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

[Azaradel]

Since when is English even remotely hard to learn?

I studied Spanish for some 5 years and I always found that much harder... and more boring. Though maybe I found it harder because I didn't have the motivation to learn it? I dunno.

I've studied English since I was around 7, though

 

[Outright Villainy]

Americans just kinda went bat-shit crazy with the language and have bastardized it enough to where its nearly considered a new language. So, yeah that's your "wtf?" fact for the day kiddies.

I find that a little hard to believe. American English has replaced a good few words sure, but the structure still applies wholesale, and a brittish and an American would have absolutely no trouble understanding each other, save for a few clarifications. It's just a different Dialect.
Hell, I know many dialects even that are radically different. If I wanted to use my Munster/Connaught Irish when talking to someone speaking Ulster Irish I'd find them completely unintelligible. Half the words are pronounced completely differently, and those are the ones that are spelt the same.
Uk English and American English are barely different.

 

[HSIAMetalKing]

English is among the easiest languages to learn, really, it's the reason it's considered the "international" language. Maybe it's "complicated", but it sure as hell is not "hard to learn" by any stretch.

Ahh, no this is rather far from the truth. As I learned in a humanities class the language of trade follows the dominant global power at the time. Due to the fact for a few hundred years Britain was the dominant the language of trade became English, and since after Britain was unseated as a global power the US (which thanks to its British origins spoke English and became the dominant power) continued to use English and thus English has remained the standard language of trade and commerce.

If like everyone is saying China should become the dominant global power it wouldn't take very long (well on the scale of time where history is concerned) for the standard language of trade and commerce to become Chinese.

I'd argue that "Chinese" (Mandarin) won't become the standard language of trade and commerce because, although it is true that China is "on the rise" economically or whatever, their language isn't nearly as involved in globalization as English is. China isn't exporting its language.

 

[snowman6251]

snip

Like I said, I AM a native English speaker. I have no trouble speaking it and following all of it's little quirks and oddities. That being said however by studying other languages and learning their rules its made me appreciate how much of a cluster-fuck English is. We have too many irregularities and inconsistencies and we have this amazing ability to never follow our own rules.

Also I compared it to Asian languages because a lot of people consider those to be the hardest languages and it can be understandable why people might say that. Written Chinese is a pretty major "oh shit" and Japanese is the same since despite having TWO perfectly good alphabets they decided to borrow about 300 (I think that's the right number) or so Chinese symbols and give them all multiple pronunciations. I can understand why people might find that hard (although learning another alphabet isn't actually hard. I learned both Japanese alphabets in about a week or so just dicking around at school) but when it comes to grammar most other languages stick to their thing.

Its not that English doesn't have rules its that we have too many rules/exceptions.

"I eated!" NO! English doesn't care if the past tense of all the other words ends with "-ed" you didn't "eated" you "ate".

 

[AllLagNoFrag]

Ok I asked people that have French as their native tongue and they say it is hard because of exceptions to rules, a little bit of word sounding problem and no genders for words. And about the people saying Japanese is hard to learn, try Chinese, not speaking, writing AND speaking. The writing in Chinese is pure memory. In Japanese, you learn Hiragana, Katakana and as much Kanji as you can which are Chinese characters with different meanings, and you are set.

Having the opportunity to learn Chinese (speak fluently, cant write for shit), Japanese (For a little bit, got hiragana and katakana down with abit of speaking), ENglish which I find easy (first language) and French, Chinese is by far the hardest to master overall. It is pure memory work. I cannot say which is the hardest language out of ALL of them but, out of these 4.

 

[Broady Brio]

Isn't Japanese like learning 4 at once?

One for talking to younger people.
One for talking to friends.
One for talking formally.
And one for talking to elders?

Or am I just making shit up?

EDIT: Isn't because of punctuation?

 

[Burningsok]

It's because our language has so much lingo in it.

 

[octafish]

MANDARIN MANDARIN MANDARIN! There is no language called Chinese. There are Chinese characters, yes, but a bunch of different languages. You might as well say someone speaks Indian!

 

[Diligent]

It's because English is taught with rules that alot of the time don't apply.
"i" before "e" except after "c", for example, is wrong about half the time.
The double use of apostrophes, that "it's hot" - meaning "it is hot" and "it's bag" - implying the possesion "it" has of the bag.

English has rules that aren't consistent, that's one reason why it's hard to learn. I'm sure there are many more.

This is so true, and stupid teaching tools like "Hooked on Phonics" are a load of crap, because it is not a phonetic based language.
If it was, it would be called "Huked on fonicks"

 

[manic_depressive13]

As a lot of other users have said, English doesn't have strict rules, and is therefore difficult to learn. Look at though, through, trough, etc. They all have the same suffix, yet the pronunciation is completely different. It is probably the least phonetic language out there. Even the French, who sometimes don't even pronounce half the word they've spelt out, at least apply it consistently.

 

[Kragg]

Where did this come from? i saw it in the "J in Japan" topic and i have heard it here so many times, but i can't find any evidence of it at all.

I have seen diffferent trains of thought on how too look at it, complexity of vocabulary and tenses, speaking as a native, phonetics, but none of these put english as the hardest.

Where did this come from? help !

seeing as i made the "j for japan" thread, figured I'll answer this. English is the most difficult language because so many words have separate meanings. there are 3 different spellings for the word, "to" all with separate meanings. synonyms make if difficult, as your told one way how to do it, but you hear people using it another.

plus, you can make up words and people will still understand them.

take the prefix "un" the root word "forsaken" and the suffix "able" and you can make "unforsakenable." not a word, but you get what their trying to say. that, and they fact that it's spawned several different variants over several different countries make it difficult to learn unless you learn ti from birth.

everyone wants their language to be the most difficult, but English is really the only one able to back it up.

you and most other people base this on exceptions to the rule, but most other langauges have these too you know. For example french have basic rules for conjugation, but for every one that follows it there is one that deviates from it. this doesn't make it harder.

My personal take on it is this, you can never pick 1 language that is harder than others, it depends on what your native tongue is, depending on that it maight be easier or harder to learn other languages like it, like thee germanic ones or with tongtwisting sounds like it, with differing alphabets.

 

[ntw3001]

The only people I've heard say this are native English speakers. I've spoken to people who actually did have to learn English and it's unanimous, yes English is easy to learn. I can only speak for other European languages, but there's relatively little of the gender and case trouble that tends to trip people up in, say, French or German. Generally, the rules are similar but there's far less trivia (a few corner cases such as how to correctly pluralise 'child' doesn't compare to having to find out whether every single noun is masculine, feminine or neuter). Spelling, though, I'd assume is a tricky part. English doesn't really conform to any hard and fast spelling/sound convention the way German does. It's not as bad as Celtic languages like Welsh though.

 

[Palademon]

I do think that it would be hard for others to learn, since there are so many synonyms, and ways to phrase things. Also words that seem to be pronounced randomly compared to how look.

Most people seem to be bias in saying it's easy, just because they grew up with it and it's oe of the most common languages.

 

[ColorfulObscurity]

Isn't Japanese like learning 4 at once?

One for talking to younger people.
One for talking to friends.
One for talking formally.
And one for talking to elders?

Or am I just making shit up?

Pretty much. There's also one for women and one for men.
And then there's the shit load of dialects.

 

[HSIAMetalKing]

snip

Like I said, I AM a native English speaker. I have no trouble speaking it and following all of it's little quirks and oddities. That being said however by studying other languages and learning their rules its made me appreciate how much of a cluster-fuck English is. We have too many irregularities and inconsistencies and we have this amazing ability to never follow our own rules.

Also I compared it to Asian languages because a lot of people consider those to be the hardest languages and it can be understandable why people might say that. Written Chinese is a pretty major "oh shit" and Japanese is the same since despite having TWO perfectly good alphabets they decided to borrow about 300 (I think that's the right number) or so Chinese symbols and give them all multiple pronunciations. I can understand why people might find that hard (although learning another alphabet isn't actually hard. I learned both Japanese alphabets in about a week or so just dicking around at school) but when it comes to grammar most other languages stick to their thing.

Its not that English doesn't have rules its that we have too many rules/exceptions.

"I eated!" NO! English doesn't care if the past tense of all the other words ends with "-ed" you didn't "eated" you "ate".

I would suggest that the reason that you think that English is more difficult to learn is because you are a native speaker-- all arguments aside, I think it can be objectively shown that English is among the easiest languages to learn. Some non-native English speakers in this thread have claimed as much, because learning English is mostly about learning vocabulary and remembering those irregularities you mentioned. So what if they don't all follow a stringent pattern-- you might think that that would make the language more difficult to learn, but it doesn't. It's all about grammar when it comes to difficulty in language-learning, because after speaking a certain way your whole life it becomes difficult to learn to order your thoughts in a different syntax. English grammar is a simple object-verb dealie.

On that same theme, it doesn't take much time to memorize an alphabet, as you mentioned. But alphabets don't help you speak a language at all. Japanese and Mandarin (not "Chinese) are difficult for many reasons-- I think that all of them are related to the fact that you are forced to think your thoughts in a different paradigm and your words in a different direction. It's also difficult to bridge the gap between their unique symbols and the common, Latin-style alphabet many other languages use.

 

[crimson5pheonix]

I hear that complaint quite a bit around here. I always thought Spanish was harder since it has something like 7 tenses and you have to know what gender a word is...

 

[Burwood123]

English has: Tenses. the word 'the' conjectives stuff of that nature, granted other languages are harder, but japanese, the forum you visited, all those things aren't in the language. except for tenses japanese has those,..

 

[kurupt87]

It's because English is taught with rules that alot of the time don't apply.
"i" before "e" except after "c", for example, is wrong about half the time.
The double use of apostrophes, that "it's hot" - meaning "it is hot" and "it's bag" - implying the possesion "it" has of the bag.

English has rules that aren't consistent, that's one reason why it's hard to learn. I'm sure there are many more.

I do believe when it comes to possession with the word "its" the apostrophe is not needed, as the apostrophe is only used to shorten "It is"

OP:It's mostly cause it's a language with lots of rules that contradict themselves

Whoops. In my quest to show a rule that is confusing I used an example that contradicts the possesion rule. Appropriate time to make a mistake it may be, it's still annoying though damnit.

A better example for those interested would be:
Ben's fucked up. -> Ben has fucked up.
Ben's fuck up. -> The fuck up belongs to Ben.

 

[Zenn3k]

English is the most difficult language because it has no REAL rules, every rule in english has an exception, then you have multiple instances of words that sound the same, yet mean different things. Their, There, They're for example.

Also, a large portion of NATIVE English speaking American's can't even properly speak the language, so obviously its more difficult than you'd think; or those people are just really stupid.

Japanese is actually a much similar spoken language than English. Japanese is only difficult due to the alphabet (all 3 of them) and the different way things are said depending on formality.

English is also the only language without a plural form of "you", slang has invented "ya'll" and "you guys" to compensate.