Seth: Moving on to question number two. I want to ask Mary because Mary is an ESL teacher she's has a lot of experience in this. Mary, why do many people think English learning is a hard process?

Mary: Okay, that is a super great question, and I don't exactly know maybe the exact reason why, but I can tell you what my students have told me. Um, the first is that English has a really huge vocabulary. Yeah, like there are so many words in the English language on the words that I borrowed from other languages.

But just the world is changing so fast around us that every year hundreds of words get added to our dictionaries into our vocabulary just as the world changes around us. So that's hard. It's hard to keep up on because not a lot of languages do that a huge part of world culture is based on Western culture. You know a lot of the technology. Um, we just for some reason get to be the language that get shared a lot, so that gets really tricky. The other reason is that we have some complicated forms of grammar that don't always follow exact rules like, um, the grammar that you might find. For example, in the romance languages. It's really predictable. It's easy to conjugate verbs. It's easy to know how things work within that language, like the building blocks are really similar. But English doesn't always follow those rules. And so that could be really hard for ESL students to know um, which rules apply where, you know, making something past tense, putting something in a progressive tense, putting things in a subjective tense. Those are really, really hard for people.

Seth: Mary, can I just interject here that, as an English native English speaker, I feel like even for me, it's hard to know when the use or conjugate certain verbs in a certain way?

Mary: Yeah, I believe that. But I would say that you do a lot more than you probably realize, because instead of thinking exactly about the grammar as you're speaking, it's just something that you naturally do. Even though you might not be able to explain what tense you're using or why you've conjugated a verb that way.

Seth: Well, that makes sense.

Mary: you know, and then the last thing that can make things really hard is Phrasal Verbs. So a phrasal verb is when we have, um, a verb and then like a proposition. Okay, so we might say to back up. Okay.

Seth: All right.

Mary: And we might say you need to back up the car or I need to back up this document or I'll be back up in a minute and those can have three different meanings, But they're all the same phrasal verb. And so you know where we have verbs that can mean 10 different things, right?

Seth: Right.

Mary: And, for example, the verb to run can mean like to actually run like you're running a race. It can mean when you leave the water on, so to run water, like when you turn on the water, it can mean like your nose if you're congested, run is running. There could be like your computer when it's turned on and using a certain program that we might say we run a program or if you're feeling sick and you have a fever, will say, um, she's running a fever. I mean, no other language uses verbs that way. And so for someone who's not a native English speaker, that's really hard for them. They don't learn. They don't get to that level of English for a long time unless they're really dedicated and diligent.

So I would just say like when I was teaching English, my students would say: "Teacher, why do we do it this way?" And sometimes I just have to say it's just an exception to the rule, like I don't have a good reason why we do that. It's just in exception. It's just the way that the language has evolved in the way that we use it. And that can be really hard for students.

Seth: Thank you, Mary. That's three really hard things that you explain. I mean, we're always adopting new words. We have so many exceptions to the rule, and we have phrasal verbs, which you explained perfectly. Thank you!

Mary: You're welcome.