THE F WORD.

It is often said that the learning English is one of the hardest languages to learn and if English language isn’t your first language, I am sure you would totally agree.

What is it about English that has brought about this reputation for being so difficult and may one ask; is it really so difficult when so many other countries use it as a second language?

As a native English speaker myself and a Northerner to boot I can’t see why it’s such a problem. You just ‘speak it’, you don’t really think about the illogical side of the language. Mind you, saying that, England has so many accents and dialects within its own boundaries you have to wonder sometimes if it is actually English that is being spoken at all.  Sometimes we can’t even understand each other!  (I say that from experience as ‘him indoors’ and I were brought up from the ‘other side of the Pennines’ to each other and we sometimes still struggle to understand each other 30 years on).

It’s an odd language and unless it’s something you are raised on; it really is hard to get. It has rules but those rules are broken to suit the tense of the sentence, the meaning of the sentence or simply ‘just because’. The biggest example of this is the little rhyme that is drummed into us from pre-school days: I before E except after C.  We have all learned it and can now spell believe and chief and field but what about receive, eight, neighbour? How do explain the foibles of this language…………just because…..?

Then there is the word order in the sentence. Native English speakers automatically know in which order the words of the sentence should be used but to try and teach that and the little subtleties isn’t as easy as one would think. Whilst the sentence could be grammatically correct, the subtlety could be that it ‘just doesn’t look or sound right’!

And don’t get me started with idioms: “Barking up the wrong tree”, “the straw that broke the camel’s back”, “raining cats and dogs” and “let sleeping dogs lie”. If you haven’t grown up with these phrases, what chance have you got of making sense of them?

English is a very old language, and over the course of many generations, words have been modified, been dropped, new ones added and some only understood by the area they are spoken in but I have to say, there is one word that is now in the dictionary that the whole world seems to understand, no matter their first language.

The “F” word.

WTF??….. in English……”Why is that?”

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