Love for English, alas, does not always happen at first sight. To get to know the language better, read about the most curious features of it - this will help you gain inspiration before the lesson.
1. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis - the longest word in the English language (according to the Oxford Dictionary). It consists of 45 letters and stands for "chronic lung disease caused by inhalation of very fine silicate or silica dust." Puzzle lovers in 1935 came up with this word on purpose, in imitation of long medical names. But there is also the chemical name of titin, the most famous protein - it has 189,819 letters, and it will take you 3.5 hours to pronounce it.
2. In Nigeria, even more people speak English than in England - about 79 million people (in Britain - about 60 million).
3. Blond (e) - one of the few in the English language that has a gender binding. Blond is about a man, blonde is about a woman.
4. The most famous pangram in English (a phrase that uses all the letters of the alphabet at once) is “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. But in general there are many of them. For example, these are: "The five boxing wizards jump quickly", "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs", "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow".
5. Another special sentence in English is “James while John had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher”. 11 "had" in a row! But if you place punctuation marks in it correctly, everything will fall into place: “James, while John had“ had ”, had had“ had had ”; “Had had” had had a better effect on the teacher ”-“ James, while John used “had”, used “had had”; “Had had” liked the teacher better. ”
6. The author of The Canterbury Tales, Jeffrey Chaucer, who lived in the 14th century, coined the word twitter. The author of "The Lord of the Rings" John R. R. Tolkien in the middle of the XX century invented the plural form of the word dwarf - "dwarves", whereas before him about fairy gnomes they wrote "dwarfs". But the leader in neologisms of his time is undoubtedly Shakespeare: thanks to him, words such as addiction ("dependence"), assassination ("murder"), eyeball ("eyeball"), fashionable ("fashionable, secular" ) and manager.
7. If you count in English, the first number in which the letter "a" appears is thousand. This is not counting the "a" in the union "and", through which numbers after 100 are written.
8. One of the most common misconceptions about English grammar is "An English sentence cannot end with a preposition." Even many English speakers think so, so it is better to say about him in English: “It is one of many misconceptions about the English language that even native speakers can't get rid of”.
9. Americans associate an English accent with high intelligence and low moral character. That is why the British are often cast as villains in Hollywood films - Christopher Lee, Gary Oldman, Rafe Fiennes, Anthony Hopkins, Alan Rickman and others.
10. In a 1940 study of the most beautiful English word, mother was ranked first, memory second, and cellophane third.
11. About 20% of modern English words go back to the vocabulary of the ancient Vikings. This is largely why Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are still often named among the easiest languages to learn as English speakers.
12. English has a name for a situation where listeners misread the words in a song - mondegreen. The term was invented by the American writer Sylvia Wright, who in one Scottish ballad heard not “And laid him on the green”, but “And Lady Mondegreen”.
13. Adriano Celentano released the song "Prisencolinensinainciusol" in the early 1970s. Although written in a fictional language that phonetically mimics English, it became a huge hit in Italy. Swedish producer Max Martin also made the whole world sing along to the songs he wrote in English, almost not knowing the language. By the way, Britney Spears' "Hit Me Baby One More Time" was actually supposed to be called "Call Me Baby One More Time", but Martin mixed up the verbs.
14. There are translations of Harry Potter from British English into American English. Yes, the author of the American edition of the Potterian, Arthur Levin, claims that he did not adapt, but that he “translated” the book. For example, in the first part ("Philosopher's Stone") trainers were replaced with sneakers, biscuits with cookies, and jumper with sweater.
15. All inanimate nouns in English are designated by the pronoun it ("it"). But there is at least one exception to this rule - British sailors traditionally speak of the ship she ("she").
16. Richard the Lionheart hardly knew English. And his wife Berengaria of Navarre, even in England, had never even been - although she was her queen.
17. The English words science and shit come from the same Latin word skheid (to divide).
18. When writing about a woman in English, use "Miss" if she is not married, "Mrs." if she is married, and "Ms." if it is not known whether she is married or not. And remember that the "Mrs." and "Ms." - this is American English, but in British there is no full stop.
19. The most commonly used letters of the English alphabet are "E" and "T", the least frequently used are "Q" and "Z". And for a while, the English alphabet also included the "&" sign.
20. During the reign of Elizabeth I, the English slang word nothing meant female genital organs. The title of Shakespeare's play Much Ado About Nothing sounded much more provocative to his contemporaries than it sounds to us.
21. In Illinois until 1969 there was a law prohibiting the use of English. The official language of the state was American.
22. But the California authorities take English very seriously - they do not recognize a single letter of foreign languages in official documents. For example, a person named José can only be registered there as "Jose" - and nothing else.
23. The most polysemous English words are set and run. Each has several hundred meanings.
24. If you really want to learn all the irregular verbs, you will have to try very hard: there are more than 600 of them in English, even if most of them are already considered outdated.
25. Nabokov drew attention to the fact that in English translations the horse from Pushkin's "His horse, smelling the snow ..." turned into an old mare, and a poor horse, and a faithful horse, and even a pony. At the same time, Nabokov himself, in his translation of "Lolita" into Russian, "blue jeans and sneakers" turn into "blue cowboy pantaloons and linen slippers."
26. Old English used the words "the day before yesterday" and "the day after tomorrow" - ereyesterday and overmorrow.
27. Germans, on average, pass the IELTS international English proficiency test better than the British.
28. Many modern English words have been around for a long time, but before they looked different and changed only due to common speech errors. For example, the word wasp used to be written as "waps", bird - "brid", empty - "emty", apron - "napron", and nickname - "eke name".
29. The word glamor has been noted in the English language since 1720 as a variant of the word grammar. Initially, it had a meaning associated with the scholarship of an occult nature, with the knowledge of witchcraft. And in the 19th century, this word already began to indicate not only witchcraft, but also female attractiveness.
30. German Heinrich Heine said that English is when people take a dozen monosyllabic words into their mouths, chew them, swallow and spit them out. Englishman Bernard Shaw agreed with him on the complexity of the language: in his opinion, German and Spanish are quite accessible to foreigners, but English is inaccessible even to the British.