Why do people think English is the hardest language to learn?

[Valksy]

Often heard that English is difficult and I assume it is because of all the words that sound the same but have different meanings and the "rules" that all seem to have exceptions.

I do protest it though. I get pissy with languages that assign a gender to objects and used to argue with my french teacher - how do I know if a table is male or female? (la table or le table). He used to tell me that there were no rules and it was just necessary to learn the vocabulary. Always thought that was pretty stupid.

But then I guess every language has its funky stuff that makes no sense. I often watch a show called "Nihongo Quick Lesson" which is a Japanese language primer and get utterly foxed by the counting system - the word for nine cars is different from the word for...say....nine apples. Seems unduly complex to me. Especially when I am trying to work out what they mean - it isn't immediately obvious if it is a counting work for cars, or vehicles, or things with wheels.... Baffling.

Do you get annoyed when people refer to ships as females etc.? Or do you understand the necessary anthropomorphism that certain objects must undergo in the human psyche?

Nothing to do with learning language. In english a chair is a chair, a table is a table, a tree is a tree. In French, for example, it is not enough to simple learn the word for the item, you have to memorise a secondary part that makes no sense to me at all - I am expressing frustration that there is no obvious rule for why one thing is male and another female and without the corresponding "le" or "la" you cannot properly use a word.

 

[The Austin]

It's not a romance language, and quite frankly, it's a bastardization of every other language ever.

 

[Kragg]

Often heard that English is difficult and I assume it is because of all the words that sound the same but have different meanings and the "rules" that all seem to have exceptions.

I do protest it though. I get pissy with languages that assign a gender to objects and used to argue with my french teacher - how do I know if a table is male or female? (la table or le table). He used to tell me that there were no rules and it was just necessary to learn the vocabulary. Always thought that was pretty stupid.

But then I guess every language has its funky stuff that makes no sense. I often watch a show called "Nihongo Quick Lesson" which is a Japanese language primer and get utterly foxed by the counting system - the word for nine cars is different from the word for...say....nine apples. Seems unduly complex to me. Especially when I am trying to work out what they mean - it isn't immediately obvious if it is a counting work for cars, or vehicles, or things with wheels.... Baffling.

Do you get annoyed when people refer to ships as females etc.? Or do you understand the necessary anthropomorphism that certain objects must undergo in the human psyche?

ships turn me on aswell !

already regretting making the title of the topic a question, there is no right answer to which language is hardest or no one way to find out anyway.

More likely than not that it is not English though

 

[paranoidhalfbreed]

Perhaps it is how many things are oddly spelled and how they rhyme that can make you though with English like being thru with a ball you threw through a neighbor's window?

Or maybe how more than one mice is not meese but more than one goose is geese?

Or the story of the people over there where they're living with their family?

Or maybe the regional differences, because making a piss may or may not always require a restroom.

Or maybe how the slang in these regions could drive a person a person off their head, go nuckin' futs, or just drive them crazy?

Or maybe how the online lexicons can b rly confusing 2 some1 not familiar w/ stuf like dat?

Perhaps we may never know.

 

[asinann]

The biggest reason I think people say that is because in English we speak in the reverse of everyone else.

English: My name is Joe.
Every other language on Earth: Joe is my name.

 

[Mercsenary]

English is the language that follows other languages down a dark alley and beats them over the head with a bat. Then ruffles through their pockets for vocabulary and language rules.


Not to mention endings also sound differently. For example: "ough"

through, thought, though, cough, rough, bough, thorough

ALL OF THESE DO NOT RHYME WITH EACH OTHER AT ALL.

Not to mention

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_differences

 

[sketch_zeppelin]

Its hard because we have less rules and the ones we do have we tend to break when ever we want to. most lauanges have past, present, future tense, they have gender, they ways of saying a phrase based on wether your talking to a peer or someone higher or lower up the food chain.

while it takes a while to learn all these rules, once you do you have a good grasp on a language. With english though your never sure what the fuck is going on. i mean we have words that are spelt the same but mean somthing different, we have words that mean the same but are spelt different, we have words that sound alike but aren't the same thing. and since english is an evolving lanuage, there are times when we just make shit up.

that may not seem like a big deal if you grew up with the language but to someone just learning it its downright confusing. Thats why broken english is so common. Immigrants learn the words but they have trouble figuering out how there supposed to be formed into a sentence and i don't blame them. i've lived here all my life and i'd be lying if i said i had perfect understanding of the english langaue (which is most likely apparent if you proof read my post)

 

[brainfreeze215]

The way I've heard it, Japanese has the most precise and difficult rules to learn, but English is hard because it has a whole bunch of rules and then just disobeys them all the time. There is so much inconsistency and irregularity in English.

 

[koshypops]

Firstly English is indeed full of rules that are often broken but that is what happens when you basically cobble the language together as alot of other languages have been forced to do in recent times with the invention and spread of computers.

Secondly while it does have slang, so do all languages in a strictly classroom sense slang should NOT be taught as slang is often localised to a very specific area. I can already think of 5 occassions today alone where I used slang that only 20 minutes away where I work no one says it (add in one South African and the confusion is complete).

Thirdly English does possess one big advantage over most other languages, almost everyone comes into contact with it on a daily basis be it on the Internet or via the news. While America has played a role in the internationalisation of the language the foundation was begun by the British Empire with the conquering of almost a quarter of the worlds Landmass and a quarter of the worlds population. Throw in that most of the revolutionary inventions these last two centuries are from English speaking nations (The first Car assembled on a production line, the first airplane, the computer, Nuclear power and MANY other inventions) and it just makes sense for people to use the language most of the people have in common even now more people speak English as a first or second language than speak any one of the Indian languages (yeah there are more than one) or either of the Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese).

As for English being hard to learn, it's not that hard to learn to a basic level it does get more difficult however.

Speaking to many people who have learned English as a second language I often hear that one cause for confusion is that we have words pronounced the same, with different spellings and meanings and only the context indicates which one we are refering to for example which and witch, there and their & your and you're.

 

[Kevlar Eater]

I can understand that English is tough to learn. I still think Japanese and Icelandic are leagues tougher to learn, in my opinion (and firsthand experience, though I still suck at both of them).

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Because English is an insane language.

There are two genders instead of three,...

See, that always confused me when I was studying French and German. Why do inanimate objects have genders? Is it really just to fuck around with school kinds, making them remember three or four tables of endings for verbs and all that? Never understood the need, really - that's one layer of complexity English is without, thank God!

Knock on from Latin, where a lot of our roots were. But then you add Greek, where it's different, German, Scots (Not Scottish), French, Celtic, Welsh, Dutch..

And we'll still tend to call cars or computers "she".

 

[Gildan Bladeborn]

The other well known sentence being "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo", which actually is grammatically correct. (It means THE buffalo FROM Buffalo WHO ARE buffaloed BY buffalo FROM Buffalo, buffalo buffalo FROM Buffalo.)

English is a true bastard of a language. In the literal sense.

I always see people claiming that is a grammatically sound sentence and I have never believed them - personally I would contest that its a joke somebody has pulled and the internet is just blithely perpetuating it. Seriously, how could it possibly mean what you say it does if it doesn't actually have any of the words in it? It's just the word "Buffalo" 8 times in a row - sure, "Buffalo buffalo buffalo" might be grammatically sound (noun, verb, and another noun), and if you're describing buffalo who are from Buffalo that buffalo other buffalo from Buffalo, you could certainly say Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo, but at that point you really need another word to continue the sentence - you can't really convey the "who are buffaloed" bit without punctuation and use of tenses, it just ends up as gibberish!

Which is not to say a sentence with the word "Buffalo" 5 times in a row is not gibberish, but at least you can actually parse that one together.

 

[sparkyk24]

Someone may have said this already, but I couldn't read all of the people thinking English is hard for the same reasons everyone is hard. Every language has words that sound the same but mean something different (or at least many do), many languages have weird words that don't follow the rules.

But, having studied a little Japanese and a lot of Spanish, I think one of the main difficulties is the way our words sound vs. the way they're written. In Japanese and Spanish, words are very easy to sound out, because vowels (or certain combinations of vowels) always make the same sound. Think of the Japanese word "domo," is pronounced the same way we would say "homo." But, if we were to see the word in an English book and were unfamiliar with it, some of us might get it right, but some of us might say it like "da-mo".

Some of our things just plain don't make sense, too, like gh being an f sound, (cough), "o" being a small "i" sound (women), and "ti" making a sound like "sh" (caution). An old demonstrations using these regularities spelling fish like "ghoti."

 

[Kragg]

I'm sorry? When did I say they turned me on?

kidding man ! jab at the gender of the word see

grammatical gender, not natural gender

 

[Kasawd]

I'm just going to pop in real quick here and shall be back to properly post in a couple of hours. I just have one things you might consider.

English may be harder to learn due to the constant use of Doublespeak/Doubletalk.

 

[Klepa]

http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/genkau2.html

Different forms for the Finnish word "shop".

My shop - kauppani
Your shop - kauppasi
Our shop - kauppamme
His shop - hänen kauppansa

How is the English way not a shitload simpler than the finnish one? I mean, we finns have gone far enough to actually butcher our own language to make it more like english, because speaking it properly is stupid.

English is nowhere near the hardest languages to learn.

 

[Eggsnham]

For someone who speaks a non Latin based language, it's pretty damn difficult to learn.

It's the same for someone who speaks a language based in Latin trying to learn a non Latin based language.

It's like learning how to speak all over again, this is why I can learn a language such as German with little to no effort, but I can't learn Russian for my life. Grrrgle!