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English: textbook vs. reality

English textbooks generally do a decent job with the basics, but they tend to over-rely on one register — clean, polite, complete sentences. Real spoken English has a wider range: contractions are standard (not optional), responses are shorter than textbook dialogues suggest, and some very common phrases are introduced late or not at all.

Greetings

What textbooks teach
Hello
"Hello"
Standard greeting taught in most textbooks — perfectly fine and widely used
normal very common
Good morning / Good afternoon / Good evening
"Good morning / Good afternoon / Good evening"
Time-of-day greetings, common in professional and polite settings
normal common
What they often miss
Hi
"Hi"
The most common everyday greeting — slightly less formal than "Hello" but perfectly appropriate everywhere
normal universal
Hey
"Hey"
Very common among friends and acquaintances. Not appropriate in formal settings (job interviews, presentations)
casual very common
What's up?
"What's up?"
Common casual greeting, especially among younger speakers. Not a real question — the expected response is "not much" or just "hey"
casual very common
The full picture

"Hello" is perfectly fine — the textbook gets this right. What textbooks often miss is "Hi," which is the most common everyday greeting in English and works in almost any situation. They also rarely explain that "What's up?" is not actually a question — it's a greeting that expects a brief response, not a detailed answer.

Sources for English

The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.

  1. Huddleston, R. & Pullum, G.K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-43146-0.
  2. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. & Svartvik, J. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Longman. ISBN 0-582-51734-6.
  3. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman. ISBN 0-582-23725-4.
  4. Carter, R. & McCarthy, M. (2006). Cambridge Grammar of English: A Comprehensive Guide. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-58846-1.
  5. Swan, M. (2016). Practical English Usage. 4th ed. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-420243-5.

See all data sources and dataset-level citations for the broader bibliography.

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