> The noun gendering alone makes it significantly easier to embarrass yourself speaking French than English.
English has more than enough of ways to easily embarrass yourself without the need for arbitrary noun gendering.
English has more than enough of ways to easily embarrass yourself without the need for arbitrary noun gendering.
I’m genuinely asking for examples. I’ve embarrassed myself quite often in French, yet haven’t much in English.
* neither are my mother tongue
Other European languages may have this to, but explaining it to people who speak unrelated languages usual results in a wail of "but why?!"
Many English speakers don't themselves realise it - in the UK, at least, we are not carefully taught English piece by piece after a very young age. Most grammatical understanding comes when (if!) you study a foreign language and then you find out that "find out" is a thing called a "phrasal verb".
little kids often mess up on irregular verbs ("I eated supper") because they (subconsciously?) learn the grammar, they aren't memorizing the past tense of every word
They do, and just like in your other example, they internalize it, they just don't realize they do it automatically because it "sounds good".
> Most grammatical understanding comes when (if!) you study a foreign language and then you find out that "find out" is a thing called a "phrasal verb".
That's super funny, isn't this taught in middle school or something? In Romania you study Romanian grammar from 5th to 8th grade (11/12 to 14/15), and you learn syntax, morphology, etc.
Does the average English speaker really not know about the term "phrasal verb"? :-)
Yes.
Furthermore, I didn't know the English word for it, despite being a native speaker, but do know the German "Verben mit Präpositional-Ergänzung", from having learnt German.
Speakers of English as a foreign language will know more about English grammar than English native speakers.
The brain will remember the term while it’s useful — to get a good grade on a test. After that, for most (almost all?) people it is useless to remember.
Phrasal verbs are not typically mentioned when Norwegian kids learn English, because not only do we have them, we typically use them in exactly the same way (e.g "eat up" is the same as "spis opp", "find out" is the same as "finne ut"). No reason to explain an obscure and odd concept if kids do the right thing by default anyway.
"Modal particles", small words that subtly indicate the speaker's certainty or degree of concern, likewise is another strange little grammatical quirk that German has, but Norwegian kids generally don't need a name for since Norwegian has them too and they can mostly just be translated directly.
Interesting. As a native English speaker (from the US), I'd say that "good small old" felt a little awkward for me to say out loud. Personally, I'd probably say "good old small ...", but to your point, there isn't exactly a "right" answer, just one that sounds right. I'm assuming you're also a native English speaker from the UK, so maybe we've discovered a funky difference between the English in our two countries. It would be a fun study to give native English speakers a list of those adjectives, and the noun "book", and tell them to order them.
I suppose a comma might disambiguate, within a list of qualities, but I think my point stands.
As a foreigner that observed a lot of other foreigners speaking English: it is not an easy language to master.
Let me go take a sheet.
I really like that beach.
But I don't think English particularly stands out, and I can think of languages that are much worse than it in that regard (especially for an outsider). Mandarin / Cantonese / Japanese / French / Korean are all pretty notorious examples for homophone collisions.