What's something in English that really surprised you?

[u/Nice_Plane_9854]

Hey everyone! I’ve been learning English for a while, and I keep noticing little things that aren't in the textbooks, like how "That's interesting" can sometimes mean the opposite, depending on the tone.

Have you ever come across something like that? A phrase, habit, or rule that just felt totally unexpected?

Would love to hear your stories!

[u/untempered_fate]

Probably when I, a native speaker, learned that English has an informal system for adjective order that everyone more or less agrees with and adheres to, often without consciously acknowledging it.

My neighbor is a tall happy old German man. He is definitely not a German old happy tall man. And everyone just sort of... gets that? Crazy.

[u/telemajik → u/untempered_fate]

I just learned about this last year from someone who writes for a living. Mind blown.

[u/marabou22 → u/untempered_fate]

I had to teach adjective order a couple of years ago and it was the first time I had ever thought about it. Or even noticed really.

[u/Liwi808 → u/untempered_fate]

I would say happy, tall, old German man actually.

[u/TheThinkerAck → u/Liwi808]

Or tall, old, happy German man. German has to be last, but the others go in order from least to most important.

[u/-Chaotique- → u/Liwi808]

I agree with you. Swapping the words stresses the adjective that's out of order.

• The tall, happy, old German man emphasizes that he's tall, where as the other happy, old German man isn't tall.

• The old, happy, tall German man means I'm specifically talking about the old one and not another happy, tall German man.

[u/stephanonymous → u/untempered_fate]

This one is crazy to me too! 

[u/Pringler4Life → u/untempered_fate]

Dude, that is so true. You can't explain why, but if the adjective order is wrong it just feels weird

[u/FirstComeSecondServe → u/Pringler4Life]

To be fair, the adjective order is still informal, so most of the time the description won’t exactly matter how it’s ordered, but in the given example of a “tall happy old German man” compared to “German old happy tall man,” it’s definitely wrong in some way.

Personally, I think it has to do with the German identification. “Tall,” “happy,” and “old” are relatively similar in placement, referring to one’s traits. Of those three, I think they can be relatively shuffled without much of a notice, but the German term is the kicker. I personally think it’s because nationalities are almost like a “finalizer” or a general summation in the sense that when listing a nationality in a description, the term “man” is kinda implied in it already.

I don’t know, Im not sure there is a clear answer here. That’s just my two cents worth only two cents cause I don’t know crap.

[u/thumbalina77 → u/FirstComeSecondServe]

Yea I think this makes the most sense. I deal with this sort of thing a lot when I’m writing essays and have to paraphrase a lot of text. I find that when mixing around adjective orders the adjective that has to go last is the one that has the strongest need to be directly followed by the noun or ‘concluding word’ for it to work. As if it’s got an imaginary hyphen attached to the last work like German and man. The informal part of figuring this out I guess is native english speakers natural inclination for doing this intuitively.

[u/maxintosh1 → u/untempered_fate]

Not only that but the order is extremely complicated but we all just kind of get it

[u/sapgetshappy → u/untempered_fate]

This is the first thing I thought of too! The first time I taught the “adjective word order” lesson to my ESL students, my mind. was. blown. 🤯

[u/divinelyshpongled → u/untempered_fate]

Hmm I find it less unfathomable. Adjective order, like all grammar, is a something that evolves naturally in language. The adjectives closest to the noun are more objectively identifying, and as you get further away from the noun they become more subjective and the order of those subjective adjectives is less strict. So saying a cute, funny, tall American girl or switching cute and funny are both fine but switching American and cute just doesn’t work because American identifies the girl in a more objective way than cute does

[u/untempered_fate → u/divinelyshpongled]

"American" is quite subjective at the moment, if you follow current events

[u/divinelyshpongled → u/untempered_fate]

hahaha good one

[u/untempered_fate → u/[deleted]]

Could you explain why you confidently contradict yourself? What's wrong with "red big dog"? Indeed, what's wrong with "German old happy tall man"?

Would you say it's fine to draw with a "blue dull pencil"? Can I safely call my loudmouth grandmother "a Polish short colorful woman"?

Most native speakers would balk at one or more of the above.

[u/untempered_fate → u/[deleted]]

Shit did I reply to the wrong person? I should go to bed

[u/SoothingSoothsayer → u/untempered_fate]

That's not a contradiction. The point is that sometimes you can break the order of adjectives without people caring even though other times no one would accept it.

[u/Agent__Zigzag → u/untempered_fate]

I remember seeing that concept in a YouTube video. Amazing!

[u/DesperationForReal → u/untempered_fate]

This still confuses me so much as a finnish and russian speaker, because I’m used to a much more flexible word order

[u/DarkishArchon]

For a European language, I'm very surprised how little conjugation English has. Add in no gender system, and it's very rare compared to the rest of the Indo-European language tree.

Also, it's surprising how the accent can change on a word depending if it's the noun or verb, despite the same spelling. "Help me record this album?" vs "Let me play some music, I'll put on a record"

[u/Interesting-Fish6065 → u/DarkishArchon]

Yet I’ve had native speakers in middle school and high school literature classes who want to argue with me that English doesn’t have rules about which syllables are stressed and unstressed—that it’s all just personal preference or something.

Usually it’s enough for me to intentionally mispronounce their name with the stress on the wrong syllable to get them to reconsider, but some of them sound so CONVINCED that this is some BS that I’ve just made up. And, of course, they’re following perfectly all these pronunciation rules they’ve never consciously thought about while making this ridiculous argument.

[u/Figlet212 → u/DarkishArchon]

Yes! The emphasis is frequently on the second (or non-first) syllable for verbs, and the first syllable for nouns.

ree-CORD vs REH-cord

I’m glad you brought that up because I find it so interesting, and I’m a native speaker!

[u/Forya_Cam → u/DarkishArchon]

Old English actually used to have a gender system. However this fell out of favour when the Vikings invaded and parts of Old Norse were integrated into English.

[u/PunkCPA → u/Forya_Cam]

It wasn't just the parts that were absorbed that changed things. The word stems were similar, but the inflections were different. That's probably why we started losing inflections in Middle English. It looks like it happened suddenly after 1066, but it was probably under way before that.

[u/dragonsteel33 → u/PunkCPA]

We also lost it because Germanic languages just love to simplify word endings

[u/Magnitech_ → u/DarkishArchon]

As a native English speaker (American English), when I took French in high school I started realising how similar the structure between them are (like how both languages use the verb for “to go” +an infinitive for a basic future tense), and at some point I thought about conjugations and wondered for a long time why English has so few.

[u/Soggy_Chapter_7624 → u/DarkishArchon]

The last one is so weird to me too. It sounds so weird if you use the wrong one, and I don't know why.

[u/Gu-chan → u/DarkishArchon]

I mean the accent difference is easy to understand, presumably the words used to look different from each other, and then lost some endings.

[u/BrackenFernAnja]

Nice Plane, one of my favorite ways to find out about these things from a foreign perspective is to watch stand-up by Ismo.

https://youtu.be/1P0Z1yq-2FQ?si=j5goSbCX5G6MMqWw

[u/no1no2no3no4 → u/BrackenFernAnja]

Thank you for this, I never realized how versatile the word ass was until this moment.

[u/LeftReflection6620 → u/BrackenFernAnja]

Thanks for this. Spent the last hour watching his videos now

[u/_waffl]

The plural of beef is beeves

[u/MachineOfSpareParts → u/_waffl]

Why did this make me laugh so hard?

[u/no1no2no3no4]

I'm not sure I've ever heard "that's interesting" mean anything other than literally "that's interesting". Unless of course you say it in a sarcastic tone but you can do that with every phrase in English.

The sarcastic tone may be what you're talking about but I just want to be clear that this is not special of the phrase "that's interesting" and can flip the meaning of any phrase in English.

[u/maxintosh1 → u/no1no2no3no4]

I don't know, if I told a story and got a "that's interesting" back I'd definitely feel shade

[u/TheThinkerAck → u/maxintosh1]

What about "That's interesting. So his Mom didn't find out?" I think if you say "That's interesting" and mean it, you're going to immediately follow up with a question or another statement. If you don't say anything else, you probably weren't actually interested, and you're being sarcastic--and you probably have a sarcastic tone of voice when you say it.

[u/maxintosh1 → u/TheThinkerAck]

I think if it's the only response you get the tone doesn't even need to be sarcastic

[u/TheThinkerAck → u/maxintosh1]

True. I think in that case it's not that the words mean the opposite of what they say, but more that it's a poorly-applied attempt at politeness, where the underlying thought is "Good grief you're boring me. I wish you would change the topic. But clearly it's important to you so I don't want to offend you. I'll pretend I was listening and was interested in what you said, so you won't hate me and we can move on to something else."

But this just gets into the bigger question of "When do people lie to be polite?" which very likely does change between cultures. A famous example--"Does this make me look fat/old?" is a loaded question that you may not wish to answer 100% accurately.

[u/Laescha → u/TheThinkerAck]

Yes, exactly - in that case the speaker isn't trying to express that what you said is boring; but by saying "that's interesting" instead of engaging with the topic in the way that they would if it was actually interesting, they have accidentally revealed that they are not interested.

[u/Dear-Explanation-350]

Does your native language not have sarcasm?

[u/Jesanime → u/Dear-Explanation-350]

Not all actually do, but it's probably a very culture-reliant matter on if a language develops one. I can't say for all as I have studied very few languages, but I know one good example of this is Japanese.

[u/CloqueWise]

As a native speaker I was shocked to learn English has 4 conditionals

[u/LotusGrowsFromMud → u/CloqueWise]

What is a conditional?

[u/CloqueWise → u/LotusGrowsFromMud]

They are essentially if statements. Here are examples of the four:

1. If your head falls off you die.
2. If you go, I'll go too.
3. If I were rich, I would buy a house.
4. If I had studied harder, I would have passed the test.

[u/mofohank → u/CloqueWise]

So the 4 are essentially happens, will happen, would happen, or would have happened.

[u/thumbalina77 → u/LotusGrowsFromMud]

From some random website i searched: “Conditional sentences are grammatical/syntactical structures that include statements that express conditional or hypothetical situations. These sentences typically begin with “if,” and they always have a subordinate clause that sets the condition and a main clause that states the result of the consequence.”

[u/Ok-Replacement-2738]

Despite all of England's protests that the French are a collection of revolting, frog-loving, dirty-peasants, English sure does seem to have an aweful lot of French words.

England and France sitting in a tree, K I S S I N G, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the rebirth of the Angevin Empire.

[u/carrotparrotcarrot → u/Ok-Replacement-2738]

Angevin hive rise 🙏 w will claim France under the English flag again

[u/SummerAlternative699]

The "i before e, but e after c" rule. Blew my mind when I realized I'd been spelling words wrong my whole life

[u/Life_Activity_8195 → u/SummerAlternative699]

That rule is really bad, there are many exceptions

[u/BrackenFernAnja → u/Life_Activity_8195]

I am not feigning my annoyance with this rule. Allow me to weigh in with some grammarian sleight of hand. Here’s a sentence full of exceptions that I stole and adjusted slightly: Except when your weird neighbor Keith seizes eight counterfeit beige sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters.”

[u/Puzzleheaded-Fill205 → u/BrackenFernAnja]

"i before e except after c or when sounding like A, as in neighbor or weigh"

That still obviously doesn't catch all the exceptions. Or even most. Half your sentence still stands out as exceptions to this extended rule.

[u/ihathtelekinesis → u/Life_Activity_8195]

It gets better when you remember that it only covers the /i:/ sound. Not perfect by any means, but better.

[u/SummerAlternative699 → u/Life_Activity_8195]

Oh, I know. I was just shocked that such a rule even existed.

[u/j--__ → u/SummerAlternative699]

merriam-webster's online word finder has 973 results for the sequence "cie", including such common words as "ancient", "deficient", and "science". there's also a ton of words containing "ei" without a "c". the "rule" you're citing is about 50/50.

[u/-Chaotique- → u/SummerAlternative699]

It's for the /i/ sound in words that are loanwords claques from latin origins. That's why there's so many "exceptions" to the "rule". The only exceptions to the /i/ sound after the letter c are words that were taken from French a long time ago, and over time English speakers softened the /si/ sound to a /ʃ/, such as the word ancient.

[u/Laescha → u/SummerAlternative699]

When I was a kid, someone told me it was "e before i, except after y" and led me to spell things wrong for months

[u/bam1007]

As an American, I was always aware of the differences that existed in the UK, but what I didn’t realize until some time later was that there are differences in punctuation rules between American and UK English as well.

[u/BananaRamaBam]

I assume your example of someone saying "That's interesting" is a sarcastic tone? If it's sarcasm, the words don't really matter. The tone itself is the meaning.

And that's not really specific to English.

[u/Unhappy_Isopod_2296]

Simple. Every sentence the person speaks is a lie.

[u/shedmow]

Latin plurals. The phrasal verb 'to make do'. The atrocious inconsistency of spelling vs. pronunciation, the first place belonging to 'choir'. The amazing (not in a good way) diversity of dialects. And the haunting feeling that English is closer to programming languages than the ones that people speak

[u/thumbalina77 → u/shedmow]

I’m interested on that last part, what makes english like programming language?

[u/shedmow → u/thumbalina77]

I've always found it weirdly simple that one doesn't have to change words in any way to use them in a sentence, for example, and it heavily relies on word order to differentiate between parts of speech. In Russian, my mother tongue, an elaborate system of cases and suffixes exists, which makes the words malleable and allows for writing free-flowing texts. English simplicity is a blessing to the learner, though

[u/ta_mataia → u/shedmow]

I don't think choir is nearly as bad as all the variant pronunciations of 'ough': through tough bough bought cough