August 2007

[This month's article may be the first in a series dealing with the peculiarities of the English language – those characteristics that make English especially complex while at the same time making it very rich.]

Whenever I work with students for whom English is a second language (ESL), I become aware of how much native speakers take for granted. We native speakers may recognize some idiosyncrasies of our language (weird spelling, for instance), but we remain blissfully unaware of other peculiarities. Having grown up with the language, we take these peculiarities for granted. I, too, had little idea of how difficult English can be for non-native speakers until I had to explain it to some of them – either students in my English Composition class (which is not, by the way, an ESL class but often includes some second-language students) or people who ask questions on the ESL board on this and other websites.

I've been thrust into or have put myself in these situations without any formal training in teaching ESL. I've learned as much as, maybe more than, my students about English as a result of these experiences. One main concept I've acquired is that explaining English to an ESL learner is extremely complicated. With all due respect to teachers of ESL who themselves have learned English as a second language, I believe that those best able to teach non-native speakers are native speakers with a very high levels of fluency in and understanding of English. I'm not saying that non-native speakers cannot teach other non-native speakers, but it's logical to suggest that an explanation that baffles a native speaker will be even more elusive for a non-native speaker. Be that as it may, I believe that English is more complex, and perhaps more subtle, than most other languages.

Unfortunately, my knowledge of other languages is limited, so I have no way of telling how difficult English is to learn in comparison to other languages. I'm aware that some practices are simpler in English than they are in other languages. For example, English articles (the, a / an) are not inflected (don't change their forms) with the gender and case of nouns because our nouns don't have grammatical gender and don't change their forms except in the possessive case. On the other hand, the way we use these articles – when a or an is appropriate, when the is appropriate, and when we use no article at all – is one of many complexities that give non-native speakers no end of trouble. Yet those of us who grow up with the language instinctively use a and the correctly, even though a few of us never get straight about when to use an.

For non-native speakers, the difficulty with the use of a and the, as with many of the problems they have in learning English, is that usage is context-dependent. There's an appropriate context for "the men," another context for "a man," and yet another context for "men" or "man" without the article – and which we use subtly alters the meaning. This context-dependency creates, I suppose, the lion's share of the problems that non-native speakers have with English once they get beyond the fundamentals.

For purposes of the following discussion, I shall refer to all usage that depends on context as "idiomatic usage," even though that is not what we usually mean by the word idiomatic. Technically, an idiom is "a speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meaning of its elements" (American Heritage Dictionary, 2000 edition). Thus, for example, "to keep tabs on" something is an idiom. However, here I shall use the phrase "idiomatic usage" to apply to anything where meaning and use are dependent on context.

One set of common English words that are intensely idiomatic are the prepositions. It is not surprising that non-native speakers are often at a loss to determine what preposition to use in a given context, whereas native speakers have little difficulty. We understand that each preposition has multiple meanings, and we develop a sense of what each one means in context. By itself, the word in probably evokes an image of location or containment, but this preposition is not always so used. The word has different meanings in in a minute, paid in cash, written in ink, falling in love, and one in ten, to name a few examples. The distinctions are as hard for a native speaker to explain as they must be for a non-native speaker to understand, but we native speakers are somehow conditioned to know what all these phrases mean.

Another challenge for the ESL learner is mastery of English verbs. Verb tense is not the only hurdle, but it can be difficult, especially when English has such practices as using the present tense to denote future action: "I am going to the city tomorrow" (present progressive in form, yet future in meaning). The auxiliary verbs (could, would, might, should, etc.) can be confusing, though, here again, native speakers take the meanings for granted and easily recognize distinctions among, "I can do it," "I could do it," "I will do it," "I would do it," and so on.

What must be terribly baffling to ESL students regarding English verbs are the less-than-literal-meanings that some verbs have. It's easy enough to learn that the verb take has to do with carrying something or grasping something with one's hands, but then how does one explain "to take a photograph," "to take a look at something," "to take a college course," or "to take a shower"? We know what the verbs cut and crack mean, but how does one explain to a non-native speaker what "cutting class" or "cracking a joke" have to do with cutting and cracking?

These are only a few examples in a few fairly obvious areas of ways that English is complex and subtle. Those of us who study the language – and especially, perhaps, those who are required to explain it to non-native speakers – soon become aware that these constitute only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It is worth noting, however, that this kind of subtlety and complexity is what makes the English language as rich as it is.

FOOTNOTE: Difficulties with English may derive, in part, from the sheer size of the language, although nobody knows for certain how many words Engkish contains. Estimates vary widely, partly because the word count will be much higher if we consider all the technical words that the language contains. Even if we count only common words, however, English probably has more words than any other language. To complicate matters, it has borrowed extensively from other languages. Our guess, though, is that the complications are rooted more in the multiplicity of meanings that the same word can have than in the number of words.