Ladies and gentlemen, this is what is known as a leading question.

Learning a second language AND professionally teaching English to speakers of said language. English is not broken. English is actually much better than many alternatives. We don’t need to worry about noun gender. We don’t have to worry about tones. We have precise ways to indicate number and time. Formality levels are not baked into word construction. The pronunciation of words can generally be inferred from the spelling, despite learning this skill being a little complicated— but that complicated nature even has its usefulness.

We rag on English, but it is by far not the worse out there, not even close. It’s just contempt for the familiar.

When you start a new language, you learn “The Rules” first, and wonder why your first language doesn’t have such immutable “Rules.”

Then when you get fluent, you realize there are just as many exceptions as your first language.

Learning German taught me how messed up non-English languages are. Having to memorize if every noun is either male, female, or neuter just so you can use the right form of “the” with it is crazy.

ITT: Loads of monolingual native English speakers who has no knowledge of linguistics or even how their own language is not unique in all the ways that they think it is.

Learning Mandarin. The stereotype of a Chinese person saying “Me no English” makes sense now considering the word is literally 我(Me)不(No)英文(English)

Teaching English to non-native speakers will fully open your eyes as to how broken and outright ridiculous the English language is. “To” and “too”. “Through” and “threw”…

This post kind of ignores basics of grammar instruction that we’ve known for centuries. Some people try to teach grammar from a prescriptive fashion. They tell us what the rules are, they have us memorize them, and then we can speak perfectly.

The problem is, that’s not how language works in reality. Even if you had a perfect language to begin with, something with no exceptions of any kind, after 20 years people would have added their own changes. So then the original instruction that you gave, that wouldn’t prepare future language learners for reality.

This is why we have to teach grammar and spelling descriptively. We’re talking about what actually happens in the world when people actually speak and write in English. Of course it’s nice to point out common customs and conventions, but we don’t get to ignore all of the irregular things just because they’re irritating to memorize.

And this is true for all languages that are used by even a medium-sized population over time. You cannot avoid it, you’ll find it in every language, sorry.

Learned English as my second language instead.

Yeah it’s broken, but y’all have tenses that sorta make senses (in Estonian we have present and past - future is implied by context!) and you don’t need 14 noun cases because y’all have prepositions.

At the same time, English borrows words from over 9000 different languages, nothing is pronounced the way it’s written, and to be quite honest, I never bothered learning any of the rules in school. The rule for ordering adjectives so they wouldn’t sound off was impossible to remember, but because I’ve been terminally online since I was like 7, it just came naturally.

TL;DR: English is a great language to just know natively, horrifying one to learn systematically.

Learning a second language hasn’t made me think English is broken. I already thought English was messed up but know a little of it’s history so have a general idea why. Learning Spanish means learning the flaws of a second language. I thinking all languages are flawed, but English just goes the extra mile.

It isn’t broken. It’s quirky, and they all are.

What I appreciate about Spanish over English is the ease of spelling and pronouncing new words. What I appreciate about English over Spanish is the ease of creating new words.

I have some limited ability/understanding in other languages, but not enough to judge. Except for French.

Its taught me all languages are broken in some way. Romance languages have words that have arbitrary gender needing conjugation. Some have two genders, some three! Then the Romanian language comes in with its own tricks.

Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) lack an alphabet so words are conjunctions of smaller words, or sometimes worse the phonetics of smaller words without the meaning of the word.

Starbucks (the coffee company) in Mandarin is 星巴克. 星 is the literal translation of Star. So far so good. However 巴 can mean “to hope”. 克 can mean “to restrain”. The reason they use 巴克 for the second half of Starbucks is that when you pronounce them they vaguely sound like “bahcoo” (buck). So the first half is the traditional use of direct translation ignoring what it sounds like phonetically, but the second half ignores direct translation and instead uses the phonetics of the second two characters to sound like “buck”.

quite simple: I learned english

I say “correct” more frequently now when in agreement instead of “right.” 🤷‍♀️

I noticed how many of the verbs in English can mean different things depending on what word comes next, e.g.

• Put
• Put down
• Put up
• Put upon
• Put on (wear)

English has so many words that mean the same thing, it’s amazing, astonishing, bewildering and flabbergasting, there was a thief, mugger, robber, bandit… Who stole, robbed, nicked, thieved from me… I don’t know how anyone ever learns all the English words for stuff, I honestly don’t know how I have.

It also made me reflect on how languages are just noises we’ve all agreed to make at each other. The rules try to match the language and fail, not the other way around.

Recently I was also thinking about how interesting it is that some words we use are SO OLD, and we just… use them like it’s no big deal, but if we we’re transported back thousands of years, people were still calling vanilla something very similar to vanilla and arteries something very similar to arteries, and that is super cool to me.