Anyone who learns English as a second language has my admiration. I’ve been trying to learn English as a first language for over fifty years to great or lesser degrees of success or failure, and I have to admit, English is one really tough nut to crack. I’ve studied verbs and nouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, clauses, gerunds, pronouns, relative pronouns, subject pronouns, object pronouns, interjections, slang, and a never ending list of strange grammar points, none of which are consistent, coherent, or logical. Even if the pronunciation weren’t a nightmare, or that all the short vowels weren’t the same, or the silent letters, or all the bizarre idiomatic expressions with prepositions and verbs, or the lack of a true subjunctive, or our inconsistent orthography, or our strange relationship to punctuation, it would still be hard. Don’t even get me started with the helping verb “do” or whatever the word “would” really means because I have no idea. As a bilingual person (I sorta speak a little Spanish–Hablo un pequeño español), I know how hard it is to learn another language that you were not born with. I’ve studied English for years, and it is still a complete mystery to me. Oh sure, I’ve given up trying to make sense of this mess, which is a major load off of my shoulders because trying to understand English is only a little less terrible than trying to learn it as a second language. Perhaps the only thing crazier than English syntax is, well, wait, maybe there is nothing crazier than English syntax. What drives second language learners out of the minds are all of the words that sound to them just about the same, and if that isn’t enough, there are about thirty different brands of English which pronounce all of those similar words just a little bit differently, but not differently enough to be another language, or even another dialect, just differently enough to confuse the hell out of anyone trying to learn English as a second language. And it’s the little words, the in’s and on’s, the about’s and the over’s which can change the meaning of any simple sentence in a radicle way–thinking “over” something is not the same as thinking “about” something. The combinations of verbs and prepositions is almost infinite as are their different meanings. Let’s not even discuss the passive voice in English. Yet English seems to be everywhere and is a requirement for so many kinds of jobs and occupations, so a lot of people have to learn it. Perhaps the hardest thing to learn in English are the idiomatic expressions–short, sweet, and have little or nothing to do with the actual words involved, so knowing the meaning of the words is irrelevant for understanding the meaning of the entire phrase. If you tell someone, “You’re fired,” they should have no actual idea that they are out of a job. What is so maddening, nee, insane about English are all of the small subtleties that contribute to meaning. The pronunciation is impossible, the syntax twisted, the semantics insane, so why would anyone want to learn English? Well, I can think of lots of reasons, but there can only really be one reason that has any value–because they want to. In the meantime, sign up for your English classes–in a college or university, on-line, maybe a pre-packaged course you do on your computer? Sandstone?
