Using English correctly requires a massive amount of knowledge
antimoon.com
antimoon.com
To communicate efficiently and effectively in English either verbally or in writing requires not only considerable knowledge but also skill and practice. It can take years for a native speaker to acquire good idiomatic English and I feel envious of people who can get up on a podium and speak fluently without notes and be clearly understood by an audience.
It's often noted that those who acquire great skills in English not only have the knowledge, skills and ability to apply themselves to the task but also they have, per se, an innate ability for languages that's over that of most people. This came to my attention years ago when I attended a lecture by Noam Chomsky when he bemoaned the fact that some of his colleagues could acquire languages easier than he could. He said with words to the effect 'a new language can waft down the corridors of MIT and just pass me by only to be quickly absorbed by colleagues'.
Acquiring and using English correctly is no doubt considerably more difficult than some other languages but what Chomsky's comment emphasizes is that being truly proficient in any language can be difficult and challenging. It's just that some of us are better equipped for the task than are most of us.
I guess it is all part of being a native speaker of a widely spread language and the evolution of language. I am curious to see where it takes us.
I've also tried Michel Thomas's Spanish audio approach that takes a rules-based approach, by explicitly teaching word order and grammatical concepts largely with English, in a way that explains "rules" comparably to the submitted article. I found the course helpful, but I believe that there definitely too many edge cases in language learning for an explicit approach to reasonably cover all the nuances of language learning.
You've made a great point that it's often easier and more useful to learn about the nuances of language learning through implicitly picking up patterns of speech through conversation and immersion (I also think lots of reading can be helpful), versus memorizing lots of rules and their exceptions.
I thought the author made an interesting illustration, though, of how there is a lot of nuance with natural-sounding expression that might be missed from formal instruction. Immersion can be a great approach to solve this problem—even if a student can't move to a location where it's the majority language, experiencing a great deal of content for native speakers can help one implicitly pick up on natural-sounding patterns of communication.
>I thought the author made an interesting illustration, though, of how there is a lot of nuance with natural-sounding expression that might be missed from formal instruction.
This is where I thought they failed, random selection from their offerings "What size is it? BUT NOT What weight is it?" Weight in that example may not be "proper" but is highly figurative and this example ignores that, to bear the weight of the world on your shoulders does not mean to heft 5.972×10^24 kg and this is a false equivalence between size and weight. In the authors native Polish this may be more sensible but it will not work for all ESLs. Not the best example but I picked at random, most of his examples fall into this trap. "What weight is it" can absolutely be used effectively and properly but weight and size have no real correlation because English also has density, "What weight is it" is considerably more dense than "What size is it" but both could be completely nonsensical in context.
But again, does it even matter? I think the figurative language of the Romantics and Modernists is on the way out, Realism and Naturalism is coming back and they are going to be considerably more blunt/direct than they ever were. The younger generations seem to have no care for the old style figurative language, even their sarcasm and irony is more blunt and they seem far more interested in reading genre fiction. The next big thing in literature is going to have to balance the simplicity and directness of genre with the weight of the Modernists and I think it is going to happen. Lately we have hearing a great deal about the supposed affirmative action/reverse sexism/racisim aka wokeness of the publishing industry but I think this is mostly that women and minorities have the most interest in proving themselves by the old standards and that implied majority is just going through the motions at this point. The new movement is always pioneered by the minority and currently the literary and social minorities are aligning, it is not just the avant garde this time.
I am amazed at how much usage has changed within my 42 years which demonstrates one of my biggest issues with anitmoon, he made usage out to be a rule, usage and definition are the most fluid things in language. I doubt any of this matters for all the reasons I have given, but I find it very interesting.
When yelling "No! No! No!" you have to do it odd number of times, otherwise people think it is "Yes!"