Introduction

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.