One of the fun exchanges I saw transcripts in a linguistics course was between two ESL speakers - one native Spanish, the other native Japanese. Something as si

One of the fun exchanges I saw transcripts in a linguistics course was between two ESL speakers - one native Spanish, the other native Japanese. Something as simple as not knowing the word “income” and using the Spanish “ingress” which was interpreted by the Japanese speaker as “English” was like the Naked Gun of language comedy for me. But as an ESL person myself I’ve never thought of English as a language about rules as much as memorizations. It’s the x86 of human languages, for better or worse, and trying to systemize it fully was how I messed up English most as a kid and how my parents tried to teach it to me.