[oldgradstudent]

> 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.

[andruby]

Such as?

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

[adhesive_wombat]

The adjective order one is really interesting to explain: the adjectives in "good small old red wooden English book" have to come in that order or it sounds very peculiar.

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".

[samvimes]

> "good small old red wooden English book" have to come in that order or it sounds very peculiar.

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.

[globalise83]

As a native English speaker from England, I'd always keep "good" and "old" together, and probably put them at the beginning of the sentence. I'd also use "little" rather than "small" in such a context: "my good old little red wooden English book." To me that would sound just right.

[jackfoxy]

I would also say good old small.. but the rest of the adjectives flow as I would expect to hear and say.

[eszed]

Yeah, but "good old" has an independent phrasal meaning, as in "good old Charlie Brown". That's fine if that's what you mean, or if you want to play with the ambiguity between the two interpretations - but if that's definitely not what you mean, then best use the standard phrasing.

[likeclockwork]

I don't think it's independent at all. I think it assigns the quality of good oldness to things that are good but not old. Or it refers to things that are good and familiar.

[FergusArgyll]

Steven Pinker's book on irregular verbs has a great example of this.

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

[dazc]

The beauty of English being that everyone understands what the kid meant.

[footy]

This is true of every language though. Language acquisition works like this (and people understand what young children mean) regardless of whether you're learning English or Spanish or German or Korean.

[adhesive_wombat]

I think in German some smashed up sentence like "ich haben gegesst der Abendessen" would also be understandable no matter how brutally you fluff the verb's conjugation and gender of the noun.

[oblio]

> Other European languages may have this to, but explaining it to people who speak unrelated languages usual results in a wail of "but why?!"

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"? :-)

[okeuro49]

> 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.

[freedomben]

Speaking only for my own experience growing up in the Western United States in the 80s and '90s, everyone was taught grammar from elementary school through senior year in high school, where the only required course was English. All of the pieces were taught. However, there is widespread ignorance among native English speakers about grammar. I don't think it's lack of education, but something else. My theory is that it just isn't interesting or particularly useful or helpful, so the information is quickly forgotten. With most things in education, they recur on an ongoing basis through life. English grammar on the other hand, does not, because you can get remarkably far by just going on how things sound.

[joelegner]

I think the brain is designed to free up memory holding information that is not useful. Memory associated with a technical term like phrasal verb seems to be something it would garbage collect.

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.

[vintermann]

There are a ton of language quirks that have their own name, but aren't prominent enough that they're taught - especially not in your native language, if they're peculiar to it. (In a second language, they often have to be taught, because they stick out and make no sense in the context of your first language).

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.

[ajmurmann]

There are lots of tricky things in English language, but the adjective order doesn't nearly carry the potential for embarrassment as gender-related mistakes.

[akkad33]

A couple of examples that come to mind is using the wrong verb form, since English has a lot of irregular verbs, and another is mispronouncing words, since there are many words with the same spelling but different pronunciations. And then you have words like "read", which have both characteristics.

[oldgradstudent]

Tenses, pronounciation that is completely divorced from spelling, idioms, prepositions, word order, articles, and so on.

As a foreigner that observed a lot of other foreigners speaking English: it is not an easy language to master.

[fegu]

To "the" or not to "the" before a name or noun.

[andruby]

I’ve heard lots of people with a Spanish background make mistakes against this. Iirc in Spanish you often should use it in front of a name.

[kevinmchugh]

It's probably the most common class of error for people who learn English as adults. There's lots of strange, hard to explain meaning encoded in which (if any) article a person chooses. "I dropped by the school today" and "I dropped by school today" are both valid and have slightly different implications

[volemo]

Series “Mind your language” is one big example (along with cheesy ‘70s humour).

[tacone]

Such as great classics like:

Let me go take a sheet.

I really like that beach.

[hex4def6]

But those are pronounced differently. Of course, English has its fair share; Their / They're / There, beach / beech, etc etc.

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.