Why do people think English is the hardest language to learn?
- Thread starter Kragg
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You can't tell because probably English is your native language. Its hard because of the so many different pronunciations for words that only have a one letter difference, so many grammar and rules for text that even countries with English as the native Language have to take up all the years in school to teach, so many rules that make little sense, words like knee or phone which are pronounced differently then the letters are. Other languages would have a character and the characters pronunciation, and that character would always be pronounced like that, unlike in English where even the name of the language doesn't follow the same guideline.Kragg said:
English is like this because it was screwed up by the French, the German and the Spanish by integrating them all into one.
I had a confusing English teacher.Flee the Cities said:
Because I'm petty, you double posted.
n00b!!!
I think alot of it is grammer.
You have words that sound alike but arent. YOu have words that are spelled the same but are different meanings. I before E except after C unless in words that have an A sound like Neighbors and Weights.
yah. we had a girl from mexico learning english and just read her that and a few more grammer things from first grade and her eyes rolled up, she couldnt process, and i swear i heard her brain just shut off.
You have words that sound alike but arent. YOu have words that are spelled the same but are different meanings. I before E except after C unless in words that have an A sound like Neighbors and Weights.
yah. we had a girl from mexico learning english and just read her that and a few more grammer things from first grade and her eyes rolled up, she couldnt process, and i swear i heard her brain just shut off.
Spanish and French are torture to learn. Believe me, Spanish is my native tongue; I've been speaking it for over 18 years and it STILL pisses me off sometimes. With all of its punctuation and accentuation rules. It's a hassle to learn, but you get used to it after speaking/hearing it for a lifetime. I don't think that's a plus, though.
Spanish has male and female particles for items... ITEMS. Inanimate objects have to be classified by gender.
For example: "La mesa" means "The table" but "La" indicates that it's female. "El vaso" means "The cup", but "El" indicates that it's male. So, to review, tables are female and cups are male. Bonus confusion points: Mugs are technically cups, but they're female in Spanish.
It's also very redundant. You have to specify plurals in almost every part of the sentence.
Example: "Las personas disfrutan de un dia en el parque" which means "[The]People enjoy a day in the park". In English, you would know that it refers to more than one person (plural) because it says "People". In Spanish you have to use the plural form of almost every word. "Las" which is "The" female and plurlal, "Personas" which is people, "Disfrutan" which is "enjoy" but in plural form and the rest is simple.
You see? Redundancy.
Plus you have to add "The" before almost everything.
Japanese is incredibly tricky, too. It has a lot of irregular verbs plus thousands of Chinese characters.
English is pretty easy to learn. It's relatively simple with no complex accentuation rules or redundancy.
I hope you enjoyed this little Spanish lesson.
I know most of you will read the firsts sentence and go "TL;DR" but to those of you who read it: You learned something today you probably would not have learned in school! Hooray internet!
Spanish has male and female particles for items... ITEMS. Inanimate objects have to be classified by gender.
For example: "La mesa" means "The table" but "La" indicates that it's female. "El vaso" means "The cup", but "El" indicates that it's male. So, to review, tables are female and cups are male. Bonus confusion points: Mugs are technically cups, but they're female in Spanish.
It's also very redundant. You have to specify plurals in almost every part of the sentence.
Example: "Las personas disfrutan de un dia en el parque" which means "[The]People enjoy a day in the park". In English, you would know that it refers to more than one person (plural) because it says "People". In Spanish you have to use the plural form of almost every word. "Las" which is "The" female and plurlal, "Personas" which is people, "Disfrutan" which is "enjoy" but in plural form and the rest is simple.
You see? Redundancy.
Plus you have to add "The" before almost everything.
Japanese is incredibly tricky, too. It has a lot of irregular verbs plus thousands of Chinese characters.
English is pretty easy to learn. It's relatively simple with no complex accentuation rules or redundancy.
I hope you enjoyed this little Spanish lesson.
I know most of you will read the firsts sentence and go "TL;DR" but to those of you who read it: You learned something today you probably would not have learned in school! Hooray internet!
Every language has its difficulties. In English its mostly spelling, pluralization and vocabulary. Every language has irregular verbs. In other languages its gender and number. For other languages there are other issues. Most linguists will tell you that all natural languages are about equally complex and difficult to learn.
What the hell are you guys talking about, English is probably the easiest language in the world, by far. Sure there are a lot of irregularities, but that's only because there aren't really that many rules. Almost every other language gives you a shitload of rules and still has quite a lot of irregularities between.
Well you're right that you have to memorize whether it's a verb, noun or whatever. You usually do that by memorizing the present and past tense for verbs (to buy, bought) and you memorize nouns with the article ("a house", instead of just "house").
In German, you have to remember three variants for every verb you learn (gehen, ging, gegangen), plus you need to know how to decline it. Yes, we have six different variants for each and every verb, depending on which person it goes with (not just an s for he/she/it: it's ich gehe, du gehst, er geht, wir gehen, ihr geht, sie gehen). Of course there's rules about it, but you have to know which rule applies, and as I said, there's a lot of irregularities.
With nouns, you have to remember what the genitive for each word is, so that you know how to decline the noun, because guess what, we have four different cases (times two because of the plural) for nouns as well, and you only know which are the correct cases if you know what the genitive is, and even then you have to know the rules and irregularities. You also have to know the article, because every word is either male, female or neutral.
With adjectives, you have to know six different forms because it depends on the article of the noun. The same goes for possessive pronouns and lots of other things.
So now, you don't have to memorize a lot to learn English vocabulary, not compared to other languages.
Besides, verbs on -en: you can use every verb as a noun (much like your gerund), and a lot of nouns have their plural or their genitive as -en, as well as a few other words, so it's not like you see "en" and know "that's a verb", especially because the verb mostly has it in the infinite form, which doesn't make its way into conversations all that often (since you have to use the declined form most of the time).
Another advantage of the English language is its large vocabulary. In German, there are quite a lot of words who have completely different meanings, and you have to know depending on the context which one is meant. In English, you know what's meant because there's a word for everything.
***RANT OVER***
Let me give you a few examples depending on article, case and tense:
I see a tree - Ich sehe einen Baum.
You see the shadow of a tree - Du siehst den Schatten eines Baumes.
You and Paul see the crown of a tree - Du und Paul seht die Krone eines Baumes.
We saw a green tree - Wir sahen einen grünen Baum.
You saw a green meadow - Du sahst eine grüne Wiese.
He saw trees - Er sah Bäume.
I give his tree a hug - Ich gebe seinem Baum eine Umarmung.
You give his cat a kick - Du gibst seiner Katze einen Tritt.
And so on.
So my point is, while your tree stays a tree, your see a see and your saw a saw, we have different words for those in almost every sentence.
Now tell me again: why is English hard to learn?
I'll take your quotes to make my point because you're about the only one to give any reasons whatsoever. Let me compare it to German (because that's quite extreme for a European language), but it basically works with every Roman language just as well.Naeo said:
Well you're right that you have to memorize whether it's a verb, noun or whatever. You usually do that by memorizing the present and past tense for verbs (to buy, bought) and you memorize nouns with the article ("a house", instead of just "house").
In German, you have to remember three variants for every verb you learn (gehen, ging, gegangen), plus you need to know how to decline it. Yes, we have six different variants for each and every verb, depending on which person it goes with (not just an s for he/she/it: it's ich gehe, du gehst, er geht, wir gehen, ihr geht, sie gehen). Of course there's rules about it, but you have to know which rule applies, and as I said, there's a lot of irregularities.
With nouns, you have to remember what the genitive for each word is, so that you know how to decline the noun, because guess what, we have four different cases (times two because of the plural) for nouns as well, and you only know which are the correct cases if you know what the genitive is, and even then you have to know the rules and irregularities. You also have to know the article, because every word is either male, female or neutral.
With adjectives, you have to know six different forms because it depends on the article of the noun. The same goes for possessive pronouns and lots of other things.
So now, you don't have to memorize a lot to learn English vocabulary, not compared to other languages.
Besides, verbs on -en: you can use every verb as a noun (much like your gerund), and a lot of nouns have their plural or their genitive as -en, as well as a few other words, so it's not like you see "en" and know "that's a verb", especially because the verb mostly has it in the infinite form, which doesn't make its way into conversations all that often (since you have to use the declined form most of the time).
Yes, same as in every other language, except that you only have one past tense, because you always use the third with have: buy, bought, have bought - come, came, have come - seek, sought, have sought - very few irregularities here. In German, you always need all three AND need to know whether to use have or do: kaufen, kaufte, habe gekauft - kommen, kam, bin gekommen - gehen, ging, bin gegangen - not a lot more complex, but still. And we have different forms for the past tenses just as we have for the present tenses - THAT's a lot more complex: it's ich ging, du gingst, er ging, wir gingen, wir gingt, sie gingen.
I'll give you that, although you seem to think that most of them are unique to English: except for the progressive form, we have them all, but that one gives us trouble sometimes, that's correct.
Agreed. Although lots of other languages have the same problem.
Another advantage of the English language is its large vocabulary. In German, there are quite a lot of words who have completely different meanings, and you have to know depending on the context which one is meant. In English, you know what's meant because there's a word for everything.
***RANT OVER***
Let me give you a few examples depending on article, case and tense:
I see a tree - Ich sehe einen Baum.
You see the shadow of a tree - Du siehst den Schatten eines Baumes.
You and Paul see the crown of a tree - Du und Paul seht die Krone eines Baumes.
We saw a green tree - Wir sahen einen grünen Baum.
You saw a green meadow - Du sahst eine grüne Wiese.
He saw trees - Er sah Bäume.
I give his tree a hug - Ich gebe seinem Baum eine Umarmung.
You give his cat a kick - Du gibst seiner Katze einen Tritt.
And so on.
So my point is, while your tree stays a tree, your see a see and your saw a saw, we have different words for those in almost every sentence.
Now tell me again: why is English hard to learn?
Really? That's a fairly common expression.WilliamRLBaker said:
Someone asks "Which shoes do you prefer"?
You reply "Those ones over there".
It's Slang that makes English hard. That's almost all English is now, There are tons of other reasons why it's overly difficult, but im not savvy enough on the subject to say any more than that. However, I have actually come to understand that learning Polish is THE most difficult to learn.
As a non-native English speaker I'll tell you its not that hard to learn. I didn't speak a word of English for the first nine and a half years of my life... I gotta say it wasn't hard at all to pick up. If you want a language with weird grammar try my native Russian which has 6 tenses or German which has 20 different ways of saying 'the.'
'One' just means 'the singular thing.' It makes perfect sense to have 'ones,' i.e. two singular things which designate any object or objects.
For those who moan about 'ough' being pronounced differently in English, let's just count them:
uff, ugh, or, oo, off - L*ough*borough, Loughbor*ough*, thought, through, cough. Five.
Now let's count how many things in French make the noise 'uhn':
un, en, ane, on, uns, ens, anes, ons, unt, ent, ant, ont, unts, ents, ants, onts.
Now put an H in front of all of those, and double the total because H isn't pronounced at the beginning of French words. Given that most people learn to speak languages first and then to write them, I reckon English is much easier - better to transfer many noises to one spelling than many spellings to one noise.
For those who moan about 'ough' being pronounced differently in English, let's just count them:
uff, ugh, or, oo, off - L*ough*borough, Loughbor*ough*, thought, through, cough. Five.
Now let's count how many things in French make the noise 'uhn':
un, en, ane, on, uns, ens, anes, ons, unt, ent, ant, ont, unts, ents, ants, onts.
Now put an H in front of all of those, and double the total because H isn't pronounced at the beginning of French words. Given that most people learn to speak languages first and then to write them, I reckon English is much easier - better to transfer many noises to one spelling than many spellings to one noise.
You know,I actually think its the hardest language to learn because its the language that most of the world tries to learn. If its the only language that someone has tried to learn, I suppose that automatically makes it the hardest one. Especially since your native language seems super easy in comparison.
Or even better, your house can be up in flames at the same time that it's burning down!nick n stuff said:
What about though, or hiccough? What about Slough (rhymes with cow)? Or, a more archaic word, hough (pronounced hock)?Ishamel said:
I'm aware of that. It usually ends up being the more common the word, the more irregular it gets, which is why most languages have their form of "to be" as an irregular verb. Another common one is to have.Ekonk said:
Its just that English has significantly more of these irregularities than most languages.
Japanese is the easiest to learn. Its because the grammatical rule are easy and never broken. Ice taken Japanese for years and found it easy as well.Julianking93 said:
Anyway OP its been said because English makes so many complex and strict grammatical rules that its hard to keep track of them all then add on the fact that is then turns around and breaks the rules. Like to make deer a plural you say deer or to make person a plural the word changes to people. Yet dogs is the proper plural to dog. Add in the fact that English barrows words from other languages and you get the most confusing language in the world. Don't even get me started on all of our punctuation. look at the two words affect and effect, they sounds the same. Year have two similar yet different meanings. To those that have been learning English all of our lives it seems easy if you set me in a grammar class and I can guarantee I'll be confused.
It can be icrebibly hard to learn partly due to all the consistencies and especially if it's the first language your learning which uses the latin alphabet (easier languages to learn first would be possibly French and Spanish). Not to mention the fact we tend to steal other country's words (such as entrepeneur or amateur, both were french words) and pass them off as our own.