lot about state schooling rather than anything else.

Charming response.

It means what the f--- it says. I was replying to a post that said (it might have been yours) that maths afficionados don't make posts about getting maths wrong.

For a start, maths problems are not the sort of thing you see regularly, if at all, on social media (unless it is a dedicated page for that sort of thing. You wouldn't find it in Brenda's Sales N Swaps page).

People often say "language evolves". Nobody says that maths does, because it can't, in the same context.

Find. Typo. (I do know the difference between fine and find.)

You just learn - through practice, repetition and so forth. Anyone with a small kid can probably see the process in them - my child just said "I winned the race", because they don't yet know that "to win" is an irregular verb, but they'll learn it over time and probably won't remember how they know it; they'll just know it.

I was taught French grammar at school (I'm bilingual, with an usual "home" language I used with my parents and French as school language) and learned English from the age of 7. It has always slightly shocked me that schools in Britain don't seem to teach grammar much. I recently did a piece of work with a colleague, updating our organisation's website. I suggested we rethink the use of the tenses as we were referring to an action that had started and ended in the past and she just looked totally blank. So I think perhaps some of the basic terminology isn't familiar to native speakers, and perhaps ought to be included in the curriculum.

Think Yoda.

As an English teacher I find the schism apparent here very depressing. I don’t accept that this is a binary choice. It is possible to give children a wonderfully creative experience of English whilst also ensuring a solid understanding of the rules of our standardised language. The major barrier is a generation of parents and teachers who were not given this basis in their own education and who are insecure and defensive as a result.

We have to get to the point where professional learning facilitates a no-judgment approach to filling these gaps in order to work together to give children both ‘correctness’ and creativity, rather than bickering about the difference.

Ha, ha and good for you.
People say "different to" but it should be different FROM also
saying "of" instead of HAVE.

@ThanksItHasPockets hear hear!

My grasp on grammar isn't very good. I do try but I struggle to remember some of the rules (some apostrophes etc). I have been studying recently at a post grad level and been passing my essays so it can't be that terrible but there are some things I avoid as I cannot get my head around it (affect vs effect etc) (please don't try and explain, I have read them all and it fries my brain).

There's prescriptive grammar, descriptive grammar, and inaccurate grammar (I also love an Oxford comma)! Sometimes the distinction between the latter two isn't necessarily clear. I mark undergraduate essays and am always interested to see how linguistic trends ebb and flow. I can unfortunately also say that over the past decade I have witnessed an undeniable decline in Standard English expression. If I were still the pedant I was when I first started out it would take me around 3 hours to mark a 2,000-word script.

There are old, fairly obsolete grammatical rules I no longer bother to correct. Splitting the infinitive is one. Ending a sentence with a preposition also doesn't seem to be the faux pas it once was. That's indicative of the way some trends ebb and flow.

Some is downright lazy, inaccurate or over-colloquial writing: people these days tend to write in much the same form as their speech, without awareness of the different levels of formality required for each. Subject, verb, object sentence construction is a real problem for some. This is a very straightforward, basic concept.

'Was' for 'were' has been around for years. I'm now seeing examples such as: constant sentence fragments; garbled, confused syntax to the extent that it's impossible to make sense of the meaning; sat for sitting; been for being; tense confusion; singular/plural confusion, due to/owing to confusion, 'in regards to', the constant overstatement of 'massively', and a real personal bugbear: 'showcasing'.

A weird syntantic anomaly I'm coming across with increasing frequency is sentences that start with the word ‘By’ and insert an ‘it’ somewhere mid-sentence. Ie: ‘By doing action A, it brings about result B’. The 'by' and the 'it' are completely superfluous. In addition, the ‘it’ pronoun is vague, which further detracts from the clarity of the sentence. I have no idea where this particular trend has come from, but it's driving me potty!

The earlier examples are simply a fluctuation of old, strict grammatical rules. The latter are lazy use of colloquial English, and inaccurate.

I'm aware that this may well be a contested view. Such is the beauty and richness of our (extremely difficult and complex) language.

Sorry I know this is off topic, but @macrowave yes, the introduction of new words is always quite fascinating in Spanish and French! I speak both, and usually in Spanish words ending in "a" are feminine (bar a few exceptions, like "el problema") but it seems to me that new words introduced nowadays are derived from context rather than appearance, possibly trying to make it easier for people to remember the gender

I find English grammatically much easier than Spanish, but I struggle with English idioms more.

I only learned French & German to O level standard, but I found I quickly got used to how things ought to be, & it was obvious when someone got it wrong. Word order in German, for example, is bizarre to an English speaker but it became second nature when speaking German. Someone (Punch magazine?) came up with a brilliant example of German word order, decades ago:

'Although I ninety years old am, play I for Man United when Sir Matt not looking is.'

😂

I thought it was interesting in a French class one day, when a girl read something out & inserted an extra 's/z' sound between two words, which made them flow more easily - something which was wrong formally. The teacher told her she'd done it, but said that's actually what French people do, too!