If Not Read Blog, I Will Be Execute

Right. Not to have a bash at the British education system, but why do we know nothing about language? Not just languages like Mandarin Chinese or Arabic, just language in general. Take, oh I don’t know, English. I am utterly clueless about English. I’ve always had a vague idea somewhere in the back of my mind that, as languages go, it’s probably a hard one. But only now that I’m surrounded by people who have studied English for decades and still haven’t quite mastered it do I understand precisely how colossal a pain in the backside our language really is.

To show you what I mean, let’s take a quotation from Borat.

‘Please, you come see my film. If it not success, I will be execute.’

One of the key things that Borat’s appeal highlights is the trickiness of articles in English. Do you know why we say ‘it’s good furniture’ and not ‘it’s a good furniture?’ My guess is you probably don’t, unless you’re Harry Swanson, in which case, stop showing off. It’s because furniture can’t be counted individually. You can’t have ‘three furnitures’, so you have to use an ‘implied article’. If we were talking about a countable noun, though, like a film, then a non-English speaker would first have to ask themselves whether they were discussing a single film or multiple films. If they were talking about multiple ones, they could then safely use the definite article ‘the’. ‘The films will be reviewed by the court-martial tomorrow’. But if they were talking about a single one, they'd have to consider whether they had a specific film in mind, or whether they were talking about an unspecified film, or indeed films in general. In the former case, they would use ‘the’ (‘the film that I watched yesterday was utter rubbish’); in the latter, they would use ‘a’ or ‘an’ (‘do you want to watch a film tonight?’). Chuck in a ton of exceptions, the word ‘some’, and the fact most sports, languages, and nationalities don’t take articles, and you’ve got a system complicated enough to make anyone say ‘wa-wa-wee-wa’.

Secondly, pronouns. When Borat says ‘you come see my film’, he shouldn’t have said ‘you’. I suppose this is because he’s using an imperative, and they just shouldn’t be accompanied by pronouns. But as a matter of fact, pronouns in English are compulsory in almost all other cases. When you use a verb, you have to specify who is doing the action, because most conjugations of most verbs look exactly the same in English (I think, you think, we think, they think), and the pronoun is necessary to distinguish who is doing the thinking. So whereas in Russian you can either use pronouns or drop them if you’re feeling lazy, in English they’re a must. Unless you’re using imperatives. This is annoying, but not too unreasonable. What is unreasonable (considering the amount of flack that Russians get for their case system), is that our pronouns change according to what role they serve in the sentence. If I am the subject of the sentence, I am the subject pronoun ‘I’. If I am the object of a sentence, I am the object pronoun ‘me’. If the object of the sentence belongs to me, then I use the possessive pronoun ‘mine’. If I am both the subject and object of a sentence, then I become the reflexive pronoun ‘myself’. Yep. Pretty dire.

Borat attempts to say ‘come and see’. This isn’t actually a phrasal verb, it’s just a fixed term. But that’s as good a segue into discussing phrasal verbs as I’m gonna find in this blog, so I’ll take it. Phrasal verbs are probably the second hardest aspect of English for Russians to wrap their head around. Phrasal verbs are a combination of a verb and a preposition/adverb, which creates an entirely new term which often has absolutely nothing to do with its two components. ‘Back me up here’ comes from the phrasal verb ‘to back up’, or to support. Think about that for a moment. Back + up = support. ?!?!?!?!? Break + down = get upset. Look + after = take care of. Take + off = start flying. AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGHHHHHHHHH

I’m actually getting frustrated just writing this, so I’m going to wrap it up (wrap + up = conclude) with the ultimate challenge for Russians learning English: the system of tenses. Actually I should call that tense + aspect, because in English we don’t just differentiate between when events happen, we also think about whether the action in question is incomplete, complete, continuous, or a combination of those three states. What that means in practice is that, while in Mandarin Chinese there are no tenses, good old English has something like twelve or sixteen, depending on who you ask. Aygul is an English teacher, and she pointed out to me the difficulty of our system of tenses. She’s absolutely right, it’s bonkers. In my experience, Russians who study English often naturally default to the future progressive tense (‘I will be having a test tomorrow’), which is no wonder, because it’s so darn hard to construct that I’d expect them to want to get all the use out of it that they can. Anyway, all this to say that Borat’s failure to find the past participle of ‘to execute’ in the future perfect phrase ‘I will be executed’ is really very understandable.

But sorry, I just got super sidetracked. My point is, English is hard. We know intuitively what articles to use, but it isn’t intuitive, and most people have to refer to a massive mental flowchart before they come out with the word ‘a’. BUT in Russia, people have a very good understanding not only of how English works, but also of how Russian works. When I make a mistake with case endings, the person I’m talking to will invariably smile and go ‘ah, irregular dative plural caught you out there LOL’. Can you imagine that? Russians are taught Russian at school. They have entire lessons dedicated to the pronunciation of certain really hard sounds (like ы, which sounds like the sort of sound a Minion might make if you fired a cannonball at its stomach). They have lessons on their entire grammar, not just the silly fiddly things like ‘less’ and ‘fewer’. One of the effects that this has is to make Russians much, much more tolerant of people utterly slaughtering their language (@me), because they appreciate just how hard it is! Another effect is that it makes them better equipped to learn other languages. Compare that to us. Did you even know we had a case system before you read this? I only worked it out after I started studying languages at university! And here’s a case in point (if you'll pardon the pun)… a targeted ad which I got from Facebook. Admittedly, one of the mistakes is more a problem of geography than grammar…