Language Logic

I know a man who has one friend.

Does he honestly just have one friend, or does he have a friend? Maybe he really does have one friend (which would make him one/a lonely man). The misuse of a, an, the or one are pandemic among students, resulting in unfortunate shifts in meaning. Even more, if we want to talk about the man (that we just mentioned) a second time, we must specify by using the to point him out.

Prepositions are also complicated, as well as using count and noncount nouns. For example:

I brush my hair, not my hairs. I always enjoy milk in my coffee, not a milk, along with some sugar, not many sugars. My house has a couch, not just couch, and even more, that man up there - he doesn’t have friend, he has a friend (and maybe just one friend).

I hadn’t known those terms before I began teaching. Little do you know, but I just used the past perfect tense (had + past participle) which consistently blows students’ minds. I had eaten breakfast this morning and then I had gone to the train. Now, in that sentence the tense is misused, for we can only use it before another action that happened in the past. It’s more complicated than you had thought (right?). Perhaps it was more complicated than you had thought before you realized it was complicated. But more likely you just hadn’t thought it was as complicated as it is.

Often I find mistakes such as:

She have a sex mouth.
I am boring in class.
You went to the movies, weren’t you?
After Boston I come back to my country.
I am living in the Boston.

Have you ever thought about how “everyone” is considered singular? Or, why can we say “I go home” but can’t say “I go school”? How do we automatically know the difference between “it could be”, “it might be”, “it should be” and “it has to be”? How do we immediately know that “I considered to go” is wrong and that “I considered going” correct?

We also know that “read” in the past is pronounced like the color, yet “read” in the present is pronounced like the plant. We know that we ARE 26 years old, we don’t HAVE 26 years old. And even more astonishing, we can state perfectly that we are interested in, excited for, and are thinking about. We can recollect that we went to bed at 11, we didn’t necessarily sleep at 11. Moreover, we know that we can break up with a boyfriend, break out in a rash, break in new shoes, and even take a break when we’re tired. We also know that we’re tired, not tiring.

Modals, gerunds, infinitives, and the future perfect were all terms that I had no knowledge of before teaching grammar. But now I can confidently spew out all sorts of grammatical terms that would make any English speaker zone out. It’s like learning the inner workings of the human body, a car, or even mother nature.

But the major problem is that language is only mostly consistent. Students desperately desire to label grammar rules with “always” or “never”, but there are always exceptions and always things that they will never be able to express from their own language.

“We just don’t say it that way in English.”

That is all I can offer them, for any language must be learned purely as is. Constant translation only leads to frustration, as one tries with all their might to punch that language into the way they are most comfortable thinking. This is why children are the language prodigies. Their minds are so eager to absorb everything around them, the wires in their brains still malleable.

Each language is so closely tied to its culture and the unique way that each society thinks about things. English pops with so many different kinds of words that capture the tiniest contours and shifts in meaning. I could say that I am happy, or I could say that I am elated, excited, content, well-pleased, joyful, merry, cheerful or satisfied. Each would connote a different meaning and require an appropriate tone or context. Why do we have so many slightly different words for things? And as people have often noted, why only one word for love?

But even more than this, some things, in some ways, can often be more appreciated when taken as is. Rather than try to translate people or events into our own language of how we view life, and what they ought to mean, it is more meaningful to open the mind to possibility. Not flippantly, but in a way that helps release a creeping anxiety about the direction of our lives and the illusion of control. Sometimes life works differently than our limited understanding of it.

Yet, it’s difficult to be open when you believe that if you could figure out the rules, then things would click. In some ways, the rationalizing just needs to be turned down a bit.

An end. One end.
The end.