[AngryData]

I don't know if I would agree that how we teach it now is really the best way, but I overall agree with you that in order to really learn english you need an extremely wide and varied exposure to english in order to learn all the "rule breaking" and make english across the world and through time intelligible.

[ryao]

People can learn this outside of school. People who learn English as a second language do. Forcing it on me as a child meant that I did not learn English properly, until well into my adulthood. I am a native speaker in my 30s and I am still finding faults in my English education that need correction. One of the most recent ones I have found is using “pet” as a past tense. The correct past tense is “petted”. If school had properly taught English without forcing me to read incorrectly written literature that confused me, I would not have been saying this wrongly for decades. Another issue in my English that I found in recent years was use of the word “wrong” where I should use “wrongly”. Adjectives are not adverbs. :/

[kccqzy]

Well colloquially "pet" itself is a past tense. Depends on the register of the language. And "wrong" is also an adverb. It would help if the educators explain when to use "wrong" vs "wrongly" vs "wrongfully" since all could be adverbs; or you could read enough to figure out the subtle differences.

[ryao]

I had recently looked up “wrong” to check out of curiosity, and DuckDuckGo only said it was an adjective, so I had stopped using it as an adverb. It turns out that the dictionary states it is an adverb, but you need to click to go to an actual dictionary to see that since the definition given by DuckDuckGo is only a partial definition. Thanks for making me double check.

That said, I read dozens of English books per year. I am well past the point of diminishing returns for benefits from more reading in English. Reading more books only increases my reading speed , which I have noticed is now 2 to 4 times faster than others around me.