English with Foreign Grammar

Those among us who speak English natively should consider ourselves lucky. Having as our birth tongue what is almost certainly the final dominant language of our species not only provides us with an advantage in terms of global communication, but spares us the torture of actually having to learn it. But there's a downside to this as well—while most native speakers (of any language) are capable of speaking their language fluently solely on the basis of intuition, they are more often than not ignorant of the actual grammatical rules, much less their significance in the context of language structure as a whole.

Also, as a result of the global dominance of their native tongue, many native English speakers never seriously study a foreign language. This is a shame for many reasons, not the least of which is that studying a foreign language academically is perhaps the best way to provide insight into the grammatical functions of one's own language. For example, it wasn't until I studied the use of the subjunctive mood in Spanish that I truly understood how it was used in English; while I'm quite sure it had been explained to me in grade school, and I'd had a vague awareness of its existence since then, once I learned how it was used in Spanish—and how that differed from its use in English—it was a concept that suddenly became quite clear to me.

The big problem, of course, is that learning a foreign language is hard, and requires time, patience, and practice. But why is it so hard? A language can be broken down into two mostly distinct parts: grammar and vocabulary. Of these two, the more difficult to learn, and arguably the less interesting, is the vocabulary. Learning the grammar is a matter of understanding and internalizing a complex set of rules, whereas studying vocabulary involves little more than rote memorization. For those who aren't good at this, or simply find it tedious, vocabulary is probably the biggest impediment to studying a foreign language.

So, let's eliminate the vocabulary aspect, inasmuch as that's possible. We thus modify English grammar so that it matches the grammar of a foreign language while retaining English vocabulary, thus highlighting the difference between the two languages. Studying this new set of linguistic rules will not only provide the student a greater insight into his own native tongue, but will hopefully prepare him for future study of the foreign vocabulary once he is more comfortable with the grammar.

Some examples:

“Yo voy a la tienda grande.” — “I go to the store big.”
“Yo espero que ella venga.” — “I hope that she come.” (Demonstrating the use of the above-mentioned subjunctive)
“Puedes quedarte aqui, pero no me molestes.” — “You can to remain thyself here, but do not me bother.”

Words that don't have a clear analogue in terms of conjugation in English may need to have forms imported for more advanced students. E.g., “to bother” might need to become “botherar”, to allow distinction between its various tenses and persons (thus making it “botheres” in the example given).

But while this may seem like an overly complicated way to get a simple point across, there are many features of English that we take so fundamentally for granted that we never learn about or even consider them. Indeed, it's not until studying how certain grammatical constructions are formed in other languages that it even occurs to us that there's another way to do them. Take, for example, the phrase “I want to go to the store.” In Romanian, this becomes “Vreau sa merg la magazinul.” Breaking this down word by word, we find a couple of striking differences from English:

Vreau: I want
Sa: (indicates that the following word is in the subjunctive)
Merg: I go
La: To
Magazinul: The store

So, literally, it's something like “I want I go to store(the).” Notice how where the infinitive would be used in English and many other languages, Romanian uses a conjugated verb. But we're really saying the same thing, just dropping the pronoun: “I want to go” means “I want me to go” as opposed to “I want you/him/her/it to go”. Somebody who had never studied Romanian, however, might not ever have considered that fact.

Also, notice how in Romanian, the definite article exists only as a modified form of the noun (the noun in this case being “magazin”). If you'd never been taught this, would it have ever occurred to you that articles don't necessarily have to consist of an independent word or prefix, but could simply modify an existing word? Or, in the case of Russian grammar, that they're totally unnecessary? For that matter, in Russian (and Hebrew) the verb “to be” doesn't really exist at all (at least, not in any form an English speaker would consider equivalent). So you see, there are a lot of things about our language we take for granted, but somebody who was intimidated by the time and effort required to learn to read and understand Cyrillic or Hebrew writing and vocabulary would remain ignorant of this fact.

Certainly, some words will need to be borrowed, and some existing words modified to suit foreign conjugation. Regardless, this wouldn't really be taught for actual use, but would be mainly intended as a means of gaining insight into the mechanics of English by contrasting it with different grammatical structures—but without all of those pesky vocab flash cards. The focus wouldn't be on teaching how this or that foreign language is different from English, but instead on simply teaching how those languages work and allowing the student to independently acquire the kind of knowledge that only comes through understanding (I think there's a word for that in German).