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SilasBarta comments on Being a teacher - Less Wrong
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I used to teach English as a second language. It was a mind trip.
I remember one of my students saying something like "I saw a brown big spider". I responded "No, it should be 'big brown spider'". He asked why. Not only did I not know the rule involved, I had never even imagined that anyone would ever say it the other way until that moment.
Such experiences were pretty much daily occurrences.
That's not really a grammatical error though. If you were giving off a description as you got it, you wouldn't be expected to restart -- you could say, "I saw a brown ... big ... spider" rather than "I saw a brown ... no, big brown spider."
It's not the same level of error as if he said "I seed a big brown spider" or "I saw a big brown spiders." True, you may not know why we have a preference for placing certain adjectives first, but then, it's not as important to learn, either.
Now, if you had to explain why French only conjugates verbs in written rather than spoken form ...
For the same reason English spells write, right, Wright, and rite differently. They used to be pronounced differently, but aren't any more, and the spelling hasn't been updated to reflect that.
this has always driven me nuts and English is my first language... I would start using phonetic spelling right now, but it seems like more effort than it is worth to convince everyone I know to accept it.
And determining which regional accent wins.
I wouldn't call it an error per se, but it's definitely unidiomatic. Native speakers will consistently produce big brown spider far more often than ?brown big spider. Some languages enforce this more strictly than others, and in some the words can be deliberately moved out of the usual order for emphasis. (E.g. in such a language, a phrase equivalent to "brown big spider" would roughly mean "big brown spider".)
We do?
Like Yvain, I once taught French as a second language, and don't remember that. I did have a lot of cases of "there's probably a rule but I don't know how to spell it out".
In a way -- I'm referring to how a lot of the forms sound the same but have to be written differently -- e.g. parle vs. parles.
Oh, that, yes - I ascribe that more to the fact that written French just has a lot of letters you don't pronounce, or only pronounce in certain contexts, especially at the end of words (or h at the beginning).
But those letters still exist, even in spoken french: the verbs in "tu vois" and "il voit" sound the same ("vwa") in isolation, but with "arriver" behind them, they can sound like "tu vwazarriver" and "il vwatarriver".
Not to mention the fact that only some of the forms are homophones anyway: parle/parles/parlent sound the same, but they're different from parlons and parlez.
Is there some context where you can distinguish ait from aient in the spoken language?
Probably not, even the vois/voit example is far-fetched, most people would pronounce both "vwa'arriver", except maybe in a context where they want to put extra emphasis.
Verb forms' frequently being homophones is really not the same thing as their not being conjugated when spoken.
If all verb forms were homophones then it would be exactly the same thing. French still hasn't gone so far.