Welcome

Welcome all to my Genius Hour Blog.

I have never done one of these before so I invite you to join me on this adventure! Back in 2014 I met a wonderful Brazilian girl. It was the typical story. Boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy follows girl back to her country... boy needs money to live.

My dream had always been to teach and I had been planning to head out of country to teach English. Having a fiancé from another country was convenient for my plans. I set about securing a job in Brazil teaching English and learned Portuguese at the same time. It was during this time that I really became interested in languages. As a Canadian from Ontario I was required to study French from kindergarten to grade 9 but at those ages I wasn’t really interested. I wish I had been. Teaching English and learning a second language, I really started to notice that were things I could do with Portuguese that I couldn’t do with English and vice versa.

I learned so much and thought so much about English in my three years of teaching it. You don’t often think about you first language, you typically just use it. It was a challenge when a student would ask me about irregularities in English. Like “why is the plural of plant, plants but the plural of fungus is fungi?” or “Why are there one dog, two dogs, but one moose, two moose?” English is so full of irregularities and inconsistencies that make it incredibly difficult to learn. Portuguese may have a lot to remember to use it but at least it is all structured. English by contrast seems to be like a house built by a half dozen different engineers and contractors that could agree on anything and just did their own thing. Its haphazard and seems to be rather unwieldly from a learners standpoint.

For many years have have wondered, “why is English so full of the irregularities and inconsistencies that make it so hard to learn?” and “would knowing about these help teachers teach and learners learn?” these are questions that I would like to answer. I will start with the first one for now:

Why is English so full of the irregularities and inconsistencies that make it so hard to teach and learn?

I will start by breaking the problem down into smaller questions. Where did modern English come from? What influenced it? What forced the changes? How is English different from other languages? What can you do with it? What can’t you do with it?

At the end of all of this I would like to identify what it is about English that makes it so hard to learn and maybe help ESL teachers around the world to better understand what it is they are teaching. Perhaps if students understand the development of the language, it can help them to understand how to use it more efficiently and fluently.