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 has just made me laugh so much 🤣

Bring back Latin, I say. My students used to say that it was only in the Latin class that they learned English grammar. They were very surprised that Ms. X, their English teacher, had not the faintest notion of the function of a gerund and could not identify an English subjunctive. I had to explain that many younger teachers were the victims of the New English Syllabus, that disastrous initiative of the Education Ministry in the 1970s which had denied them a good grasp of the basics.

Are you in the UK? Most houses on our estate have en suites and that's what everyone calls them. Everyone knows it means the bathroom attached to the main bedroom.

All the estate agent listings use the term en suite shower room but in conversation it is always shortened to en suite.

As a general principle I agree as long as we also teach that endless frustration will follow if we try to apply the grammar of a dead language slavishly to a messily living one like English. The horror of a split infinitive is a good example of Latinate pedantry misapplied to English (and I hate the fact that I deliberately avoided using one in the previous sentence despite knowing that they are not incorrect!).

With respect, this is a very good example of
the Dunning-Kruger effect. I know the Dunning-Kruger effect gets chucked around as an insult, but it’s a cognitive bias that we are all susceptible to. We underestimate the difficulty and overestimate the importance of what we know, whilst overestimating the difficulty and underestimating the importance of what we don’t.

You think the using en suite differently to French is wrong and that people who don’t use it correctly are ignorant because it seems like straightforward common sense stuff to you. But the idea that you use the word sake wrongly seems unimportant and you wouldn’t expect people to know Japanese, even though it requires a far more rudimentary understanding of Japanese to know that than the understanding of French needed to know that en suite is not being used correctly. You have wrongly assumed that what you don’t know is somehow harder or more esoteric than what you do. Just like the OP thinks that the grammar rules that she doesn’t know are far more complicated and less important than the ones that she does.

Very good point @Takoneko

To a large extent I agree with this. However, use of apostrophes is in the National Curriculum and it genuinely easy to learn that they have no role in indicating the plural.

In fact, this is a good example of ’someone is wrong internet on the internet’ syndrome. I can’t possibly have a different opinion, I must be wrong, and you’re going to keep going on until I agree.

But - it’s inevitable that people see things differently. I don’t even agree that en suite is anything but basic French, or with your final claim about the OP - as she never said anything of the sort.

@Mirabai - maybe the problem is that you are arguing it is wrong, rather than that you think it is naff 😂.

It most definitely is taught in Primary schools routinely. Apostrophes and plurals are one of the hardest things to get children to remember. We teacher Grammar twice weekly, as well as feed it into all of our English lessons. There is many reasons someone may not grasp these concepts but auto - correct also has a lot to answer for.

Learning and retaining what you are taught becomes problematic when it doesn’t reflect reality. The reality is, random, pointless apostrophes are all around us.

The problem is that you can’t accept a different perspective. We disagreed last night. I’m not still trying to get you to agree this morning.

In Latin languages all nouns have gender, English doesn't. For instance table in my language is feminine, cucumber is masculine, wardrobe is neutral. That means you need to use the right article when referring to different objects, in my language the article comes at the end of the word which makes things even harder for someone foreign learning it. In English you have 'the' for everything.

The gender complicates the adjectives too.

Conjugation of verbs. In English, apart from a few irregular verbs that are not too difficult to learn, everything is very straight forward: I sit, you sit, he/she sits, we sit, you sit, they sit. In Latin languages conjugation of verbs is a nightmare, take a look at French.

These are just a few examples.

Like you said, perhaps hearing English on media helps too.

I started learning English in my 20ies and I did have to sit down every day studying grammar books, but I found it a joy and a lot easier that learning French for instance. My English is far from perfect though and I'm always open to learn new things.

By those measures Japanese is really really easy. There are no grammatical genders, no articles, words don’t change when plural, and verbs don’t conjugate according to the person, number or gender so regardless of whether it’s I, you, they, he etc. the verb is always the same. There are also only two irregular verbs “to do” and “to come”.

Then they go and complicate things by conjugating for a million other things that we don’t. 😂😂

I would say English is easy because it is widely spoken, even if not as a first language, and very tolerant of mistakes, so an excellent language to communicate in. Even most English people aren’t too fussy about their own glaring errors 😁.

@Mirabai - I can accept a different stylistic interpretation, but not the claim that other people’s usage is wrong. I didn’t say you were wrong not to want to use “en suite” in the way other English people do, I just said you were wrong to say other people were wrong.

And,mto be fair, the Cambridge English dictionary says the people you think are wrong are actually perfectly correct in their usage of en suite.

I live in France and the language has adopted loads of English. My local Facebook group had a request for un babysitter, a newspaper had "le management d'un business start-up" and I was discussing talkie-walkies (sic) with someone the other day. 😮 Oh and fuck is starting to appear in graffiti all over the place.

Yeah, but the Cambridge dictionary also thinks men can be women so……

@Walkaround I think that is a very good point. There’s lots of room to make mistakes without significantly impairing the ability to make yourself understood. It’s a very forgiving language. I think the flexibility in vowel sounds helps a lot.
If someone says ch-i-ps, ch-u-ps, ch-ee-ps, ch-ə-ps (depending on their accent) we have no problem in understanding that they are talking about chips.

Well you do just have to accept a different pov. It’s ok if I think people are using a phrase incorrectly, the world will not collapse. I’m not saying they can’t use it or they don’t - I’m aware it’s widely used.

This was covered last night…

I cannot stop saying “We was”……I ask my partner to correct me every time and I still do it on a regular basis. 😳
Habit of my youth!

I always think it’s sounds very strange when an American says ‘erbs’ it just doesn’t sound right to my ears. The US and us (UK) are both inconsistent with our French pronunciations though, us with our herbs and niche and the US with their ‘erbs’ and nitch.

Isn't en-suite an abbreviation, like microwave and vacuum? You know what should come next, so why bother to say it?