It’s a terrible disorganised mess, it’s inconsistent, it makes very little objective sense, but for some reason we seem to have settled on it as the default.
It’s a terrible disorganised mess, it’s inconsistent, it makes very little objective sense, but for some reason we seem to have settled on it as the default.
I have been learning English for decades and I still suck at it.
It is as the OP says “a terrible disorganised mess, it’s inconsistent, it makes very little objective sense”
Not everyone has a knack for learning languages and it may vary depending on your native or other second languages you already know. But 1.5 billion people (the minority of them native speaker) manage it.
It does. But it don’t think it’s true for English or PHP.
Did you find English easy to learn? What is your native language?
Easy. Lithuanian.
Yes. German.
English and German are both Germanic languages, they have a lot of similarities making it easier for you to learn.
My native language is very different, I guess that makes it much harder for me to learn English. And the terrible disorganised mess doesn’t help.
I’m curious to know how you know that you suck at it?
There are so many different formal rules, informal rules, dialects, accents , slangs and cultures and subcultures and so on across the world both among native and non-native speakers that I don’t believe anyone can communicate flawlessly or even effectively in all of them.
I think the only way to assess competency would be to estimate the rate of misunderstanding in communication. Probably weighted in proportion to importance for survival. I’d guess that this is likely to be the case for most languages as they spread outside of any close-knit culture.
I think being widely used on the Internet makes any language suck; face-to-face is one of the best ways for speakers to understand the effectiveness of communication- and to learn and adapt to what works for that audience. Without that feedback loop, communication and improvement is probably much harder.
Human language just isn’t like computer languages as there is no underlying instruction set, no compiler, and no objective standard or measure of what does or doesn’t work.
TLDR; I think everyone sucks at English, but lots of people ‘get by’ which is ‘good enough’.
After decades I am still uncertain of some grammatical rules and word choices. I still struggle with spelling often, and once in a while I find a word that I have been pronouncing wrong my whole life.
Sometimes people correct me, sometimes I just realise my mistakes by observations. I definitely get by, but I wish I could be more fluent.
Get more contact with native speakers. No shade but half of them don’t even know the rules
I know how you feel, I also feel that. I am not always sure how to navigate cultural connotations of words, sometimes a native surprises me by using a phrase, that I have known before, in a way that I knew is the proper use but would have never come up with that myself. Yet, since I started spending more personal time with native speakers, I would often be asked to take a look at a draft of their message. Or they ask me how would I word something. Because “you are better with words” ¯\(ツ)/¯ The difference is, you and I pay attention to what/how we say it. Native speakers often just say it as it comes
Granted, as we already established, I am not a native speaker but by looking at your posts I would not say you are struggling with English
What’s your language?