English is my first language and I got along with it just fine until I started to teach it. I now realize there are so many weird things about it. Please tell me examples of things you find odd.
This post may include affiliate links.
The fact that the words read and red are pronounced the same. The letter u is inconsistently pronounced in the words uniform and under. Letter C is either pronounced like k or s. Nothing is pronounced like how it’s written
Every-bloody-thing and I'm English. How people that don't have English as their first language cope I do not know.
'you' is singular and plural and can also mean 'one' not you personally; 'they' is singular and plural; EVERY SECOND VERB seems to be irregular; nothing (especially place names) is pronounced how it's written; and there are so. many. synonyms for everything. wierd language
Almost everything honestly. Mainly verbs and the they/theirs/they're things. I'm just happy we don't have gendered nouns though.
The fact I have learned the same thing for three years. Also most of it
Extra filler words. Like, basically, literally, etc. It wasn't 'like' really hard. It was really hard. She wasn't 'literally' shaking. She was shaking. It's a pet peeve.
Here's my example. There are 'countable' and 'uncountable' nouns - in sentences starting "I like eating..." we would pluaralise a 'countable' and leave an 'uncountable' as singular. "I like eating oranges" vs "I like eating watermelon". Why is pasta 'uncountable' and noodles 'countable'? "How much noodles do you want?" sounds odd but so does "how many noodles do you want?"
Where do I start...at least we don't have to worry about genders for the word "the"? But anyway:
1. Grammar, it's confusing sometimes, like "can't" is short for "cannot" but is grammatically correct in "can't you get me this?".
2. The way some words are spelled and pronounced, some of them don't look real. Examples include: "Yacht" "Ratio" "Queue" "Colonel" "Unlike" "Axolotl" "Banana" and many more.
3. The pronunciation rules, ever heard of "Ghoti"?
4. That in writing, if a character has a certain accent, an apostrophe (I think that's the right word for what I'm talking about) can replace an entire word or syllable. There are SO many more.
The fact that you can look at a word, recognize every character that makes it up, pronounce each letter in a valid way, and completely miss the mark on how to pronounce the word… that’s pretty ridiculous. We have far too many vowel sounds being written with far too few characters, AND have consonant characters that do not need to exist at all. We add “silent” letters to words - but some of them sometimes aren’t silent, depending on your dialect. Also, some words are spelled differently depending on what country you’re in, even though we are all speaking the same language.
I remember Hooked on Phonics being ~the~ thing for kids who were struggling with reading when I was a kid. I didn’t use it, but the notion of learning English reading by memorizing the multiple phonemes for each letter and expecting to be able to puzzle out what anything was supposed to sound like was insane to me even then. I know now there’s more emphasis on sight words for early readers, but this whole system could be so much easier than it is.
It's my nat language and comes more easily to me than many other native speakers. But there's so many exceptions and accepted alternative pronunciations and spellings, I can totally understand why people find it difficult.
boxing rings are square. if items go by ship it’s called cargo. if it goes by car it’s shipment. (i got that form a yt shirt a while ago) are guinea pigs pigs?
*le gasp* ooh the downvote “fairy” really went through all of my posts and additions! yay! 🙄🥱
