Week 4- English as a Learned Language

These readings remind me how incredibly un-intuitive, rigid, and arbitrary the English language. The clearly patterned systems of suffixes for marking person and tense conjugations in Spanish wow me with their parsimony. The tiny bits of Chinese I've learned through language-learning apps and my Uncle Ricky's wife from China, Yuhong, as well as from their tiny yet fluently bilingual children, also awes me. The syntactical flexibility of Mandarin and proliferation of adjectival markers for classes of things makes vocabulary and tonal pronunciation key rather the transformation and relative placement of words. I could master that! It's more muscle memory than procedural piecing together of sentences.  The cause of some English confusion creeps in from the other language I'm most familiar with that lends so much to English, French. It follows similar patterns to its sister Romance language Spanish-- except pronunciation of many of the suffixes is not distinct! How does anyone internalize conjugations if they can't hear them? So I'll crossly blame the French and their ancestral invading Normans for English's grammatical idiosyncrasies.

Working with native Chinese speakers in the past, I've noticed most consistent transfer differences with induction and article usage. The article problem is common to most English Language Learners I've worked with and I struggle with it myself when speaking and writing Spanish. What are the rules? Regarding induction in discourse, I also noticed many first year native English speakers do this, especially more creative folks. They like to keep the reader in suspense. Why give away the point of the argument up front? As a fiction writer, I sympathize with this. It's a form of hook.