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?

Did you get autocorrected there?

Knowing your shit, as opposed to knowing your shit.

This one also grates on me terribly. I see it at work constantly.

I've recently been in court and the court document's had mis'splaced apostrophe's. I've given up now. I've started to abu'se them myself. If you can't beat 'em, joi'n 'em

'

Touche (can't do accents or whatever they are called) 😂

Never mind, I'm busy at the shops buying tomatoe's.

So many things that I learned through reading or hearing and was never taught. I don’t even realize I’m ordering this way, it just happens.

You're assuming there is perfect grammar among the general population of the other languages you've studied.

It's estimated there are nearly 5 million illiterate adults in France (for example). So that means there are probably even more people with poor grammar.

Budge over, I’ve brought popcorn 🍿!

Having always struggled with literacy and grammatical skills .
there’s nothing worse than some sumg superior wanker pointing out your errors

different to you And there's another thing - English grammar is changing to reflect how the majority of people use it. In the 1950s we were taught "different from" (because it means it differs from), but over the course of the last 60 years, "different from" has been replaced by "different to".

A more recent change, over the last 20 years at most, is that eg "two times as large" has been replaced by "two times larger"

Shakespear woud have something to say about all this! And Chaucer would turn in his grave.

I used to think English was a complicated language until I studied other languages. Then I realised it's, comparatively, very simple

I think maybe it's because English your mother tongue?

You keep saying grammar but the examples you're giving are mainly about punctuation and plurals.

English is actually one of the hardest languages to learn because it breaks its own rules all the time. Mainly because it's such a mish mash of other languages. English borrows from French, Italian, Latin, Norse, Gaelic, Sanskrit (basically every country that ever invaded us, plus every country we colonised!)

We have so many irregular verbs it makes conjugation a nightmare- you just have to learn them by heart.

Not to mention the weird spellings and words that are spelt the same but have completely different sounds and meanings. I found French much easier to learn because most of its grammatical rules tend to agree.

English is a an easy language to make your self understood in, but a hard one to speak well.

I also find it a messy language. Doing Latin to English translations was always a fun exercise - watching a neat, compact piece of writing explode.

Conjugation basically refers to the different versions of a verb, and tells us about who (e.g. I/you/they etc) is performing the action the verb describes and also about the tense (e.g. present/past/future). You are definitely using it even if you don't know what that word means, because we do learn it quite early on (even if they don't call it conjugation) - this link has some examples: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/verb-conjugation/
Some languages are a tad more complicated, something I discovered while learning German (and am still learning, because learning a new language from scratch involves learning a lot of verbs from scratch!).
Hope that helps.

The OP has done it 3 times in the post and none of them are Oxford commas though!

You're no linguist if you believe regional variants are errors.

Many languages have simpler grammar than English, e g. Samoan, Chinese an Swahili. This does not mean that you would find them easier to learn than English, as grammar is far from the only aspect of a language that poses difficulty to learners.

English is considered a medium-to-higher difficulty language. This is due not only to its grammatical complexity (and it is complex; it has more tenses than the average language, uses articles and is highly irregular) but because of the sheer amount of vocabulary and in particular our reliance on phrasal verbs to convey meaning-- a meaning not at all guessable from the component parts in many cases!

I used to think English was a complicated language until I studied other languages. Then I realised it's, comparatively, very simple

I too am "a linguist" 😁😇 and I think English is one of the most complicated languages.
We don't have to make the adjective agree with the noun, nor do we have cases, but the spelling and pronunciation are really hard to master, as are plurals.
Because English we speak today has derived from many different sources we have lots of "exceptions to the rule" and often several different words with very slightly different meanings eg house/home/dwelling that you don't tend to find so often in other languages.

Mumsnet does seem to be full of posts

"recommend me a hairdryer"
"I was sat there"
"I was laying next to the dog and.."

and I do grind my teeth reading these

1. Your grammar isn't very good despite your claims!
2. English is a notoriously difficult language to learn - particularly as a 2nd language.
3. Even writers need editors and copy editors and line editors to help get their grammar etc correct before a book is published - because actually it is tricky. Very.

' a business publicising its wares...' surely? I think you are the one mixed up with singulars and plurals

Style guides exist for a reason. I love an Oxford comma, but I know others find it fussy and pointless.
My grammar and spelling on here is APPALLING at times - typos, writing on a phone, typing in a RAGE! My written grammar for work is impeccable, and even I have to constantly check uses. Despite writing, reading and editing for a lving.

I did languages at Cambridge. I only learnt about tenses etc. from studying foreign languages.

My English grammar "sounds" right (I'm a professional writer!) but I can't name all the tenses etc. in English because it wasn't taught is state schools in the 80s. I have learnt a lot now but I've had 20 years of professionals editing me!!! I wouldn't leave a participle hanging at the end of a sentence now 😳

I think that's being fixed now, they teach it very differently.

Honestly there are much bigger problems in life than other mums saying "I was stood at the bus stop" 😂😂😂😂

Some people have a dialect and transfer their non-standard regional grammar and other non-standard forms into written English when convention is to write in Standard English grammar.

So true. I live in Yorkshire and the number of posts I see on local Facebook pages with "Av been to town", "As anyone got a lawnmower I could lend" and "you was being rude," etc makes me want to say "have" "has" "borrow" and "were". I don't of course.

And don't get me started on "could of"

I agree with you @Skyeboat. I think there are a lot of adults who missed out on basic grammar at school.

I don't remember ever being taught grammar at school, even at primary school (started in the late nineties in Ireland.) If a child said something that was obviously wrong like 'Sorry, I done the wrong homework' or 'I brung this in to show the class', the teacher would correct them and say 'I did, not I done/ brought not brung' but I never remember learning grammar formally. We did do spelling rules, plurals etc but not much more...
I think a lot of people just say whatever sounds normal to their ear, and if you've grown up surrounded by people who speak with good grammar, it's quite intuitive so bad grammar probably grates. But it depends so much on dialect and your environment... I personally don't have much frame of reference about what's grammatically correct, as I'm only going on what I hear (or read). I remember finding out that it's meant to be 'if I were rich' rather than 'if I was rich' in my teens and was very taken aback by it - I'm sure I frequently make mistakes that I'm not aware of, so apologies for any and all mistakes in this post!

It’s ok @rwalker one of said smug persons is now on the receiving end in their turn and hopefully realising the error of their ways! As others have said, get the popcorn and enjoy.

@AliceOlive I would love to say it was deliberate. A trap for those who love to correct others. Unfortunately that would be a lie. Auto-correct strikes again. So pleased I wasn’t being a pedant. That would have been embarrassing 😂

English has a lot more words compared to many other languages. If you look at a bilingual dictionary, you can see.
eg, sky and heaven mean very different things in English, but there’s only one word in many languages. Equally, wedding and marriage, etc. There are lots of examples, especially where the Anglo-Saxon/Germanic word comes up against the Latinate word.

Similarly, phrasal verbs and prepositions.
eg, the difference between:
come in
come into
come on
come at
overcome
income
oncoming
put up
put up with
put on
put out
put in
input