One of the things that I do in my retirement is to take some online learning from Great Courses. Two of my favorite courses so far have both been about languages. One was about the development of languages while the other was about language usage with an emphasis on usage of English.
I’m a classic mono-lingual American. On the one hand, that’s a classic sign of the arrogance of being American. I’ve traveled many times to Europe, Asia, Central America, and the South Pacific, and I’ve been able to get along just fine with my miserable one little language.
On the other hand, it actually does kind of make sense that most Americans only speak one language. I live in Seattle. I live about twelve hundred miles from Mexico. I live about twenty-five hundred miles from Quebec. Based in Seattle, I could easily live my entire life and travel a pretty vast range and never need to go anywhere where the default language isn’t English. Considering that, it’s not that strange that American education doesn’t really prioritize other languages.
Over the years, I’ve tried several times to pick up Spanish or French. On the surface, it seems kind of easy. After all, children seem to have no problem learning it. I’m smarter than a two year old, right?
Most people think that it’s an exercise in memorization. Book in Spanish is Libro and in French is Livre. Just sit down and memorize a bunch of lists. How hard can it be?
Of course, it’s way more than that. Vocabulary is the easy part. There are syntax and semantics. There are dialects, creoles, and pidgin. There are what’s written down and what’s spoken. There are all of the rules. There are all of the exception to the rules.
Maybe you’re still thinking that, even so, it’s really not that hard. Maybe you’re one of those people that gets annoyed when you’re speaking to someone and you have trouble understanding them. They came to this country. Why can’t they flawlessly speak the language?
Let me give you two examples. Both are from the language usage course.
You go to the grocery story. You see an aisle full of canned products. You pick a can of corn. You pick a can of beans.
Wait! Why don’t you pick a can of corns? Or why don’t you pick a can of bean? After all, beans and corn seem to be pretty similar things.
Well, it turns out that there are two kinds of nouns. There are mass nouns and there are counting nouns. Mass nouns are associated with concepts like liquid, powders, and grains. Mass nouns are considered undifferentiated units, so are not pluralized. Therefore, since corn is a grain, it is a mass noun. Beans, even though they are a seed, are not considered to be a grain, so therefore the noun bean is considered to be a counting noun, so it’s pluralized.
I don’t know about you, but I sure don’t remember any discussion about mass nouns and counting nouns when I was being taught English in school. How did I learn this? To me, a can of corn and a can of beans are totally obvious things to say.
The second example is the word up. Everyone knows what up means, right? It’s a direction. You can’t see me, but I’m pointing to the ceiling right now. It’s as simple as can be.
Now, I’m going to fry up some eggs. I’m going to clean up my room. What does up mean in this context? Am I going to throw my fried eggs up into the air? Am I going to throw my vacuum cleaner up into the air?
No, it’s not an idiom or some weird folk saying. It’s actually a grammatical rule. In English, there are markers that can be attached to a verb. Up, in this context, marks that the verb will be completed. Notice that this is different than past tense. Here, I’m saying that I will complete the action of frying some eggs and complete the action of cleaning my room.
I have used the word up in this context many times. I’ve heard it used in this context many times. Never have I been confused in its usage. However, I’d never heard of the term completion marker before I listened to this lecture. Where / how did I learn this? By osmosis? By repeatedly being corrected until it got hammered into my head? Most likely, I learned it very early when my child’s mind was uniquely receptive to learning language.
These are just two examples. There are many, many more subtleties to English that I just blithely use on a daily basis without being aware of its byzantine complexities.
At my age, it’s going to be pretty much impossible to learn a new language with any facility at all. I guess that I have to learn to live with that.
I also need to be sure to be empathetic to those around me that learned / are learning English as adults. What they’re attempting to do is fiendishly difficult and I should recognize their valiant attempts.
dorkenstein 