It must confuse English learners to hear phrases like, "I'm home", instead of "I am at home." We don't say I'm school, or I'm post office.
It must confuse English learners to hear phrases like, "I'm home", instead of "I am at home." We don't say I'm school, or I'm post office.
In this usage, "home" is an adverb / adverbial! It is a preposition being used adverbially.
I'm going in. I'm going home.
Send it out. Send it home.
Run away! Run home!
All languages have quirks, but English is awful.
I only realized that the more I studied other languages, making me reflect on English.
Like, English doesn't have a future tense. It seems like a pretty basic thing, but in English you say "I'm going to X". Why do you use the verb 'to go' there? Why is that the way English creates a future tense? If you're headed to the store now: I'm going to the store. If it's happening later: I'm going to go to the store. WTF is this bullshit? "going to go"? Just stop and think for a second about "going" and "go" in that phrase.
And the verb "to do", why is that part of questions in English? Statement: You have a dog. Question: Do you have a dog? What does "to do" have to do with any of that? Why is "doing" the verb that somehow is used to turn a statement into a question?
And then there's "to use". Using is to take, hold, deploy, consume... so why is it sometimes part of the past tense. Sure, you can say "I walked to school", but if you want to talk about habits or routines: "I used to walk to school". Why is "to use" even involved there at all?
That's not even accounting for spelling and pronunciation which is just ridiculous in English.
We have a letter 'k' that reliably makes a certain sound, and a letter 's' that reliably makes another sound. But, a huge variety of words use "c" which can make a 'k' sound like cat, or an 's' sound like city. The letter 'c' has no sound of its own, it's just a randomizer machine for one of the other useful sounds. The letter 'g' has one sound that no other letter makes, in words like "grip" and "great". There's another letter "j" that makes a different sound, like in "jet" and the name "Jim". But, for some reason, sometimes the "g" makes a "j" sound, so "Jim" and "gym" have the same sound but completely different spellings, leading to bullshit like the confusion over how to pronounce "gif".
English has roughly 20 vowel sounds, depending on the accent, but the vowel letters are 'a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u', and sometimes 'y'. So, you'd think that at least those 5/6 are sorted and the other 20 come from combinations, right? Nope. In British English, for some reason "can" and "can't" get a different vowel sound for the 'a', despite "can't" being a contraction for "can not", which literally contains "can". The letter "u" can sound different between "put" and "putt", even though you're just tacking a 't' to the end of that combination of letters. If you tack an 's' on the end it doesn't change, but if you tack an 'e' on the end... whoa, an entirely new sound different from both "put" and "putt".
I'm glad the world is slowly converging on one language that allows everyone to communicate with everyone else, but it sucks that the language that came out on top is English.
For me it always just felt very close to “I am here” / “I am done” / “I am late” / “I am fine” — not as description of a place but state.
All the quirks, weirdnesses and exceptions are the best / most fun parts of any language. Close second, how it constantly evolves and where the words originated from.
Your instincts are right in that English as a second language is tricksy and annoying. The "I'm home" thing never occured to me, but there's plenty of stumbling blocks. They're, their, and there. Idioms like "piece of cake". It's a long list. Not the hardest of all languages to learn, but it is confusing in places.
Yes it does. I think it's that way because it's in locative case even though it doesn't make the word itself look any different. English sort of has cases and doesn't.
It works similarly in Latin. You don't say ad domum. You only say domum.
No, the way people say it makes it obvious that it's a set phrase. Like in Japanese they say "tadaima" and people reply "okaeri" and you just know that it's a thing and don't question it much. It's until much later when people point it out that you go, ohh yeahhh.
In Hungarian it's the same with "home" in particular. You say "I'm home.". In Hungarian, I too say the exact same thing: "Otthon vagyok" (I'm home).
Your other two example works the same, you won't say in Hungarian "I'm school" (Iskola vagyok (it means I am literally a school)). But you say "IskoláBAN vagyok" (I'm at school) or "PostÁN vagyok" (I'm at the post office. Notice the suffix in this case is completely different, but that's another story of Hungarian)
honestly I never even noticed that. But I did learn English like a native would - through near total immersion, and mainly monolingually instead of through translation. Whenever I learnt something new I was just like "alright so that's how I say the thing".
To be perfectly honest, if your language teacher points out that "I'm home" is a unique case I'd say that's a bad move, because now you'll second guess yourself every time you want to say it & might make mistakes you otherwise wouldn't.
This goes for all linguistic quirks imo, so many "watch carefully for those little bits" that instead of helping you learn they make you confused. Imagine learning about through thought though taught tough throughout thorough all in one day because "they're all very similar but very different! we put them all in the same spot to make sure you don't get them confused :)" it's a mental cluster fuck trying to remember which is which when you have all of them in one spot, the way to learn them is to have examples of their uses scattered across the ciriculum so that when you encounter one you can commit it to memory before you see the next one
I remember a Vietnamese co-worker commenting that sometimes people say "Here you go" and sometimes they say "Here you are" when handing her things and wondered if there was a difference. I explained it was just two ways to say the same thing.
"I'm home" is also something say when they arrive in their birth country or birth city/village. It's different from "I'm at home".
Can't speak of other languages, but in German anyway the sentence is exactly the same. "Ich bin zuhause" meaning word-for-word "I am home". Same issue, normally a location would have a preposition and an article. Reasoning is also the same as in english, "home" and "zuhause" are not a location but a state in this case.
Neh, being home is also a state of mind
An old I Love Lucy episode comes to mind, it's got to be tough! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZV40f0cXF4
One of my favourites to think about is "How are you?". Taken literally that question makes no sense. "How are you?" "Well one day my parents had sex and I sort of grew from there...."
Well, tell them that home is more than just a location.
Also "going to 'ospitol"
If home is where your heart is, and I have my honey's heart, then saying "Honey, I'm home!" makes perfect sense.
Honey, I am at home!
Home is a state of being in addition to a location.
Only a little.
Every language has some set of rules to how your supposed to construct sentences. Every language has a ton of exceptions to those rules.
The main thing that makes English difficult is that it's a kind of hybrid language. It's in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages but it borrows a ton of words from the Romance branch. The grammar is also a weird hybrid (for example we preserve grammatical gender in pronouns, like in German, but we've mostly dropped grammatical gender in nouns and articles, like in Chinese.
This is one of the simpler types of exceptions.
Consider the Chinese phrase: 好久不见 Litterally: "good time not see" But then someone explains that while 好 normally means "good" it can also mean "quite" or "alot".
So it's fairly easy to remember that it's generally translated as, "long time no see".Those steps are pretty simple for a Chinese learner to understand. It's also not the hard part of learning a language.
I'm the law!
This is a fun little bit of fluff on this subject- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/35-confusing-things-about-the-english-language_n_5b39b246e4b08c3a8f6b9a3b
Absolutely. I'm an ESL teacher in Korea, and getting my students to use prepositions properly is a significant portion of my job. The difference between something like "He is coming to you." and "He is coming for you." isn't obvious at all if you think about it, but there are definitely proper and improper use cases for them.
Similar irregularities exist in Standard German (e.g. "Ich steige Stefansplatz aus", "I get off [at] Stefansplatz", when say driving the bus), and there's a whole sociolect that regularises it to also say "I'm going school". And, no, the "that noun is an adjective now" explanation doesn't really work in German.
Understanding those kinds of (usually informal) uses is trivial if you know the language, it's using them like a native that's difficult. Forget studying grammar they need to be learned by osmosis. Grammars linguists produce, even highly detailed ones, have a very hard time capturing the possibilities, what's acceptable when playing around with the language.
I am away?
There’s a song with the lyric “If you need us we’ll be backyard in our new tree fort” and it fucks with me that it sounds as okay as it does. Reckon it makes a little more sense when the place-word includes a relative direction, like in “upstairs” or “courtside”.
I have heard some gems in the wild though, like “Ima go run bathroom”.