The unwritten rules of English: what only a native knows

[bitheerani319]

Often when we learn English we feel that its rules are completely nonsensical. If you ask a native speaker, they won't be able to explain many of these rules to you, even though they use them perfectly and can only tell you that it sounds right. It turns out that native speakers use many rules without knowing why, while we have to study hard to learn them. Do you want to know some of them?




The order of adjectives
One of the differences between English and Spanish grammar is that lithuania phone number list are placed before nouns. This does not present a great difficulty, in principle, but when we have many adjectives the order becomes more complicated. Well, the order in which adjectives must be placed is the following:

General opinion – Size – Age – Shape – Color – Origin – Material – Purpose – Noun

Any native will be able to tell you without hesitation:

A beautiful little brand-new extra-flat silver Japanese aluminum work laptop

But he will be unable to explain to you how it turned out.

There is no good reason for this order, otherwise it would simply sound bad.



Ablaut Reduplication Law
In English linguistics, ablaut reduplication refers to the repetition of a word with a changed consonant (e.g. nitty-gritty ) or a changed vowel ( hip-hop, flip-flop ). If there are three words, this rule tells us that they must be in the order IAO, for example, ding-dang-dong. If there are only two words, the first must be I and the second A or O, which is why we say ping-pong and tic-tac and not dong-ding or tac-tic. Linguists still debate the reason for this rule today, but the reality is that any native speaker will confirm that not following it is jarring.



Verb tenses
It's funny to think that in English, even though its verbs are hardly conjugated, it has around 20 tenses that natives use without the slightest effort, even without knowing their names. Stop and think for a moment, the first thing we learn in English is the present simple , only to discover after a while that it is not normally used for things that are happening in the present. What madness is this? If you say, for example, I sleep very deeply , it doesn't mean that we are sleeping at this very moment, right? To say what we are doing at this very moment, we use the Present progressive: I'm having dinner right now . And this is without taking into account the exceptions...