The Crazy English Language
Ok so native English speakers must be thinking — ‘come on, English isn’t that hard to learn, it’s one of the most commonly spoken languages!’
Foreign people seem to be adopting it as their second language and can speak it a lot more fluently than us Brits can speak other languages
At first glance it may not seem as daunting as Mandarin or Greek for example, which have completely different, alien-like alphabets.
Well, English is a lot harder to learn than you think
Richard Lederer highlights the many linguistic anomalies of the ‘Crazy English’ language in these hilarious examples that just don’t add up.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger
And there are no pines nor apples in pineapple
Writers write but fingers don’t fing
One goose, 2 geese so one moose, 2 meese?
If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn’t the plural of booth beeth?
How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same thing?
If teachers taught why didn’t preachers praught?
Why do we have noses that run but have feet that smell?
Put yourself in the shoes of a non-English native whilst reading the following idioms. Do they make sense? Do they have any literal meaning or are they just nonsense phrases?
A party pooper: someone who prevents others from having fun
The world is your oyster: you have the ability and freedom to do exactly what you want
Chip off the old block: a person who closely resembles a parent
To be the bee’s knees: to be cool
To have your cake and eat it too: to have something in your possession and exploit it
To hit the sack: to go to bed
To let the cat out of the bag: to reveal a secret or a surprise by accident
Straight from the horse’s mouth: information from an authoritive or dependable source
So we have to give a big pat on the back to those people who are brave enough to learn our language. They clearly deserve more credit than they get! Especially when we go on holiday to foreign countries and expect everyone to speak in our mother tongue, you know you are guilty of it!
So if foreign people can remember all these funny idioms and contradictions in our seriously complex language then they can achieve almost anything!
Image copyright: Fotolia
