How many rules are there in the English Language?
No idea how many, but people exaggerate terribly. I have been teaching English and training teachers for 25 years and trying to get them to see that the underlying system is NOT that complicated. That does not mean it is necessarily easy to learn if your own language has a different set of assumptions. What needs changing is the grammatical terminology. Terms like simple past and simple present ARE misleading when you realise that they don’t always refer to the past or present but it’s the NAME that is misleading and not the actual use. If you find a lot of ‘exceptions to rules’ then it may well be the so called rule that’s wrong. English grammar depends heavily on context and teachers should be teaching it through context and not through decontextualised ‘rules and examples’. And what’s stupid about phrasal verbs? if every native speaker child can handle them without problems there must be a coherent underlying system, right? That system is not obvious to outsiders but it is there nev
