[David Muller]

English must be a difficult language for foreigners to learn as we have words that are used in all sorts of situations, often with quite opposite meanings, which only a native speaker would know.

You may be interested in this commentary I came across recently.

There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that word is up. It’s easy to understand up, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake up?

At a meeting, why does a topic come up?
Why do we speak up, why are the officers up for election,
and why is it up to the secretary to write up a report?

We call up our friends.

We brighten up a room and polish up the silver.
We warm up the leftovers and clean up the kitchen.
We lock up the house, and some guys fix up the old car.

People stir up trouble, line up for tickets, work up an appetite,
and think up excuses.

To be dressed is one thing, but to be dressed up is special.

And this up is confusing:
a drain must be opened up because it is stopped up.

We open up a store in the morning, but we close it up at night.
We seem to be pretty mixed up about up!

To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of up, look it up.
In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes up almost one-fourth of the page
and can add up to about thirty definitions.

If you are up to it, you might try building up a list of the many ways up is used.
It will take up a lot of your time, but if you don’t give up,
you may wind up with a hundred or more.

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding up.
When the sun comes out, we say it is clearing up.
When it rains, it wets up the earth.
When it doesn’t rain for a while, things dry up.

One could go on and on, but I’ll wrap it up,
for now my time is up, so … time to shut up.

 

[Val Gyde]

Hi David

Thanks for sharing this neat bit of prose about the numerous issues with learning English. It’s just as well there are many excellent ESOL teachers in New Zealand who do a great job for students! Here is a link to the online government resource centre if anybody is interested (https://esolonline.tki.org.nz/ESOL-Online/Planning-for-my-students-needs/Resources-for-planning/ESOL-teaching-strategies).

Val 🙂

[Dick Ward]

English is like the traveller at A who asks a local for directions to get to C gets the answer, ‘I wouldn’t start from here to get to C. You should have started at B.’

However, its flexibility and willingness to adapt and general lack of different case ending and not ascribing masculine or feminine endings to most nouns has helped it become the world’s lingua franca (without going into any comments about the economic and political influence of the former British Empire, American dominance and so forth).

One letter combination which must frustrate non-native English speakers is ‘ough’

Cough, chough, though, bough, through, ought (which sounds the same ending as court and caught). I won’t go on, there are too many but one expression interests me.

If I draw the curtains am I closing them or opening them?

 

[David Muller]

The curtain one is an interesting problem. I always though it meant to close the curtains but then I came across the opposite so now I am careful to add ” draw the curtains closed” or ” draw them open.”

It is a bit like flammable, inflammable and non flammable.

[Mandy Edwards]

I’ve always been confused about the curtain issue too. I guess you do draw them open, or closed. But I’ve always thought it was either one or the other … but I didn’t know how to say it differently.

[Dick Ward]

The easy way out is to open the curtains or close the curtains (or have a blind!)