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

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

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 !

English starts off easy and then gets harder. It is easy to learn but hard to get 100% as there are many little grammar rules and punctuation which is hard to get. Also a lot of pronunciations can differ between words with the same spelling or can be similar with words of vastly different spelling. Although all in all it is not that hard.

 

[Wicky_42]

Then there's the issue with plurals. "Octopuses? Don't you mean octopi?" "Deers? I believe you meant to say 'deer'." There's just so many rules with exceptions in english, and almost no explanation as to why they exist.

Well, Octopi is because it's a Greek or Latin word, and so borrows from their grammatical rules. But at least there's only one gender of the word, so that's only one exception to pick up and not a whole table of them

It's actually should be octopodes - it is a Greek noun and would decline in that way if people weren't so lazy when learning English (hence octopuses being the accepted form). The problem with English plurals is that the words being pluralized come from so many different languages that people give up on learning the original way and come up with their own methods.

Huh, well, you learn something new every day

 

[Alpha Centauri]

It's pronunciation that is the killer. We have silent letters like in the words: knight, pteric, design etc

Additionally pronunciation isn't consistent. Think of the word "through". Now think of the word "rough". You take off the first 2 letters and it's a totally different sounding word. Why isn't "through" really pronounced "thruff"?

Additionally, we have words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently. Look at "lead" (as in a lead pipe) or "lead" (as in lead me to paradise).

You are just focusing on idiosyncrasies of the language versus the other flaws inherent in the learning.

Source [http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060613180914AAd0atX]

 

[Alon Shechter]

It is super hard if you are learning GANGSTA-English.
THAT! Is some real shit you got yourself into.
But proper sense-making English , the sort of thing we type here , is quite easy when focusing good enough.
I myself learned English when i was 5 years old by myself from a video game. (Of course , i got some help on the side but lets keep it quiet)

 

[HTID Raver]

sound wise, as in just making the sounds to words are much easier than most other languages. look at french or german.

 

[Bluesclues]

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!

Actually you're wrong also, it's Cantonese. Mandarin is the second largest language spoken in China. Cantonese is the first. Or at least, that's what I was taught in Global Studies...

EDIT: Forgot to make an OT: I have also heard that hardest languages are as follows:

1)Mandarin Chinese
2)English
3)German


That's just what I've heard though. And being a native (American) English speaker, I do have to agree that because of all the exceptions to the many rules, the English language earns its rightful place as one of the more difficult languages. I work for an AML company where we constantly get calls around the world from customers who have English as a second (or lower) language, and listening to some of them speak when they call in the customer service line makes me cringe at times.

 

[Azure-Supernova]

I never really had trouble with speaking English. It's just writing in English that's the *****.

On the other hand if anyone can explain why inanimate objects are assigned genders in some other languages, I'd be very grateful.

Reminds me of Lee Mack...

"It's not femenine is it. It's an 'Egg Custard'. Why do I need to know the sex of an egg custard? I want to eat it; not fuck it."

 

[Mstrswrd]

It is said as so because of the way in which it can be used. Other languages tend to have, for one, not nearly as many words. The dictionaries of other languages, for years and years, did not need to be updated every year until English came around, and started taking words, roots, etc, from every other language to make new words for new things, make new words for old things, and just generally make new words.

Also, compared to most of the languages in the world, English is backwards. It's why someone (my Grandfather) whose native language is Greek can learn Spanish damn near perfectly in no time at all (about 2 years), and yet, to this day, he still has some trouble with English (He's lived in the U.S. for over 40 years).

 

[Vrach]

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 !

You misread that post, I thought the person said that as well before I re-read it. English is one of the easiest languages to learn, mostly cause it's the current "international language" and used just about everywhere so you're usually surrounded by it.

 

[doodger]

Learn french and come back. Seriously, 3rd grade french is harder than university level english. There are tons of exceptions, and you have to use a special dictionary for the verbs, because there are 70 Bloody ways to conjugate them. By comparison, english is a straightforward logical and simple language.

 

[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 !

You misread that post, I thought the person said that as well before I re-read it. English is one of the easiest languages to learn, mostly cause it's the current "international language" and used just about everywhere so you're usually surrounded by it.

still loads of people that think that way, as seen in this topic. but the complexity of the language stands apart from how drenched we are in it though, so it is easier or harder depending on how much we come into contact with it, but is it a hard language overall, compared to others. this topic has gone way of into other directions anyway

 

[bobknowsall]

Guys, most native English-speakers can't speak the bloody language properly. It's not an easy to language to master, and it's doubly hard when you're learning it as a second language.

 

[GrinningManiac]

I have also heard that it's hard

I suppose when you look at the comparative "simpleness" of Spanish, which cuts out all the (suprisingly easy to deal without) words in English sentences, it's probably harder

That and the funny 'ghost' letters, like the 'g' in Light and Night and whatnot.

 

[hermes]

I actually think english is among the easiest. Romantic languages like italian and spanish are far more difficult because each verb has more than 10 different forms, while english only has 3, at most (with the only exception being "to be", but that is still not even close). Also, things in some languages have gender, so a chair in spanish is feminine while a tree is masculine, as opposed to english were they are only "it". That part is almost a rule of thumb.

But, in the end, it depends on which languange is your native language. If you are an english native speaker, you should have less problems trying to learn german or dutch. If you are an spanish native speaker, you should have less problems trying to learn italian or portuguese. A curious exception seems to be japanese trying to learn english, since they got many words from that language already.

 

[Carlston]

Never heard that before.

I've only ever heard that Japanese is the hardest language to learn.

I heard the language is not to hard. It's the reading and writing of kanji (sp?) that is overwhelming.

 

[Bluesclues]

I thought CHinese was the hardest.

You mean Mandarin? Or maybe Cantonese? Or maybe the 10,000 other dialects The smaller villages and provinces in China use?



(psst, no such thing as Chinese as a language)

 

[silentrob77]

Ok, Japanese is not THAT hard to learn people. Yes okay kanji takes some memorizing, but the patterns and rules are much more simple than in english. I mean lets compare a simple phrase:

Engligh: (Q)Are you alright?
(A)Yea, I'm okay.

Japanese: (Q) Daijyoubu?
(A) Un, daijyoubu.

Its the same word!!!
Yes I know there is "keigo" and all that, but the actual language of English is more complex. The toughest part of Japanese is the context, and like I mentioned the honorifics. Oh and counting sucks too!

 

[carpathic]

Supposedly it is because we have so many words that sound the same and mean different things, our grammatical rules have exceptions (except 8 as I recall), we change word meanings entirely by using surrounding words, we speak in aphoristic statements rather than ones terminated solely by logic and there are supposedly like 52 other things.

 

[hermes]

I never really had trouble with speaking English. It's just writing in English that's the *****.
On the other hand if anyone can explain why inanimate objects are assigned genders in some other languages, I'd be very grateful.

Its mostly a rule of thumb. In spanish, most inanimate objects whose names end in "a", "e" or "i" are feminine, every other are masculine. But there are some exceptions.
It is not like they "have" gender, but they have different words to refer to objects wheter they are masculine (lo, los) or feminine (la, las), as opossed to in english (it, them).

 

[2fish]

English is easy to learn, hard to master. We have so many odd rules and just weird words. Depending on where you live you English will change too. I live in Arizona, USA and we have many Spanish influences in our language.

English was made by putting a bunch of languages in a meat grinder and pounding it into one. The depending on where the English was place it absorbed other languages into it.

English is the fucking Borg collective.