Introduction

Linguists will know that most modern languages contain two forms of the word you , one being formal and one informal. Native English speakers often struggle with this, as in the English language there is only one way to say you. This fact has often led to the assumption that the English language is much less formal than its European counterparts, but it is interesting to note that in old English the word thou is used as a second version of you. The word thou seems archaic and stuffy to English speakers nowadays, but actually it was much less formal to say thou than you. The language therefore has evolved over time to make the informal tongue redundant, and preserve the more polite version of the pronoun. This is in marked contrast with other languages such as French or Spanish, where both forms of you have been preserved, although the more formal versions are used less and less as time goes on.

The fact that in English, nouns are not given genders means that a lot less time has to be spent learning what article to place in front of word upon word, and so at first glance a prospective learner of English could be forgiven for thinking that it is an easy language to grasp. However, it is widely acknowledged that English is in fact a relatively hard language to learn if you are not a native speaker, and this is perhaps a reflection of the old frictions between different languages fighting for a place of prominence in England. Whereas most modern languages follow very formulaic grammatical rules, with verb patterns and sentence structures which can effectively be used to master the fundamentals of the language, almost everything about English is irregular. There are rules, but they are broken so often that an English learner will learn most effectively by speaking the language, making mistakes, and then trying again.