My sister moved to Canada 6 months ago and went to ESL to learn English. I told her it’s a waste of time. I knew it’s a waster of time the moment I saw her course material: right away they started teaching her English grammar .. from lesson one. So my sister has gone to ESL 6 hours a day, 5 days a week for 26 weeks – 6 by 5 by 26 – a total of 780 hours and she has learned two wonderful things: 1) English is hard; and 2) English is boring. She will stop going to ESL next week and switch to Jerry’s class. (Why don’t you teach your sister, Eric?) (Did you try to teach your sister or brother? You just can’t! So Jerry and I cross train each other’s siblings) Can you imagine that her classmates have gone to ESL for 4 full years and still can’t understand and can’t speak.

      Screw grammar! Linguists make rules. I break them.

      My sister asks me why is this, why is that. I say: please don’t ask me why. I don’t know why. Why do you need to know why? That’s just the way it is. Just do it! As the Nike commercial goes: just do it and you will learn the “how” but still don’t know “why” – it’s a basic instinct. Linguists study language and its components, how words form sentences and sentences form speeches. They try to summarize language patterns into rules – rules that you can’t break. These rules have done damage like you wouldn't believe! The richness of language is lost every step of the way as you try to make grammatically correct sentences and speeches! That’s why spell-check works but grammar-check never works. Try grammar-check on Shakespeare and his work and you will find tons of “mistakes”. I bet Shakespeare had once been a child, right? He was 7 years old at some point and sat in somebody’s English class … and he was annoying. The English teacher went: “Put that pencil down, William (or Bill). And stop speaking like that. It’s confusing.” The only rule for you now is forget all the rules. Please don't worry. If you don’t worry, you will find words and sentences just flow out. They just flow out automatically! It’s a basic language instinct! Sure you will make a mistake every now and then. But who cares? And guess what? You make more mistakes thinking about rules and worrying about being grammatically correct.