Irregular English

Reflecting on the fact that the plural of "mouse" is "mice," while the plural of "house" is "houses."  Learning English as a second language must be absolutely infuriating.  So very many exceptions to memorize.  

I studied Mandarin Chinese in grades 7-12.   The first few months were an uphill battle of learning how to use tones in speaking and read an alphabetless language, but after that it wasn't really all that difficult.  It is an old language, so old that it is grammatically simple.  No genders, no tenses, no endings.  It has rules and observes them. 

The university I subsequently attended had only a rudimentary Mandarin program at the time.  Since I had a language requirement to fulfill and did not want to repeat basic Mandarin, I chose to take German instead.  And does it ever have RULES.  Holy cow.  Endings and cases and genders and tenses and I don't even remember what all else.  By virtue of my wandering childhood, I somehow managed to miss out on grammar lessons in English, so most of the grammar I do know came courtesy of my foreign language classes.  And I learned a hell of a lot of that in German.  I actually understood German quite well by the time I was done, but was far too afraid of banging up the grammar to speak it much.

Listening to two small children talking yesterday started this train of thought.  Children who are learning to speak understandably make grammatical errors, in any language.  English-speaking children have the additional hurdle of all the illogical exceptions to master as well.  But fortunately for them, they lack the self-consciousness of the adult who is acutely aware of all the lurking grammatical minefields.

No wonder kids pick up languages faster.