How do you know how to say it correctly?

Every week I’m faced with the task of explaining to students the logic of why English behaves in particular ways. For example, how most verbs in the present tense change (are inflected) only in the third person singular: I like, you like, he likes, we like, they like. But modal verbs (e.g. must, will, should, can, could, would) are not inflected.

How is that “logical”? Most other languages inflect for all persons, singular and plural, or don’t inflect at all.

I don’t know about you but I had never given much thought to such endless quirks and inconstancies of the English language until I tried to explain them to non-native speakers.

How about when the positions are reversed? I still remember the summer ten years ago when I asked my Greek-married friend Lucy how to say “I would like…”. She told me “θα ήθελα”, which I learned whole and have easily remembered and used ever since.

Only today did I really think about the two parts: θα (“will”) and ήθελα (“I wanted / I liked”). Translated literally it’s something like “I will wanted”—which sounds odd in translation but somehow carries that polite, tentative “I would like” perfectly well.

What interests me is how we know and use phrases and constructions without being aware of the literal meaning of the elements that comprise them. This is the difference between procedural and declarative knowledge. I had θα ήθελα in my procedural repertoire—fluent, automatic, ready to use in context—long before I had any conscious, declarative grasp of its structure.

When native English speakers say “I would like”, do they pause to question the conditional auxiliary “would” and its relationship to the past tense of “will”? When they say “going to” do they visualize themselves literally going toward something? When they use “used to” are they consciously aware that they’re deploying a past tense form that has crystallized into something that no longer behaves quite like a verb at all?

Of course not. We speak our native languages through procedural knowledge, rarely thinking or caring little about whether it is “logical”. We feel our way into the right construction. We know what sounds right without knowing why it’s right.