A Blonde's Perspective - Glad I don't need to learn English again

By Jan Stadtherr

I’m very thankful that I don’t have to learn English again! When my husband and I took a river cruise a few years ago, we visited the countries of the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Hungary. I was amazed how many of the citizens of these countries spoke English fairly well. There were many sighs of relief when we were able to converse with them as we didn’t know their languages. But they know ours, at least to a point that we could converse.

There are over 7,160 languages in the world with English topping the list as the universal language. According to Ethnologue, a company that serves as a resource for research and analysis of languages, the most native language spoken is Mandarin Chinese followed by Spanish, English, Hindi, Bengali and Portuguese. I’ve always thought that English would be one of the difficult languages to learn; however, the most difficult is Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Hungarian, and Finnish. I am of Finnish descent, and only know how to count to nineteen and a few phrases (including some bad words) that my parents and grandparents used.

So, let’s open our English text book shall we, and review some of what we have used during our lifetime. Let’s start with homonyms. In English, we have words like “flower” and “flour.” If I’m baking a cake, the last thing I want to be doing is searching my garden for a flower to sprinkle on top.

Then we have those delightful little words called “homographs.” They are fancy words for words that are spelled the same but have different meanings. “Lead,” for instance. Are we talking about the metal, or are we leading a parade? “I can’t wait to lead the parade!” Oh, wait, no—I meant, “I can’t wait to lead my metal detector to find some lead!”

And how could we forget about the notoriously tricky grammar rules? I mean, is it “who” or “whom”? “Lay” or “lie”? It’s like a game where the rules keep changing halfway. I can picture a classroom of eager students, their heads spinning like their English teacher’s, trying to remember when to use “their,” “there,” or “they’re.” It must feel like an Olympic event. And here we are—gratefully retired from the race with a gold medal.

Let’s not even get started on those pesky irregular verbs! Just when you think you knew the past tense of “go”—it’s “went”! Trying to teach that to newcomers would be like teaching a cat to fetch. Imagine a student raising their hand, “Excuse me, can you explain why ‘go’ becomes ‘went’?”

And rules? English has so many exceptions to the rules, it ought to win some sort of prize for being the most confusing language. Remember the infamous “i before e except after c”? Oh please! What about “weird”? Or “seize”? 

Finally, let’s talk about idioms. Nothing is more fun than using phrases that make absolutely no sense! Idiots, I mean idioms, are phrases with figurative meanings, like “it’s raining cats and dogs” (raining heavily) or “break a leg” (good luck), “piece of cake” (easy), “hit the nail on the head” (exactly right), “once in a blue moon” (rarely), or “bite off more than you can chew” (take on too much) but don’t choke!

So, my fellow seniors, I’m going to seize the moment and put this column to bed. We can sit back, chuckle, and embrace our knowledge with open arms. Here’s to enjoying the confusion of English and relieved we don’t have to learn it again! Cheers to us!