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?

This would of been perfect if you'd also included the mistake I've just made (VERY commonly made!) 😆

That’s interesting - you’re the first person I’ve heard say that. What aspects did you find easier if you don’t mind me asking? Do you think the fact so much mass media is in English helps?

What's wrong with teaching children the rules of grammar? As Pockets said, grammar & creativity aren't mutually exclusive.

In ANY activity, you learn the rules/method & you do the activity using that knowledge plus your own tastes/instincts/creativity/abilities/opportunities. In this case, it's writing or speaking. But the same applies to football or art, or using a sewing machine or a computer or a car.

I don’t disagree with any of that. I’m all for teaching children grammar. I personally find grammar fascinating and wish I’d been taught it more explicitly at school. Like many others educated in the 80s to early 00s, I got most of my understanding of English grammar from the study of foreign languages.

However, judgemental statements about how embarrassing the state of other people’s grammar is are never going to be helpful. The OP is happy to admit to not having perfect grammar and making errors but thinks that other people’s errors are more “basic” or embarrassing. Even though some people who make the mistakes that she doesn’t would never make the ones that she does and might consider her errors more basic than theirs.

I have very high expectations for the students I teach and really reinforce grammar and other aspects of written and spoken communication in the classroom, but I’m not going to start bemoaning the state of English grammar until someone can show me some data to show that it’s actually in some kind of decline or that UK English speakers make any more errors than natives of other languages.

Completely agree @Takoneko

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...

That's interesting. I've noticed the same - native English speakers insisting our language is one of the hardest, and polyglot foreigners saying that it was the simplest language for them to learn.

But the example I gave was not colloquial, it was from a business.

Did you really go and copy and paste messages by bereaved people on Facebook about losing loved ones so that you could laugh at their grammar, spelling and punctuation on here?

Was there no moment where you thought “maybe using this would be insensitive”?

Exactly this Cosyblankets!

I’m a child of the 80’s and I don’t recall any in depth learning with regards to grammar at primary school. I am also Yorkshire born and seem to speak a different language which makes things difficult. I do find it incredibly hard to grasp linguistic rules and master the correct grammar, as I’m sure this post will show. However, that hasn’t stopped me passing my access course (all written assignments) with distinction as a mature, dyslexic and neurodivergent adult, and it hasn’t stopped me from being accepted in to a good university at the ripe age of 35. The English language is nonsensical and I think the fact others have highlighted your own mistakes OP just goes to show that neither you or anyone else is perfect. Perhaps this onslaught in the comments section might make you think twice before posting another such unnecessarily provocative and snobby post. I can’t quite tell whether your post was genuine and disgustingly egotistical or whether you are just an attention seeker, but either way, I wouldn’t bother posting similar in the future, it reflects poorly on your character, and whatever your motivations it is my opinion that this post is quite frankly, pathetic.

So what's the solution? Not bother? Accept that less privileged people have no aspirations to speak and write properly? Or is it a situation where the famous MN 'gentle explaining' would be OK?
The reason we are in this mess is because we have not tackled the problem because people like you and a lot if other Pps seem to be saying 'less well-educated' people don't need the same opportunities. And if that isn't patronising or looking down on someone, I don't k ow what is!

I'm well aware of the two definitions of "linguist" (someone who is an expert in the science of linguistics, or someone who is skilled at speaking foreign languages). I thought that the definition I was using would be obvious from the rest of my post, in which I state I studied foreign languages and work with them.

This is it exactly

I poster replied to me saying my statement of English having two tenses is wrong - I’m sorry I can’t find your post again.

Traditional linguistics has it that a tense involves inflecting the end of the verb- hence English having only two tenses , present and past .
The 16 ‘tenses’ the poster mentioned are moods or aspects of tenses ( past perfect, present perfect continuous etc. But where would you place ‘future tense’ ?
We don’t have one , we have a collection of present forms and modal verbs…
Modern language teaching just calls them all ‘tenses ‘ as a shorthand and that’s probably sensible .
But I was using tenses as an example of how English can appear ‘simpler’ than other languages but the more you look at it, the more complex it is .
It is mainly because English is a mix of Laois of other languages and a mix of Latinate and Germanic hence the larger vocabulary

Phew , end of lecture

I agree. You don't have to be a linguist to get a handle on basic spelling, grammar and punctuation. In a world where information is so convoluted and manipulated, the way we use our words is so important. The one that gets me is business advertisements riddled with mistakes. It puts me off using someone who might have to work out financial details when they can't even put out a basic professional looking ad.

@Skyeboat I work in a really international environment where English is the working lang.. None of my international colleagues say learning English was a huge struggle in comparison to the other langs they also know. Most of them speak 3 or more languages. They're from all over - western, Eastern, central Europe, Middle East, south and east Asia, south America. Its a weird point of pride to insist that English is so hard, but it's not really true.

That should say it's 🤣

I don't think privilege has anything to do with it. We now have a culture where peoples' shortcomings are blamed on their parents/education/society, whoever they can point a finger at instead of themselves. In a world where almost all of us has a device in our pockets that provides the answer to nearly any question, there's no excuse for bad habits. Its not solely up to parents and schools to educate people, there are many ways to seek learning outside of those environments. People are simply too lazy.

I find this sort of stuff so interesting. Thanks @macrowave!

The -ough thing - that's not really difficult at all. Similarly, I don't struggle with "could have" or "could of" because they are two totally different words (like "to" or "two") and in English classes I spent a long time looking at those words, not just speaking them - maybe that's the difference. It would be like mixing up cat and dog. What sometimes gives me away as a non-native speaker is the sentence structure - I tend to mirror my native language's sentence structure which often puts words in a slightly different order.

I think native speakers make different mistakes to non-natives because they learn to speak their language first, whereas non-natives often look, read and comprehend the words first (despite the teachers' efforts to get people speaking! Speaking always comes last, unless you dive head first into a new culture where no one speaks your native language)

English isn't a particularly easy language - the grammar is quite complex and even people who are really good at speaking it get confused over when to say I play or I am playing, for example. In other ways, it's easier because we don't have all the genders (likewise Finnish but that is complex in other ways too).

And then British English is full of witticisms, irony, sarcasm and people saying things they don't mean. God help any foreigners, never mind native speakers!

There’s no hope for us - even book publishers seem happy to print books riddled with grammar and spelling mistakes these days. When I was a child, I felt I could at least rely on picking up appropriate sentence construction and spelling from reading books, but not now. Nowadays, we seem to have books that have been proofread by a Microsoft spellchecker, rather than a human being checking for context before correcting appropriately. As for rogue apostrophes, they are so ubiquitous, they are dangerously close to becoming acceptable.

You make some really good points here, and to me this is not dissimilar to the arts vs sciences snobbery I see so much of. There’s this pervasive idea that being totally ignorant about science is absolutely fine - something to be proud of even - whereas no-one would ever admit to being ignorant about the arts. A great example is one I read once about a newspaper reporting the fact that something like 30% of adults thought that the Sun went round the Earth, and the editor had added “Doesn’t it? - Ed” underneath. Do we think the editor would have made the same joke if it had been reported that the same proportion of adults thought that Shakespeare wrote the Iliad? Similarly when Jeremy Paxman presented University Challenge he’d snort “doesn’t everyone know that?” if the contestants got an art/literature/history question wrong, but with the maths and science questions he’d just be derisive about why anyone would want to know that sort of thing.

A bit of a digression, sorry, but I can’t help feeling the two are linked.

Eh, we foreigners get on just fine, but thanks for your concern.

Present simple vs present continuous is a grammatical distinction that maps very easily onto many other languages (with apologies to any Germans reading this!). Wait until you get to languages like Cantonese and Mandarin which distinguish between the continuous and the progressive - I think Hindi and Urdu also have this distinction?

Well this is what I'm saying. I didn't say English was difficult for foreigners. I merely replied to some people who were insisting that our grammar is extremely complicated for foreigners to learn, saying that while foreigners may find some aspects of it understandably tricky (like phrasal verbs), these are not the things native speakers get wrong. We get much more basic things wrong.

Just because learners find such elements difficult, doesn't mean that, compared to other languages, English is difficult. I agreed with a pp who said that they only really hear English people insisting that our language is difficult. My friends from other countries are broadly of the view that English was one of the easiest to learn.

@macrowave exactly, or even just closer to home with the Spanish subjunctive which is used all over the place and is more of an emotional state of being or mood and pretty much depends on the speaker, the situation, the context and the alignment of the planets (I love the subjunctive).

I know it's only food, but ...

Salad Box's
Panini's
Jacket Potato's

It doesn't look good.

The food though is excellent!