English vs Spanish: Irregular Plurals

One of those things that mark a distance between English and other languages (Spanish included) is the capacity to absorb influernces from other languages without losing any of its own identity. While Spanish looks more "English-like" than ever, English keeps absorbing influences, assimilating the ones it really needs and discarding the ones are not so useful after all. And it's still English.
One proof of that is this notable feature of having regular and irregular plurals. Undoubtedly, the plural form of nouns may not be recent but still it helps us see how flexible English can be in order to absorb influences from different sources. The problem with that is that while English has irregular plurals, other languages only use the S at the end to indicate the plural form of a noun leading to involuntary mistakes. Here are some of those cases

Noun         Irregular plural      Spanish mistakes
Man           Men                         Mens
Woman     Women                   Womans
Child          Children                  Childrens
Foot            Feet                         Foots

The only way to get rid of that problem is just lots of oral practice. Written exercises will help student to absorb the knowledge in written form but the problem in speech will persist. The student may become aware of the problem but will meke very slow progress unless meaningful oral practice is set as part of the whole learning process.


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