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by vintermann 909 days ago
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.