u/Ken_Bruno1

The correction of "less" to "fewer" is a classic example of a "rule" that isn't actually a rule. People love to jump in and say "fewer" must be used for anything you can count, like people or cookies, while "less" is only for uncountable things like water or time.

In reality, "less" has been used with countable nouns for over a thousand years. The idea that it's "wrong" was started by a single grammarian in 1770 who simply preferred the sound of "fewer." There is no syntactical reason to forbid "Twelve items or less" at the grocery store, yet people treat it like a major linguistic crime.

what about you?

I’ve spent way too much time worrying about whether I’m allowed to end a sentence with a preposition or if the grammar police are going to hunt me down.

Most of the people I talk to still think it’s a hard rule but it really feels like a leftover obsession from 18th-century scholars who were desperate to make English function like Latin.

Since Latin literally cannot end a sentence with a preposition because of how the language is structured it seems like we just inherited a "rule" that never actually fit our own Germanic roots.

I’m honestly ready to just ignore it entirely because forcing a "to whom" or "with which" into a casual conversation makes me sound like a Victorian ghost.

Anyone actually still following this or can we all agree that natural phrasing is better than sticking to an arbitrary Latin standard?

For me, Mandarin

Got humbled pretty hard. Never touching it again lol

What about you.

Language learning usually starts fun until you hit that one specific wall where the logic just stops making sense.

For some, it is the nightmare of grammatical gender where a table is "he" and a chair is "she" for no apparent reason.

For others, it is cases that change every word in a sentence based on its position.

Syntax can be just as brutal. Moving a verb to the very end of a long sentence feels like a memory test rather than a conversation. It is less like speaking and more like solving a puzzle in real-time.

Even the most dedicated students have moments where they wonder if the grammar was designed specifically to keep outsiders out.

What is the specific part of a language that usually trips you up the most?

I started learning French for fun, but the plateau I’m hitting right now is no joke.

Without a career goal or a deadline hanging over my head, it is so easy to just skip a day and let the habit slide.

I love the culture, but sometimes flashcards and grammar drills feel like a second job I didn't sign up for.

I want to rediscover that spark before I burn out completely.

For those of you learning purely for the love of it, what specific goal or feeling keeps you motivated when the progress feels invisible?

I honestly don't hesitate anymore since the singular "they" has become a total non-issue for my processing.

It feels completely natural now, especially since it clears up so much ambiguity in quick conversations.

I just slide it into sentences without a second thought because it's objectively the most efficient way to keep things moving.

What about you?

English grammar is messy because the language is a giant mix of different cultures. I see it as a history book where every group that moved to England left their own marks.

Long ago, people spoke Germanic dialects, but then Viking and French invaders brought their own words and patterns.

The way we spell words often reflects how people spoke hundreds of years ago. Even when the sounds changed, the letters stayed the same.

I also notice that the most common words we use every day tend to keep very old, weird forms because we say them so often they never get updated.

What you think?

I honestly think using "whom" in a text message makes me sound like a Victorian ghost trying to navigate a smartphone.

I stick to "who" for everything casual because "whom" feels way too stiff for a quick "Who are you going with?"

Even in formal emails, it feels like a toss-up, but in a group chat, it’s a total vibe killer.

Does anyone here actually use it unironically while texting, or is it basically dead outside of a cover letter?

I used to assume the goal was to squeeze as many clips as possible out of an episode, but after looking at a lot of content, it feels like that mindset actually hurts quality.

When you try to force volume, you start clipping anything that’s “kind of interesting” instead of only pulling moments that genuinely stand on their own.

The difference is pretty obvious when you watch them back.

The stronger clips feel like they have a clear point, almost like a mini story or takeaway. The weaker ones feel like fragments that only make sense if you watched the full episode.

I’ve started thinking of it less as “how many clips can I get” and more as “how many moments would someone actually watch all the way through if they had no context.”

What do you guys think?