Just Let English Be Weird. It’s Easier That Way.
English is a beautiful, glorious, illogical mess. The sooner you stop fighting it, the faster you'll learn it.
English is a mess.
I say that with love. As a native speaker who has spent his entire life inside this language, I can tell you with complete honesty: English is one of the most gloriously illogical, frustratingly inconsistent, beautifully chaotic languages on the planet.
And I think the sooner you stop fighting that, the faster your English will improve.
Because here’s what I see happening with a lot of English learners. They encounter something in English that doesn’t make sense. A spelling that defies logic. A pronunciation that contradicts every pattern they thought they’d figured out. A grammar rule that has more exceptions than applications. And instead of shrugging and moving on, they stop. They protest. They demand an explanation.
“But WHY is it spelled like that?”
“That doesn’t make any SENSE.”
“In my language, this would NEVER work this way.”
“There MUST be a rule for this.”
And I get it. I really do. When you come from a language where the spelling is logical, the pronunciation is predictable, and the rules actually behave like rules, English must feel like a language that was designed by a committee of drunk poets who couldn’t agree on anything.
Which, historically speaking, is not that far from the truth.
English: A Brief History of Chaos
To understand why English is the way it is, it helps to know where it came from. And where it came from is basically everywhere.
English started as a Germanic language, brought to Britain by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in the fifth century. So far so good. A nice, relatively logical Germanic language with Germanic grammar and Germanic vocabulary.
Then the Vikings showed up and dumped a load of Old Norse into the mix. Then the Normans conquered England in 1066 and poured French all over everything. Then scholars in the Renaissance decided English needed more Latin and Greek to sound properly educated. Then the British Empire spread across the globe, picking up words from Hindi, Arabic, Malay, Aboriginal languages, African languages, and dozens of others along the way.
The result is a language that has Germanic bones, French muscle, Latin and Greek organs, and vocabulary borrowed from basically every language it ever came into contact with. It is a linguistic Frankenstein’s monster. And like Frankenstein’s monster, it is somehow alive, somehow functional, and somehow beautiful, despite being assembled from parts that were never designed to go together.
This is why “enough,” “through,” “though,” “cough,” and “bough” all end the same way and are all pronounced differently. They came from different sources, at different times, through different routes, and nobody ever went back to tidy things up.
This is why English has both “begin” (Germanic) and “commence” (French) and “initiate” (Latin), all meaning roughly the same thing but each with its own register and connotation.
This is why the plural of “goose” is “geese” but the plural of “moose” is not “meese.” Because “goose” is an old Germanic word that follows Germanic vowel-shift rules, and “moose” was borrowed from Algonquin and never got the memo.
English didn’t evolve according to a plan. It evolved according to history. Every invasion, every cultural exchange, every borrowed word, every printing press error, every lazy pronunciation that became standard: all of it is still there, baked into the language, producing the magnificent chaos that you’re trying to learn.
The Fight That Slows You Down
Here’s where this matters for your English learning.
When you encounter something in English that doesn’t make sense and you fight it, when you demand a logical explanation, when you insist that it should work differently, when you refuse to accept it until you understand why, you are spending cognitive energy on resistance rather than acquisition.
That energy has a cost. Every minute you spend being frustrated by English spelling is a minute you’re not spending absorbing English vocabulary. Every moment of protest against an illogical pronunciation is a moment your brain is focused on the injustice rather than the pattern. Every mental argument with the language is mental bandwidth that could have been used for acquisition.
And the cruel irony is that the explanations, when they exist, rarely help. Knowing that “knight” used to be pronounced with a hard K in Old English, that the K gradually fell silent over centuries, that the spelling was preserved by the printing press long after the pronunciation had changed: this is historically interesting. But it does absolutely nothing to help you remember how to pronounce “knight” today.
The history explains the mess. It doesn’t clean it up. And the energy you spend understanding the history would be better spent simply accepting “knight” as it is and moving on to the next sentence.
The Quirky Friend Analogy
Think about someone in your life who is a bit eccentric. A friend, a family member, a colleague. Someone with habits and behaviours that don’t always make logical sense. Maybe they eat their meals in a specific order. Maybe they have a particular way of doing things that seems unnecessarily complicated. Maybe they have opinions that are wildly inconsistent but deeply held.
You have two choices with this person. You can spend your energy trying to change them, arguing with their quirks, insisting that they should be more logical, more consistent, more normal. This will exhaust you and accomplish nothing, because they are who they are and they’re not going to change because you think they should.
Or you can accept them. Love them, even. Quirks and all. Shake your head affectionately at their strange habits. Laugh at the inconsistencies. Let them be who they are, and enjoy the relationship for what it is rather than what you think it should be.
English is that quirky friend.
You can fight it. You can protest every irregular verb, every silent letter, every pronunciation that defies the pattern. You can demand logical consistency from a language that has never had it and never will.
Or you can accept it. Shake your head. Laugh at the absurdity. Let it be what it is. And get on with the business of absorbing it, inconsistencies and all.
The second approach is not just more pleasant. It is more effective. Because acceptance opens the door to absorption in a way that resistance never can.
What Acceptance Actually Does to Your Brain
This isn’t just feel-good advice. There’s a real cognitive mechanism at work here.
When you encounter something that contradicts your expectations and you resist it, your brain enters a state of cognitive conflict. It’s trying to reconcile what it expected with what it actually encountered. This conflict consumes processing resources. It pulls attention away from the content and toward the problem. It activates the analytical, rule-checking parts of the brain at the expense of the pattern-absorbing parts.
When you encounter the same unexpected thing and accept it, the conflict resolves quickly. Your brain says: okay, that’s how it is. And it moves on. The processing resources that would have been consumed by resistance are freed up for acquisition. The pattern-absorbing system gets to do its work unimpeded.
This connects directly to Krashen’s affective filter, which we’ve discussed throughout this blog. Frustration, resistance, and the feeling that the language is unfair or illogical all raise the filter. Acceptance, openness, and a willingness to take the language as it comes lower the filter. And a low filter means the input flows in more freely and the acquisition happens more efficiently.
The learner who encounters “through” and “tough” being pronounced completely differently and thinks “huh, that’s weird, okay” is in a better state for acquisition than the learner who encounters the same thing and thinks “this is RIDICULOUS, how am I supposed to learn a language where nothing makes SENSE?”
Same input. Same language. Same irregularity. Different response. Different acquisition outcome.
The Specific Weirdnesses of English (And How to Make Peace With Them)
Let’s walk through some of the things that drive English learners the most crazy, and practise the art of acceptance with each one.
Spelling. English spelling is, objectively, bonkers. The same sound can be spelled dozens of different ways. The sound “ee” can be spelled ee, ea, ie, ei, ey, e, i, and several other ways depending on the word. The same spelling can represent completely different sounds: “read” in the present tense versus “read” in the past tense. Some letters are silent for no apparent reason. “Knife.” “Pneumonia.” “Psychology.” “Wednesday.”
The acceptance: English spelling is a historical document. It preserves the fossils of old pronunciations, old languages, old printing conventions. It is not a pronunciation guide. It is an archaeological record. Stop expecting it to be logical and start treating it as one of the language’s many charming eccentricities. You will learn to spell English words not through rules but through exposure, the same way native speakers do. After you’ve seen a word enough times, the correct spelling just looks right.
Pronunciation. You already know about “through,” “though,” “tough,” “thought,” and “thorough.” You know that “lead” the verb and “lead” the metal are spelled the same and pronounced differently. You know that “minute” the time unit and “minute” meaning tiny are spelled the same and pronounced differently. You know that the “ough” in “enough” sounds like “uff” but the “ough” in “dough” sounds like “oh” and the “ough” in “cough” sounds like “off.”
The acceptance: there is no system here. There is only familiarity. You learn how each word sounds by hearing it, not by applying rules. This is why listening is so foundational to everything on this blog. Your ear learns the pronunciation. Your eyes learn the spelling. The two systems are largely independent of each other, and the sooner you stop trying to derive one from the other, the happier you’ll be.
Irregular verbs. Go, went, gone. Be, was, been. Think, thought, thought. Teach, taught, taught. But reach, reached, reached. Why does “teach” become “taught” but “reach” becomes “reached”? Why does “sing” become “sang” but “bring” becomes “brought” rather than “brang”?
The acceptance: irregular verbs are irregular because they’re old. The oldest, most frequently used verbs in any language tend to resist regularisation because they’re used so often that the irregular forms get reinforced constantly. You don’t need to memorise lists of irregular verbs. You need to encounter them enough times in context that the correct forms become automatic. “Went” doesn’t need to be memorised. It needs to be heard and read a thousand times. After a thousand encounters, it just is.
Phrasal verbs. We covered these in detail in an earlier post, but they deserve a mention here because they are a major source of resistance for many learners. “Give up.” “Give in.” “Give out.” “Give away.” “Give off.” “Give over.” One tiny preposition changes the entire meaning, and the relationship between the preposition and the meaning is often completely opaque.
The acceptance: phrasal verbs are how English actually works in everyday speech. Resisting them is like resisting the weather. They are there. They are not going away. And they are acquired the same way as everything else: through repeated, contextual encounters. Let them wash over you. They’ll make sense eventually. Not because someone explains them, but because you’ve heard “give up” in enough different situations that the meaning becomes part of your instinct.
Articles. “The” versus “a.” When to use one versus the other. When to use neither. Why “I went to hospital” is correct in British English but “I went to the hospital” is correct in American English. Why it’s “the sun” but “space” without an article. Why some abstract nouns get articles and some don’t.
The acceptance: articles in English are genuinely difficult and even advanced learners make mistakes with them. Native speakers can’t explain the rules clearly because they don’t know the rules, they just know what sounds right. And that instinct for what sounds right, once again, comes from exposure. Thousands and thousands of encounters with articles used correctly in context. There is no shortcut. There is only input.
Surrendering is Not Giving Up
I want to be clear about what I mean by surrender, because the word might carry connotations of defeat. It’s not defeat. It’s the opposite.
Surrendering to the weirdness of English is not saying “I can’t do this.” It’s saying “I don’t need to understand every why in order to acquire the how.” It’s the recognition that the brain’s pattern-recognition system doesn’t need logical explanations to do its work. It needs examples. Lots of examples. And it’s perfectly happy to extract patterns from irregular, illogical, messy data.
Think about it. Your brain successfully acquired the grammar of your native language, which is also full of irregularities and illogical quirks that you’ve just never noticed because they’re invisible to you. Every language is weird when you look at it from the outside. English is no exception. And your brain handled it for your first language without needing a single logical explanation.
It will handle it for English too. If you let it.
The letting is the key. The surrendering. The opening up. The willingness to say: this language is strange and beautiful and illogical and messy, and I accept all of it, and I’m going to keep reading and listening and letting it seep into my brain without demanding that it tidy itself up first.
The Zen of Language Learning
There’s something almost meditative about this kind of acceptance. And given our conversation on this blog about meditation and language learning, that connection isn’t accidental.
Meditation teaches you to observe without judging. To notice thoughts without reacting to them. To sit with discomfort without fighting it. To accept what is rather than insisting on what should be.
Applied to English learning, this meditative quality looks like: encountering something strange and simply noting it. Not fighting it. Not demanding an explanation. Not getting frustrated. Just observing: oh, that’s interesting. That’s not what I expected. Okay. And moving on.
The learner who can do this, who can encounter the hundredth inexplicable English spelling and greet it with curiosity rather than frustration, is a learner who will go far. Not because they’re smarter. Because they’re not wasting energy on resistance.
Every ounce of energy that goes into fighting the language is an ounce that doesn’t go into absorbing it. Redirect that energy. Let the weirdness in. Let it be what it is.
The language doesn’t need your permission to be strange. But your fluency needs your permission to stop fighting.
English is Beautiful Because It’s Messy
Here’s a reframe that might help.
The very things that make English frustrating to learn are the things that make it extraordinary to use. The enormous vocabulary, drawing from Germanic, French, Latin, Greek, and dozens of other sources, gives English speakers an unparalleled range of expression. The multiple words for the same concept, each with its own shade of meaning, allow for a precision that more regular languages sometimes lack.
The irregularity is the richness. The mess is the beauty. The chaos is the creative potential.
When you eventually reach a high level of English, you won’t look back at the irregular verbs and the silent letters and the bizarre spelling and think: that was unfair. You’ll think: that was the price of admission to one of the most expressive, most flexible, most creative languages on earth.
And it was worth it.
Just Let It In
So here’s my advice. Simple, practical, and perhaps the most important thing in this entire post.
The next time you encounter something in English that doesn’t make sense, try this.
Don’t fight it. Don’t demand an explanation. Don’t compare it to your native language. Don’t decide that English is stupid or illogical or badly designed.
Just notice it. Smile at it, if you can. Think: there goes English, being English again. And keep reading. Keep listening. Keep absorbing.
The strange thing will come back. And when it does, it’ll be a little more familiar. And the next time, a little more. And eventually, it won’t be strange at all. It’ll just be English. Your English. With all its quirks and eccentricities and maddening inconsistencies that somehow, against all odds, come together into something that works.
Something that millions of songs have been written in. That Shakespeare wrote plays in. That scientists publish discoveries in. That comedians make people cry laughing in. That lovers whisper in. That children learn to think in.
A mess. A beautiful, glorious, irreplaceable mess.
Let it in. All of it. Even the bits that don’t make sense.
Especially the bits that don’t make sense.
For letting English in through content you love, at your own pace, without fighting every word, LingQ is the tool I recommend above all others: lingq.com
For absorbing natural English through TV shows and films where the weirdness of the language arrives naturally and in context, Lingopie turns your screen time into genuine acquisition.
If you want compelling, story-driven English listening at just the right level, Olly Richards’ Conversations course is well worth exploring.
If you’re looking for a conversation partner to laugh about English’s absurdities with while your fluency grows, iTalki is where I’d start. And if you’d like to work with me specifically, book a trial lesson here.
✍🏼 Richard
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