What's strange about *your* language?

Zyxx

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Jan 25, 2010
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AperioContra said:
GrungyMunchy said:
Btw, stop saying English is regarded as one of the most difficult languages to learn, no one thinks that. You don't even have genders for inanimate objects.
I'm just going to play the devil's advocate here, and point out that there have been countless studies and polls that confirm English as amongst the hardest languages to learn as a second language, (Including one by the FSA and the British Foreign Offices (whereas Portuguese is considered one of the easiest)) so the evidence weighs heavily on that side. This is precisely because we don't have other verbs for proper or formal conversation or for male or female. The perceived simplicity is boggling from a person who is used to that formula. Also, our pronunciation is considered notorious nonenglish speakers.

But to be fair, difficulty in language often depends on the primary language on the speaker. If you happen to have roots in a Romantic Language (Spanish, Italian or French) or a Germanic Language (Scandinavian, Dutch) then you're going to find English relatively easier than if you have roots in an Asian language (Farsi, Cantonese or Japanese) or worse yet and African Click language, in which our language has absolutely nothing in common with, besides a brutally mispronounce Sayonara or a flirtatious whistle.
Gotta side with AperioContra here. One of the complaints I've often heard from ESL learners is that everything in English seems to have an exception. "I before E except after C or when sounding like A as in neighbor and weigh," and even that's hardly exhaustive. Plural nouns add an s (unless they don't), plural verbs don't add an s (unless they do). A German friend told me his relatives were perplexed with the existence of both "maybe" and "perhaps" (rather than just one.)

"English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them out and goes through their pockets for loose grammar." - some shirt my friend has.

OT: One of my biggest obstacles in my study of Japanese is its extreme context-sensitivity. Depending on your relationship with whomever you're talking to, words can get longer or shorter, particles or even entire parts of speech can be added or dropped.
The subject of a Japanese sentence is often implied rather than stated, which has led to some rather amusing circumstances when I misinterpreted what the subject was supposed to be (e.g. I thought someone was asking me if I'd already eaten when he meant that HE was going to go get some food.)

The subject-object-verb structure (which isn't unique to Japanese) makes it difficult when my friends ask for running translations into English, since I have to wait for the speaker to finish a sentence before I can translate it accurately, by which time he has moved on to the next sentence.

captcha: hedediu guidance. Which is exactly what I needed, because my hedediu is pretty lost.