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

[Triple G]

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 is very easy and sounds totally harmless. In comparison, German sounds "harder" and more "aggressive" than English, so my German friend was told while he was in England, and as same friend told me, Russian sounds even more aggressive and hard. One time, my best friend was at my place and my father came up to me and we had a small conversation in Russian. As my best friend is German he didn't understand a thing, but at the end he asked if my father and me had an argument. As we weren't, he was really surprised because it sounded like it.

 

[Elburzito]

It's not the hardest in my opinion, although it's not the easiest either (I found Italian MUCh easier to learn). The verbs are quite different from most languages I think.

 

[TailstheHedgehog]

English is a crazy language, just look at 'their' and 'there'. They sound exactly the same but apply to totally different contexts. In some other language there would be a prefix or something instead of just spelling it stupidly.

 

[Elburzito]

Try hungarian. That's a really hard language, one of the hardest of all.

Nah, I think Finnish and Maltese are harder languages.

 

[Captain Pancake]

Because it's an incredibly fickle language grammar wise. Almost any applicable rule to english grammar is broken half the time, like the "i before e" thing (except after c), then there's words like weird. It's also to do with all the different verbs and word orders. Compared to German, English is a fucking enigma machine. Although it really depends what your first language is, as English and German are derived from the same base language its easier for Germans to learn english and vice versa, but French and spanish people may have a harder time of it but can learn each other's languages pretty well.

 

[Cyan.]

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.

*image snip*

i have to agree with this person, Finnish is the hardest language to learn or even have the chance to understand.

holy hell man, what does that even mean? (the image word)

Uhhhh..... I cant really explain because i dont even really know.

I mean i can read it, but i dont know the english words or what the finnish words mean...

It is some kind of gearbox friction locking oil....... or something?

Any Finnish motor mechanics? Little help?



Also let me show you some of the largest words i can think of.


atomiydinenergiareaktorigeneraattorilauhduttajaturbiiniratasvaihde

Or maybe lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas?

Perhaps epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän?

Actually, epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän is a sentence contained within a word. I mentioned Finnish excessive morpholgy. Fins modify the nominal and verb to inflect meaning, instead of using particles like "a" "an" "this" "the".

Someone else wrote this, alow me to copypasta it for you to shed some light.

järjestelmä = system
järjestelmällinen = systematic
järjestelmällisyys = systematicness
järjestelmällistyttää = to make a thing systematic
järjestelmällistyttämättömyys = to not to make a thing systematic
järjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsä = with his/her ability to not to make a thing systematic
järjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkään = not even with his/her ability to not to make a thing systematic
järjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänkö = not even with his/her ability to not to make a thing systematic?
järjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän = doubting: not even with his/her ability to not to make a thing systematic
epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän = doubting: not even with his/her ability to not to make a thing unsystematic

 

[Seneschal]

Ugro-Finnic languages in general are rather difficult. If I remember correctly, depending on the language, they have 12-13 grammatical cases, while most latin-based Indoeuropean languages have 6-7. English in theory has zero.

Balto-Slavic languages, on the other hand, are notoriously difficult to pronounce because of their consonant groups. Take, for example, the russian zdravstvujte.

If you are looking for impossible languages, those with polysynthetic morphology (e.g. the Eskimo-Aleut family, Native American languages) are really alien to most speakers - they may or may not recognize phrases, and usually have a gigantic number of morphemes per word, and sometimes there's no difference between a phrase and a word.

An example from Wiki - this is from Classical Ainu, northern Japan:
Usaopuspe aejajkotujmasiramsujpa.
"I keep swaying my heart afar and toward myself over various rumors." (i.e., I wonder about various rumors.)
The first "word" is "various rumors". The second one is everything else.

EDIT: Oh right, I forgot about Hopi, popularized by the whole Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Can any of you imagine a language where there is no linear concept of time, and tenses are instead expressed in cycles? It only understands time in terms of "what has happened" and "what is expected/meant to happen."

Anyway, it's no use discussing it. There are currently around 6,900 languages, so if there's one that is the hardest for you, you've probably never even heard of it.

 

[Witty-Name]

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?

Not quite. Japanese does have several levels of politeness, with the rules of usage depending on social standing. However it's usually more a case of using longer versions of the same word to make them more polite, or dropping gramatical elements from casual spoken sentences if they're not strictly necessary to be understood. For instance 食べる taberu is the Japanese equivalent of the verb "to eat", in it's polite form it becomes 食べま tabemasu. In a sentence ケーキを食べます　keeki wo tabemasu " eat cake" might be shortened to ケーキ食べる　keeki taberu. Almost everything follows the same system, as opposed to English (can't comment on how easy or difficult it English to learn though).

 

[Mockingjay]

I before E except after...

errr...

Most things.

 

[Seneschal]

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?

Not quite. Japanese does have several levels of politeness, with the rules of usage depending on social standing. However it's usually more a case of using longer versions of the same word to make them more polite, or dropping gramatical elements from casual spoken sentences if they're not strictly necessary to be understood. For instance 食べる taberu is the Japanese equivalent of the verb "to eat", in it's polite form it becomes 食べま tabemasu. In a sentence ケーキを食べます　keeki wo tabemasu " eat cake" might be shortened to ケーキ食べる　keeki taberu. Almost everything follows the same system, as opposed to English (can't comment on how easy or difficult it English to learn though).

Yup, most languages tend to have some sort of honorifics. Japanese and Korean obviously go a bit overboard on the whole thing, but perhaps it's just that English is a little impolite. I know I would feel awkward referring to an older person with "you", when in Croatian, Polish Russian, or most things with Latin grammar it would be inappropriate to refer to her in anything but plural ("vi"/"wy"/"vy"/"vos"), in Italian in the female third person ("lei"), etc.

It does make English a lot simpler, though native speakers then have problems when learning foreign languages. Usually, if you just go around and use the equivalent of "you", you sound rude.

 

[Tekkawarrior]

The only people that think English is the hardest language are people who only speak English, clearly not many people think it's the hardest, and it definitely isn't.

 

[Cinnamonfloss]

Ive heard of this a lot.
I had a dutch friend who said it was pretty easy, but he had learnt it alongside dutch when he was younger.
My dad who was born and raised in korea can speak english, but it just isnt..fluent, after all of these years hes been learning it.
I think english is an easy language to understand, and easy to learn the very basics. But For proper fluent english I think it must be really hard. English is always changing itself over time.
I bet the current english language now is even different to, say, english in jsut the 80's.

 

[Buzz Killington_v1legacy]

English in theory has zero.

Not quite. English has lost its case system almost entirely, but there are vestiges of it in the pronouns--nominative-case he versus objective-case him, for example. All the other functions that grammatical cases serve have been pretty much replaced with word order and prepositions, though.

 

[deadguynotyetburied]

I'd been under the impression that Chinese was the hardest, though I hadn't inquired into Japanese. I do know English is not at all easy. Of course, I'm from California, and we routinely deal with people who are trying with varying degrees of enthusiasm to acquire the language. While the vowel sounds give a great deal of trouble to native Spanish speakers, they're usually understandable when speaking. I think they have more trouble understanding the language when it's spoken to them. I suspect the hardest part of learning English would be learning to read and write. If the language itself is a hodge podge of pieces borrowed from more sources than are really healthy, the spelling is worse.

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

Its just inconsistent, and has many pointless rules. I just showcased one, in fact; you're meant to use an apostrophe in contractions, except for 'its'.

 

[deadguynotyetburied]

One of my favorite little inconsistencies:

Get the gel and give it to Ginger.

 

[BlumiereBleck]

IDK it is pretty easy to me

 

[Platypus3224]

I didn't know it was the hardest to learn

 

[Flee the Cities]

Its just inconsistent, and has many pointless rules. I just showcased one, in fact; you're meant to use an apostrophe in contractions, except for 'its'.

yea and you even managed to do it incorrectly. "It is"= "it's". "Its" is possessive. Heh, english owns yet another.