Subtitle: English is not a language, it's an opinion.
In the last year of primary school, British 11-year-old children still do not master the written language. They still need to practice with words slightly more complicated (such as 'suspicious', 'allotment') and have enormous insecurities about tenses, syntax etc.
This does not happen because they are dumb or teaching is poor, but because:
1) They are not interested about teaching these things at school;
2) In fact English is the most complicated language in the world, in comparison Linear B is bullshit.
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It takes some experience. It is a bit like the cute sentences of appreciation of your work (see the Anomaly of passive-aggressive emails).
The grammar is basic, ridiculously simple. There are irregular verbs, but only a handful and you can learn them in few days; verbs are not conjugate, words are not conjugate, there is an article that applies to everything and everyone. Easy.
Faced with this, the average Mediterranean is optimistic.
He buys 'English Grammar in Use', studies it, and he doesn’t think that something can go wrong.
On the last page, he thinks he knows English.
AH! AH! AH! AH! Poor idiot.
He doesn't know. He's naive.
WE are naïve, we don’t understand. We speak moribund languages that derive from dead languages. Static for millennia. We speak little more (or less) than Latin ...
THEY speak a living, basic, nomadic language. Constantly changing, adopted by people, reworked, chewed, spat out differently from what it was before...
I'm talking about an abysmal diversity, which affects the psyche, devastates our dogmas. It is worse than meal times (See The multifaceted anomaly of food. Part 1).
You can't find the rules of English anywhere.
You have to let yourself go and enter a new linguistic world; you need to be open to English, otherwise you won't learn it.
If you think you can translate word by word from your language into English (as I do)... forget it, take the first flight to Italy and give up because you can't do it.
You need to abdicate to English. You need to submit.
After all: "different country different habits".
Sure.
But even in this case the anomaly is overbearing.
The living language is fine, but it is not normal that practically nobody knows it.
Even people with a medium to high level of education make a lot of mistakes. Spelling, grammar, everything. It is only us Italians who say: ‘whom, whose, I wish I were’, because we learned it on English Grammar in Use.
They don't care much.
The other day I received a text message from a neighbour: "I hope you are well?".
We are friends and so when I saw her I asked her: "Sorry, dear, but why did you put that question mark? It's a statement, damn it, you're not asking me if I'm okay, you're hoping for it! ".
She couldn't answer me, and rightly doesn't give a damn. He looked at me as if to say: if that's okay with it, otherwise go to hell.
But the teacher put us in the corner if we spelled incorrectly a word, we are people who spend their afternoons on Facebook insulting those who misuse the "Rather than" in Italian. We went to classical high school and learned ancient Greek which has the DUAL to express the concept of 1 +1 = 1, the unit formed by two parts ... how can we understand all this grammatical approximation?
We feel displaced, without certainties.
The pronunciation, then, makes us crazy.
We don't learn it. We pronounce wrongly almost all the words. Italian reads 'stopped' and pronounces STOPPED, every single letter well marked. Spaniard can't do it with yes (JIES), year (JIAR) ...
All true. But even if you pronounce ALMOST well, it doesn't matter, they don't understand you. They will ask you “Sorry? Say it again? "
Children will look at you with that face mixed with contempt and disinterest.
Once I wanted a taxi in Castle street and I had to repeat Castle at least 20 times.
CASSL. CASTL, CASS. In the end I went on foot.
We get nervous because we think that even if it's mispronounced, it's impossible not to understand us.
If a tourist comes to me in Cuneo (there have never been tourists in Cuneo, but let's pretend) and asks me: "where is via RAMA"? I tell him "Via ROMA is there".
I understand, I adapt quickly to the situation.
THEY don't.
So in practice, to be sure to pronounce them correctly, you need to memorize thousands of words, indeed you have to memorize the pronunciation of EVERY SINGLE word since there is no rule, there is no commonality, there is no why.
Queue… for example. Probably the most difficult English word.
They queue.
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