Why do people think English is the hardest language to learn?
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i have to agree with this person, Finnish is the hardest language to learn or even have the chance to understand.Cyan. said:Im not interested in reading over the whole thread, but Finnish mocks your English language.
The difficulty you experience learning english is based on your mother tounge. You speak Norwegian or Swedish? English is a walk in the park.
Try learning Finnish.... You could probobly cound on one hand the number of foreginers who speak finnish fluently.
Finnish uses a complex form of morphology.
There are 2253 forms for EVERY verb in the finnish language.
The written language is totally different to the spoken (as in, the words themselves are different).
However the real agony comes from modifying words into compount words.... This is a good example.
The weirdest thing for most foreigners is probably... Universal verb conjugation. In English we use:
He saw.
They saw.
We saw.
In a language like Spanish they have different conjugations for each pronoun like:
Nostros vamos: We go
Ella va: She goes
Yo voy: I go
Thats probably the hardest. Using one verb to satisfy allll pronouns.And they may have different conjugations for present, past, and future verbs. We do not.
Language lesson over! Class dissmissed.
He saw.
They saw.
We saw.
In a language like Spanish they have different conjugations for each pronoun like:
Nostros vamos: We go
Ella va: She goes
Yo voy: I go
Thats probably the hardest. Using one verb to satisfy allll pronouns.And they may have different conjugations for present, past, and future verbs. We do not.
Language lesson over! Class dissmissed.
No eipä vissiin. 70% of (supposedly hard) French is just English pronounced differently, but Finnish... Good luck with that, hah. It is so unrelated to anything else that I just tell people that it came from space... And after they hear me talking to my parents on the phone, they tend to agree...
Cyan. said:
It's not. The Scandinavian languages are alot harder, and maybe the Chinese ones too. That being said, Mediterranean languages seem to be alot easier than English, and more people speak those than any other set.
I'd say as a language on its own English probably is among the hardest European languages, I don't think you can really compare European and Asian languages so I'll leave them out. But given how English is everywhere on the internet and on games it probably is easier to learn because people are exposed to it more.
Take a first year course at a university in types of English and you'll soon see how amazingly messed up English is. We have rules with exception lists a kilometer long (i.e. never end a sentence with a preposition, which is such an old Latin rule people don't even give a damn anymore). Phonetically, English has the lowest correspondence between what you see and what you say. Try explaining the words 'through' and 'trough' to a foreigner. English imports many words form other languages as well, tossing the spelling off even more: a result of being invaded by Germanic people and then people we can liken to French.
It's all very, very messy.
It's all very, very messy.
Em try Irish or the Eastern Euro languages or the Scandinavian or the Mediterranean. English is definitely among the easiest bar the punctuation and advanced grammar.Sapient Pearwood said:
English is easy as shit. My native language is Danish, I speak English fluently, and I'm learning German in school. Of the three languages, I'd say English is easiest to learn.
And I disagree with a previous statement I saw somewhere up there: "English is harder because it has no rules". German has a shit ton of rules, and that's 5x harder than English.
While Danish has quite the same amount of rules as English, (for example bending of verbs and adjectives etc), most vocals(A,E,I,O,U,Y) in the Danish language sound phonetically different, and more guttural than they do in English. Also, Danish has three extra vocals: Æ, Ø and Å.
This makes it very hard for people who don't naturally speak a Scandinavian language, to learn Danish.
English is easy dude.
And I disagree with a previous statement I saw somewhere up there: "English is harder because it has no rules". German has a shit ton of rules, and that's 5x harder than English.
While Danish has quite the same amount of rules as English, (for example bending of verbs and adjectives etc), most vocals(A,E,I,O,U,Y) in the Danish language sound phonetically different, and more guttural than they do in English. Also, Danish has three extra vocals: Æ, Ø and Å.
This makes it very hard for people who don't naturally speak a Scandinavian language, to learn Danish.
English is easy dude.
I really don't think English is hard to learn. I live in Denmark and English was the first language I learned (Without help from my useless teacher so I learned it by playing games and such) Somehow German seems very hard to learn for me even though the "rules" of the language is more simple and consistent as compared to Danish.
We have a lot of words that sound exactly the same. Even spelled exactly the same. With completely different meanings
The Train will hit you. Train your dog. Train of thought.
You have to think of the context of the sentence to figure out which version of "Train" the person was referring to. And this is far harder to do than you think. We've done it all our lives. We're use to it. Foreigners are use to a much simpler languages where everything actually has its own word.
The Train will hit you. Train your dog. Train of thought.
You have to think of the context of the sentence to figure out which version of "Train" the person was referring to. And this is far harder to do than you think. We've done it all our lives. We're use to it. Foreigners are use to a much simpler languages where everything actually has its own word.
Like many others have said, english is a bastard language. My spanish teacher explained to us a few times that, while most other languages were more purposefully structured and thought out, english just more evolved from a ton of localised dialects and other mush. the result being, a language that has rules and then more instances which are exceptions to that rule than those that actually follow the rule.
Whereas most other languages were constructed, english evolved somewhat "naturally". And is still evolving.
So in short, it's considered the hardest language to learn (something i have also heard from many teachers) because it's rules are not as cut and dry as with other languages.
I think...
Whereas most other languages were constructed, english evolved somewhat "naturally". And is still evolving.
So in short, it's considered the hardest language to learn (something i have also heard from many teachers) because it's rules are not as cut and dry as with other languages.
I think...
It's not the hardest, though it's a rather difficult language to learn if you aren't native. Mostly due to the fact that nothing in the English language remains consistent. There's an exception to just about every supposed 'rule' English has.