I am not a native English speaker and I have sometimes referred to people as male and female (as that is what I have been taught) but I have received some backlash in some cases, especially for the word “female”, is there some negative thought in the word which I am unaware of?
I don’t know if this is the best place to ask, if it’s not appropriate I have no problem to delete it ^^
It sounds like you are confusing having an ability to speak and understand a language with having a formal education in a language, or just misunderstanding what I was saying. As you point out, people can already speak their native language (more or less) starting from the first day of grammar school. In fact, school isn’t necessary at all for a person to be a native speaker.
The children starting out in school don’t have a clue what a noun or verb is in the language. When someone reaches the point in school where they learn these grammatical concepts, they can do poorly at grasping them or forget about them after they’ve learned them and they are no longer part of the curriculum. They don’t actually need to know these things well (or at all) in order to speak, read, and write. High school students can write an essay in English that shows total mastery of the past progressive verb form without being able to tell you what it is.
On the other hand, when learning a second language (unless one does immersion), a person can’t rely on their native-speaker instinct and therefore will struggle to speak, read, and write if they don’t get the hang of formal grammatical terms to process their language input and compute the output.
reading through your comments I feel like the issue is of interpretation : what I , and possibly others , assumed you were trying to say is that non native English speakers have an advantage when trying to interpret the meaning of words , so sorry about that .
Thinking about it however , I believe I have been taught more about linguistics in my Polish lessons than in my English lessons . Unfortunately , as you have suspected many students will , I forgot a large portion of it , which I am especially unhappy about now that I am getting interested in recreational linguistics , I still remember some of it , with parts of speech (not to be confused with constituents (that joke would be quite a bit better in Polish as constituents literally means parts of (a) sentence in Polish)) being one of the most basic building blocks of language
You are an individual multilingual person from a specific place. I’m talking about how monolingual speakers on average would compare in their knowledge of formal grammatical terms to multilingual speakers, again, on average. In particular with English which has very little verb conjugation or case marking, it is very easy to ignore the class of a word if that’s the only language you learn about.