Why do people think English is the hardest language to learn?
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I don't know, I speak english natively so it seems easy to me, we do have a lot of stupid grammatical rules, but so do a lot of other languages, at the moment i think the easiest I've actually tried to learn is ancient Greek but that's not really spoken or used anymore outside of classical history students and the like classicists and such so far as I know. (Although modern Greek is so far as I know connected to it in more ways than just the fact that they are spoken in the same area, Correct me if I'm wrong here, as much as I'd like to learn modern Greek I have trouble finding time to). As far as difficult languages go I have a professor who claims that the hardest to learn is Finnish ( I don't know the actual name of the language but i mean no offense) I've also heard a lot of people say that both Japanese and Chinese are the hardest. As for me the hardest one's I have ever tried to learn are French, Italian and Latin, I think those have to do with the way I think about it though...
Because English, when compared to Latin based languages such as French or German, has very few strict rules in its usage and even the rules we do tell ourselves have flaws (like i before e except after c [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_before_e ] ) and also the fact that it is a mongrel language with words borrowed from other languages like pyjama (indian), restaurant (french) even Ketchup is believed to be Cantonese.
Add to that the fact that English, Welsh, Irish, Scottish, American, Canadian, Australian etc? dialects all have words that contradict the meanings, spellings or pronunciations of the others ranging from minor to major.
English is usually only considered easy by people who speak it as a first language though general consensus is that Finnish is the hardest to learn as a second language.
Add to that the fact that English, Welsh, Irish, Scottish, American, Canadian, Australian etc? dialects all have words that contradict the meanings, spellings or pronunciations of the others ranging from minor to major.
English is usually only considered easy by people who speak it as a first language though general consensus is that Finnish is the hardest to learn as a second language.
1. No differentiation, morphologically, between verbs and nouns. Almost every other language differentiates one from the other somehow- in Latin, verbs end with -*re, where * is a vowel. Handful of exceptions. In German, most verbs end in -en. In Icelandic, most verb infinitives end in -a. In English, the only differentiation is in third person singular, where we add -s, and in "to be". Though adding the -s could be mistaken for a plural. So you don't have a real way to know if this is a noun or a verb, and since English syntax can be very variable, especially when you fuck around with your phrase and clause orders and nestings, context won't always give you a clue. So you have t learn every word with its meaning and whether it's a noun, verb, adjective, etc. Extra memorization, basically.
2. LOTS of irregular past tenses. Buy becomes bought, come becomes came, go becomes went, seek becomes sought, sink becomes sunk, eat becomes ate, etc. Generally, you can just tack -ed onto the end of a verb, though, and people will understand that you mean past tense, but it sounds really awkward. But hey, it works if you need to get your point across. But the high level of irregular past tenses is another thing people have to just plain memorize, no way around it really.
3. Surprisingly complex tense system when you look at all the ways to express a case. E.G.: I eat, I am eating, I do eat, I ate, I did eat, I have eaten, I was eating, I had eaten, I will eat, I will be eating, I will have eaten, I will have been eating, I will be about to eat, etc. Many, many ways to express somewhat subtle differences in tenses, and they could theoretically- though not that often practically- be used to create nightmare tenses (e.g. I will have had been about to be eating. It's confusing as hell to most people but it makes sense enough; however anyone who tries to use a construction like that ought to be slapped).
4. The smallest point, but spelling and pronunciation are WAY the fuck off from each other. Most languages don't have quite this problem- Russian, German, Latin, etc have fairly consistent pronunciation. But not English, where bought, through, enough, and though display the multiple pronunciations of the "-ough" cluster.
5. English speakers tend to not speak very good english in the first place, so it's almost like you're learning a different language anyways. Or at least, they don't speak very proper English. Not that the gap is massive, but there's enough of one that's got nothing to do with how fast they speak or so much how they pronounce it. It's mostly variation on word order, filler words like "uh" and "eh" and so on, and the like.
All in all, though, I've never met someone who had a lot of difficulty learning English even from a somewhat older (high school) age. It's just a lot of memorization, I guess. I'm a native English speaker though, so I can't quite speak for (ba-dum-psh) the actual learning difficulty of the language.
Also I would say that Japanese, Inuktitut, Ithkuil, probably Hungarian, and ǃXóõ are probably the hardest languages based on what I know of them and admittedly little actual studies in the languages. Respectively, because of three writing systems and opposite-branching syntax from most other languages, having like 800 rules but I grant almost no exceptions (not to mention and estimated 95% of words occur only once, ever, anywhere), having over 183 fucking ways to inflect any god damned word (seriously, look Ithkuil up. It's fucking nuts, and thank god it's a constructed language), having lotsa rules and a theoretical infinite word length and supposedly the ability to specify almost infinitely, and having 87 consonants and twnety vowels in one dialect and 58 consonants and 31 vowels in another dialect ALONG WITH FUCKING TONES AND LIKE 80+ CLICKS THAT MUST BE RIGHT.
I like languages. Just by the way.
2. LOTS of irregular past tenses. Buy becomes bought, come becomes came, go becomes went, seek becomes sought, sink becomes sunk, eat becomes ate, etc. Generally, you can just tack -ed onto the end of a verb, though, and people will understand that you mean past tense, but it sounds really awkward. But hey, it works if you need to get your point across. But the high level of irregular past tenses is another thing people have to just plain memorize, no way around it really.
3. Surprisingly complex tense system when you look at all the ways to express a case. E.G.: I eat, I am eating, I do eat, I ate, I did eat, I have eaten, I was eating, I had eaten, I will eat, I will be eating, I will have eaten, I will have been eating, I will be about to eat, etc. Many, many ways to express somewhat subtle differences in tenses, and they could theoretically- though not that often practically- be used to create nightmare tenses (e.g. I will have had been about to be eating. It's confusing as hell to most people but it makes sense enough; however anyone who tries to use a construction like that ought to be slapped).
4. The smallest point, but spelling and pronunciation are WAY the fuck off from each other. Most languages don't have quite this problem- Russian, German, Latin, etc have fairly consistent pronunciation. But not English, where bought, through, enough, and though display the multiple pronunciations of the "-ough" cluster.
5. English speakers tend to not speak very good english in the first place, so it's almost like you're learning a different language anyways. Or at least, they don't speak very proper English. Not that the gap is massive, but there's enough of one that's got nothing to do with how fast they speak or so much how they pronounce it. It's mostly variation on word order, filler words like "uh" and "eh" and so on, and the like.
All in all, though, I've never met someone who had a lot of difficulty learning English even from a somewhat older (high school) age. It's just a lot of memorization, I guess. I'm a native English speaker though, so I can't quite speak for (ba-dum-psh) the actual learning difficulty of the language.
Also I would say that Japanese, Inuktitut, Ithkuil, probably Hungarian, and ǃXóõ are probably the hardest languages based on what I know of them and admittedly little actual studies in the languages. Respectively, because of three writing systems and opposite-branching syntax from most other languages, having like 800 rules but I grant almost no exceptions (not to mention and estimated 95% of words occur only once, ever, anywhere), having over 183 fucking ways to inflect any god damned word (seriously, look Ithkuil up. It's fucking nuts, and thank god it's a constructed language), having lotsa rules and a theoretical infinite word length and supposedly the ability to specify almost infinitely, and having 87 consonants and twnety vowels in one dialect and 58 consonants and 31 vowels in another dialect ALONG WITH FUCKING TONES AND LIKE 80+ CLICKS THAT MUST BE RIGHT.
I like languages. Just by the way.
Who says this?
Learning another language isn't easy in general. However, I would say the difficulty of learning a language is relative to what language you start out with. Learning Japanese if you are Chinese would be drastically easier than learning Chinese if you are Spanish.
Learning another language isn't easy in general. However, I would say the difficulty of learning a language is relative to what language you start out with. Learning Japanese if you are Chinese would be drastically easier than learning Chinese if you are Spanish.
If you were born in a country of which its main language is English, obviously you are going to pick it up very easily since you hear it all around you. On the other hand if you came from a country such as Spain or Germany and you are trying to learn English it can be quite difficult. The reason being is because English is far more complicated than Spanish, German, Chinese, etc. Most languages out there tend to be more straight forward while the English language has VERY many variables that are involved. For example: there has many different spellings and meanings but sounds the same; there, their, they're. There are also tenses. For example: this, that, those, them. And then there are phonetics. Some examples would be Ph, Th, Sh, and Au. Most languages have very simple phonetics, like Spanish. Most Spanish letters sound exactly the way they are pronounced. Most of the exceptions tend to have an accent mark over it like this `.
All of this can be a bit overwhelming and hard to pick up to a foreigner trying to learn English as a second language. This is generally why some foreigners have very heavy accents when speaking the language. The same goes for people who try to learn a foreign language when their first language is English.
All of this can be a bit overwhelming and hard to pick up to a foreigner trying to learn English as a second language. This is generally why some foreigners have very heavy accents when speaking the language. The same goes for people who try to learn a foreign language when their first language is English.
English is usually only considered easy by people who speak it as a first language though general consensus is that Finnish is the hardest to learn as a second language.[/quote said:... And considering that there is about 5 million of us, not very useful, also,
the reason english is the hardest language to learn is because english has little to no set structure. rather than come up with a new language, people merely took latin, german, and every other language in existence, and combined them all to form the bastard child we call english languageKragg said:
I'm sorry if that is the case. I never intended to make you feel the fool. I've been trying to teach myself Japanese for a year or so now so I was applying my knowledge to your statement. In fairness, I used to think that as well, so your conclusion wasn't wrong as such. It was correct given your level of information. Again, I'm sorry if I showed you up, it was not my intention.MikailCaboose said:
This is because those two languages are two of the most borrowed off languages in the world. They are also two of the most highly spoken languages in the world. For example a lot of Canadians speak French, and the whole southern half of the Americas speaks some form of Spanish if not Spanish itself.KeyMaster45 said:
Think about this: Take a bunch of random letters, say, "ghoti." in English, the "gh" sound is sometimes pronounced as "f," (as in "enough") the o is sometimes pronounced "ih" (as in "women"), and "ti" can be read as "sh" (inflation, creation, etc.) Thus, we can see how hard the English language is to learn if "ghoti" can make the same sound as "fish."
All languages are equally easy to learn. If they weren't then infants would have more trouble acquiring the more difficult languages.
The difficulty that comes from acquiring languages later in life comes from which ever language(s) you first learned.
That said the number of exceptions to rules and large number of morphemes in the English language contribute to the difficulty that non-native speakers can face when attempting to learn.
The difficulty that comes from acquiring languages later in life comes from which ever language(s) you first learned.
That said the number of exceptions to rules and large number of morphemes in the English language contribute to the difficulty that non-native speakers can face when attempting to learn.
