People who say English is the hardest language to learn.

Atletico56

What are they basing this on?

The people who I've heard say this can only speak English, how would they know?

Frank Black

It's almost unpossible to learn.

camel jockey

We may never know.

kylith

It's difficult because its borrowed so much from so many other languages that there's a wide variety of inconsistent spelling and pronunciation.

I'd say that Asian languages are harder to learn, particularly Chinese because it relies heavily on inflection to give meaning.

Tangatagamadda Chaddabinga Bonga Bungo

The Japanese can take their symbols and lump off with the prize of hardest language to learn okay.

Tangatagamadda Chaddabinga Bonga Bungo

English can be quite difficult to master.

bring
brɪŋ
verb
1.
take or go with (someone or something) to a place.

I bringing it, I do be bringing it, I will brought it.

The King of Moo

It's generally easy to master the basics, as the grammar is fairly simple.

Pronunciation is tough because we have words that from many languages with different principles of pronunciation.

Some tenses like the perfect tenses are tough to learn as they don't have equivalents in other languages or are used differently.

And then you have phrasal verbs which are very hard to learn, as they usually have no relation to the main verb that forms them. "Give up, give in, give out to" have no similarity to "give."

And prepositions like "to," "of" and "in" are used very differently compared to their equivalents in other languages.

So it's easy to learn the basics, but impossible to master.

gramar

As a person who teaches english in my spare time I can say that it is a difficult language to learn. Whether it's the most difficult I don't know.

English is a very abused language. People give words all sorts of meanings and twists that make them very difficult to understand. If we stuck to correct and proper English it would be mush easier but there are so many variants of words and expressions between different areas and even different generations that it must be very difficult to follow for non-native speakers.

Even the alphabet isn't easy as depending on what letters preceed or follow another the sound can change and this causes a lot of difficulties.

Cee-Jay-Cee

My three year old daughter can carry on a full conversation with people.
18 months ago she only had a few words so it's not that difficult if a 2 year old can master is within 18 months.

force eleven

I'LL have a row with you over this, and then you can row your boat over to the nearest Island and plant a row of vegetables. OK?

zl1whqvjs75cdy

Half the people I know who claim English as their first language can barely speak it, never mind write coherently in it. *Checks post furiously for errors.*

squirrelohara

CJC999 wrote: »

My three year old daughter can carry on a full conversation with people.
18 months ago she only had a few words so it's not that difficult if a 2 year old can master is within 18 months.

That's true. I often see many 5 or 6 year olds that barely have a word of English. Fair play to her.

OnTheCouch

Well let's be honest, it is fairly easy to learn, it's an extremely 'user-friendly' language. This is partly due to how prevalent it is in modern-day life (people who cannot speak it, still often get exposed to it) and the fact it's seen as the essential language to learn to get anywhere in life. In addition to these factors, I firmly believe that in comparison to say Latin languages, English is quite easy to pick up, in other words it's quite straightforward to get to a rudimentary level fairly quickly. The verbs for instance are extremely straightforward, at least regarding the most common tenses and there are many popular expressions which instantly come to mind through exposure to the media. Therefore, I think initially, it's reasonably simple to move through the language levels in English rapidly.

However, the problems tend to arrive all of a sudden at the 'proficient level' stage or B2-C1 from the Common European Framework. As Kylith says, there are huge inconsistencies in spelling and pronunciation, which can be baffling for a non-native speaker. There are also very tricky concepts to master such as the prepositions and especially the phrasal verbs, which generally seem to be a real challenge for the foreigner. I know many people here in Dublin from overseas, most of whom are commendably fluent in English, but most of whom also seem to find it very hard to progress past a certain level in the language (they speak it well but not really well if you see what I mean). Although it should be said that perhaps they feel they do not need to, after all, their conversation skills are more than adequate to lead a daily life here.

So I do believe English is quite easy to pick up, but its inconsistencies means that at later stages of learning, progress will be slower than say Spanish or French, which tend to have fixed rules for their grammatical structures.

anncoates

CJC999 wrote: »

My three year old daughter can carry on a full conversation with people.
18 months ago she only had a few words so it's not that difficult if a 2 year old can master is within 18 months.

Please say you are joking.

pajor

OH is Dutch. Now that is hard to learn.

Darkglasses

Depends heavily on what your native language is, too.

Legs.Eleven

I teach English for a living and my students have struggled their whole lives with it. Even though they've been studying it most of their lives, I've yet to meet someone who speaks it like or close to a native.

Up to intermediate level, it's fairly easy. I have students who'be been in pre-intermediate groups for years and years (they haven't had me as a teacher in that time) and it really baffles me how they could find it so hard to advance at this level when we haven't even looked at phrasal verbs, verb and preposition combinations, advanced question formation, the perfect tenses, especially as Spanish grammar is tricky from the very beginning. It's quite frustrating.

I also teach proficiency (the highest level) and it's only then do you realise just how bloody hard a language it is. I have friends here in Spain who aren't Spanish but could easily blend in with the locals but I think it's rare for a person to achieve that level in English, particularly in adulthood like my friends.

There's no such thing as a hard or easy language. It mostly depends on what your native language is and then on numerous other factors.

OneArt

OnTheCouch wrote: »

Well let's be honest, it is fairly easy to learn, it's an extremely 'user-friendly' language. This is partly due to how prevalent it is in modern-day life (people who cannot speak it, still often get exposed to it) and the fact it's seen as the essential language to learn to get anywhere in life. In addition to these factors, I firmly believe that in comparison to say Latin languages, English is quite easy to pick up, in other words it's quite straightforward to get to a rudimentary level fairly quickly. The verbs for instance are extremely straightforward, at least regarding the most common tenses and there are many popular expressions which instantly come to mind through exposure to the media. Therefore, I think initially, it's reasonably simple to move through the language levels in English rapidly at the start.

However, the problems tend to arrive all of a sudden at the 'proficient level' stage or B2-C1 from the Common European Framework. As Kylith says, there are huge inconsistencies in spelling and pronunciation, which can be baffling for a non-native speaker. There are also very tricky concepts to master such as the prepositions and especially the phrasal verbs, which generally seem to be a real challenge for the foreigner. I know many people here in Dublin from overseas, most of whom are commendably fluent in English, but most of whom also seem to find it very hard to progress past a certain level in the language (they speak well but not really well if you see what I mean). Although it should be said that perhaps they feel they do not need to, after all, their conversation skills are more than adequate to lead a daily life here.

So I do believe English is quite easy to pick up, but its inconsistencies means that at later stages of learning, progress will be slower than say Spanish or French, which tend to have fixed rules for their grammatical structures.

I think it also depends on what the learner's native language is and where they've grown up. I teach in Germany so I mostly teach Germans and I have never me an A0 German because English is so widespread here. On the other hand, the A0s I normally teach tend to have Slavic languages like Polish and Russian as their native tongues so while the verb conjugations are quite easy, the pronunciation and the countless exceptions throw them out of the water.

KungPao

The King of Moo wrote: »

It's generally easy to master the basics, as the grammar is fairly simple.

Pronunciation is tough because we have words that from many languages with different principles of pronunciation.

Some tenses like the perfect tenses are tough to learn as they don't have equivalents in other languages or are used differently.

And then you have phrasal verbs which are very hard to learn, as they usually have no relation to the main verb that forms them. "Give up, give in, give out to" have no similarity to "give."

And prepositions like "to," "of" and "in" are used very differently compared to their equivalents in other languages.

So it's easy to learn the basics, but impossible to master.

That'd be a tough one for anybody who's not Irish to understand!

Duffy the Vampire Slayer

Felicity Tangy Cougar wrote: »

There's no such thing as a hard or easy language. It mostly depends on what your native language is and then on numerous other factors.

Some languages are objectively more difficult in certain aspects though. Chinese is really difficult to read and write because of it's system of characters. English is a lot easier but has a lot of silent letter and bizarre spellings which complicate things. Korean has a designed alphabet with almost no inconsistencies in spelling and therefore that aspect is easier for a newcomer.

(Not saying Korean is easier in general, if it was then I'd know a lot more than I do.)

Irish_wolf

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart -
Come, come, I've hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I'd mastered it when I was five!

Cant seem to find a definite author on this, lots of contradictory sources, anyone know who wrote it?

edit: further reading here

danniemcq

There are an awful lot of things in English that make it very hard to learn if you are not brought up with it.

Set is a perfect example, there are well over 400 definations for the word, set sail, set sale price, set the sail on fire etc.

and its not just set, according to about.com there are also
RUN - 396 (defs.)
GO - 368
TAKE - 343
STAND - 334
GET - 289
TURN - 288

Then you have to cope with the bastardisation of English words and the way we arrange them in a sentance too

Word order English equivalent Proportion of languages Example languages
SOV "She him loves." 45% Japanese, Latin, Turkish
SVO "She loves him." 42% English, Mandarin, Russian
VSO "Loves she him." 9% Hebrew, Irish, Zapotec

Dravokivich

CJC999 wrote: »

My three year old daughter can carry on a full conversation with people.
18 months ago she only had a few words so it's not that difficult if a 2 year old can master is within 18 months.

But... this is about foreigners with a foreign language, trying to learn English. Which is very different to the set up of French/Italian/Spanish/German.

Nouns and Verbs don't have gender for instance. And as often refered to above, the same words can be pronounced in different ways. EG: polish/Polish. Actually, that's 2 different words with the same spelling. Then you've different words with the same sound, but different spellings, two/to/too, four/fore/for.

Just off the top of my head.

Duffy the Vampire Slayer

Duffy the Vampire Slayer wrote: »

Some languages are objectively more difficult in certain aspects though. Chinese is really difficult to read and write because of it's system of characters. English is a lot easier but has a lot of silent letter and bizarre spellings which complicate things. Korean has a designed alphabet with almost no inconsistencies in spelling and therefore that aspect is easier for a newcomer.

(Not saying Korean is easier in general, if it was then I'd know a lot more than I do.)

Yeah, but other aspects of Chinese, such as grammar, are much simpler than other languages for an English speaker. The Korean alphabet is easier for English speakers to master, but their grammar is very, very different. Most languages have aspects which are comparatively hard and aspects which are easier.

smcgiff

OneArt wrote: »

and the countless exceptions throw them out of the water.

Sorry, what? :pac:

Davidius

gramar wrote: »

As a person who teaches english in my spare time I can say that it is a difficult language to learn. Whether it's the most difficult I don't know.

English is a very abused language. People give words all sorts of meanings and twists that make them very difficult to understand. If we stuck to correct and proper English it would be mush easier but there are so many variants of words and expressions between different areas and even different generations that it must be very difficult to follow for non-native speakers.

Even the alphabet isn't easy as depending on what letters preceed or follow another the sound can change and this causes a lot of difficulties.

That sounds like something you could say about most languages. It sounds like you're just talking about dialects and idioms which most languages have, many of which can border on being a different language.

Realistically the "abuses" of the language are legitimate English, just not English that is standard/widely used. I think a widely taught standard is good to have for any language but I don't like the notion that regional dialects are "bad" English. After all some of the stuff they (used to) teach as proper English is/was baseless like not ending sentences with prepositions.

seamus

Although it has the same origins as many/most European languages, it's considered quite difficult for a non-English speaker to learn English in comparison to a French speaker learning German for example. This is thought to be due to the fact that there are significant differences in way sentences are constructed.

As a simple example, in english we say "beautiful woman", in french we say "belle femme" (woman beautiful). This kind of word reversal exists all over the place. So while you can remember the words, you also have to remember how to string them together to make any sense.
English, afaik, is actually more flexible in this regard, so if (to quote the Simpsons), "I am a new tie wearing", the meaning is fairly clear to most english speakers. I don't know if, it's quite as easy for a French speaker to decipher a french sentence similarly jumbled. Maybe it is.

This flexibility in English though is also part of the other two main things that make it difficult to learn: Verb regularity is all over the place, and we have no concept of genders. Funnily these are the big things that English speakers have difficulty with when we try to learn a European language.

There's also the way we learn languages that affects this ability to learn. We typically learn languages by translating words from our native tongue to the new language and then reconstructing it. In the case where the languages are syntactically not dissimilar (like French and German), this works quite well because you can for the most part maintain the sentence structure and just swap out the words. But when they're not similar, like French and English, translating what you want to say into a syntactically correct sentence becomes more difficult because you need to remember the words and the correct order in which to arrange them.

Children learn languages differently because they have no native tongue, no frame of reference. So language is learned through association with sights, sounds, smells, actions, etc, not through any translation. So recall of words is more deeply embedded in memory from the start and reinforced by people continually saying the words to the child and eventually the child repeating them. Learning a new language eventually works the same way, as the speaker uses it in context and associates the words with memories and activities, thereby losing the need to run it through their in-brain translator first. But if you don't practice it, and practice it in context, you will lose it. This is also why being immersed into a language e.g. by being dropped on your own into rural China, you will naturally pick it up whether you want to or not, because you will begin to associate the words with actions, sights and sounds and naturally develop and understanding of it.

Atletico56

Felicity Tangy Cougar wrote: »

There's no such thing as a hard or easy language. It mostly depends on what your native language is and then on numerous other factors.

Well there is such thing, Finnish is hard. It is far more complex than most languages.

biko

It's impossible to say a certain lingo is harder to learn than another.
English is one of the most recognised lingos and therefore should be easier to learn. Also it doesn't have any particularly difficult pronunciations if you compare to Dutch, Chinese or Xhosa.

danniemcq

We must polish the Polish furniture.
He could lead if he would get the lead out.
The farm was used to produce produce.
The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
The soldier decided to desert in the desert.
This was a good time to present the present.
A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
I did not object to the object.
The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
The bandage was wound around the wound.
There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
They were too close to the door to close it.
The buck does funny things when the does are present.
They sent a sewer down to stitch the tear in the sewer line.
To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
After a number of injections my jaw got number.
Upon seeing the tear in my clothes I shed a tear.
I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
I read it once and will read it agen
I learned much from this learned treatise.
I was content to note the content of the message.
The Blessed Virgin blessed her. Blessed her richly.
It's a bit wicked to over-trim a short wicked candle.
If he will absent himself we mark him absent.
I incline toward bypassing the incline.

There are loads more of examples here

gurl88

English is not my mother tongue and I'm sure my writing and speech will never be absolutely perfect, but to me it's definitely not the hardest language to learn. My own language, which is Dutch, has far more exceptions on grammar rules for example. I was taught three foreign languages in school and English always came naturaly to me eventhough I'm not much of a 'language person'.

biko

seamus wrote: »

As a simple example, in english we say "beautiful woman", in french we say "belle femme" (woman beautiful).

Those are both "beautiful woman" but I get your point.
For instance German has the verb at the end of the sentence - "Er ist ein Mann, der oft Berlin besucht." (He is a man who often Berlin visits).

Dravokivich

biko wrote: »

It's impossible to say a certain lingo is harder to learn than another.
English is one of the most recognised lingos and therefore should be easier to learn. Also it doesn't have any particularly difficult pronunciations if you compare to Dutch, Chinese or Xhosa.

I have no idea how to pronounce Xhosa!

IvyTheTerrible

I know a good few foreigners living in Ireland who say English is not that hard to learn. The people who have said to me that English is hard to learn, are generally people who've never stayed a significant length of time in an Anglophone country.

Shenshen

I'm actually a little bemused at this thread... I always assumed English was one of the easiest languages to learn?

That's what I've been told all my life anyway, and that's why I never assumed being fluent in English as a second language was much of an achievement?

danniemcq

gurl88 wrote: »

English is not my mother tongue and I'm sure my writing and speech will never be absolutely perfect, but to me it's definitely not the hardest language to learn. My own language, which is Dutch, has far more exceptions on grammar rules for example. I was taught three foreign languages in school and English always came naturaly to me eventhough I'm not much of a 'language person'.

Dutch, is that just english with an extra "sh" at the end of everything. Sorry couldn't resist!

I love the dutch language, well the sound of it at least I cannot learn new languages, even Irish despite going out with a native speaker is beyond me bar knowing how to ask can i go to the loo

Dravokivich wrote: »

I have no idea how to pronounce Xhosa!

The "Xh" is pronounced K, the "s" is silent and the "a" is the sound of a shoe dropping on a concrete floor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoS2BU6bbQ

Atletico56

danniemcq wrote: »

We must polish the Polish furniture.
He could lead if he would get the lead out.
The farm was used to produce produce.
The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
The soldier decided to desert in the desert.
This was a good time to present the present.
A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
I did not object to the object.
The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
The bandage was wound around the wound.
There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
They were too close to the door to close it.
The buck does funny things when the does are present.
They sent a sewer down to stitch the tear in the sewer line.
To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
After a number of injections my jaw got number.
Upon seeing the tear in my clothes I shed a tear.
I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
I read it once and will read it agen
I learned much from this learned treatise.
I was content to note the content of the message.
The Blessed Virgin blessed her. Blessed her richly.
It's a bit wicked to over-trim a short wicked candle.
If he will absent himself we mark him absent.
I incline toward bypassing the incline.

There are loads more of examples here

In German there are similar confusing sentences and probably in a lot of other languages.

Shenshen

biko wrote: »

Those are both "beautiful woman" but I get your point.
For instance German has the verb at the end of the sentence - "Er ist ein Mann, der oft Berlin besucht." (He is a man who often Berlin visits).

German tends to be more flexible in grammar, though.
You can easily swap that round to "Er ist ein Mann, der besucht of Berlin" and it would be perfectly ok. English is far more rigid in tis structures - Noun, verb, object. With the exception of questions, it can barely ever be altered.

danniemcq

Atletico56 wrote: »

In German there are similar confusing sentences and probably in a lot of other languages.

True plus the Germans have words for things we don't, I was just using that one as an example, if you follow the link there are loads more although some have been mentioned on the thread already

Shenshen

Atletico56 wrote: »

In German there are similar confusing sentences and probably in a lot of other languages.

Heh, no, actually. German has very few homophones, I always assumed that was why puns aren't a very highly regarded form of humour in German speaking countries. They tend to play with grammar a lot more, and are fond of absurd exaggerations.

danniemcq

Shenshen wrote: »

Heh, no, actually. German has very few homophones, I always assumed that was why puns aren't a very highly regarded form of humour in German speaking countries. They tend to play with grammar a lot more, and are fond of absurd exaggerations.

yeah it actually took them 28 months to take Paris

Shenshen

danniemcq wrote: »

yeah it actually took them 28 months to take Paris

Understandably - Parisian is German for condom, after all.

Davidius

seamus wrote: »

As a simple example, in english we say "beautiful woman", in french we say "belle femme" (woman beautiful). This kind of word reversal exists all over the place. So while you can remember the words, you also have to remember how to string them together to make any sense.
English, afaik, is actually more flexible in this regard, so if (to quote the Simpsons), "I am a new tie wearing", the meaning is fairly clear to most english speakers. I don't know if, it's quite as easy for a French speaker to decipher a french sentence similarly jumbled. Maybe it is.

Many languages could differentiate that using a declension/case system, to the point that word order might not matter at all. I suspect a lot of languages are a lot more flexible than English in that regard, which probably makes it difficult for English speakers to learn them. I wouldn't know about French in particular though.

biko

Polyglots are amazing

Here is Shakira speaking a few different languages, incl English. Mind, the others are Latin-based so quite similar but still.

Atletico56

Shenshen wrote: »

Heh, no, actually. German has very few homophones, I always assumed that was why puns aren't a very highly regarded form of humour in German speaking countries. They tend to play with grammar a lot more, and are fond of absurd exaggerations.

Maybe not specifically homophones, but there are aspescts much more difficult than english.

Rubeter

Dravokivich wrote: »

I have no idea how to pronounce Xhosa!

The X is a click.

Listen to this fella.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31zzMb3U0iY

HansHolzel

Going by the (doorstep-size) language books foreign nationals have typically shown me, it seems publishers think they are required to be expert in BBC-speak from around 1940. Time and time again, I've had to stress to them the difference between real-world English (and how it varies from country to country) and the tortuous crap in those books.

e.g. I tell them to ignore 'shall'. If they can't grasp its merely rhetorical usage, in Ireland, I tell them the Americans don't use it, which is usually enough to convince.

Otherwise I agree with OnTheCouch.

An Coilean

Atletico56 wrote: »

What are they basing this on?

The people who I've heard say this can only speak English, how would they know?

English is a horrible mess of a language by comparrision to many others. How words are pronounced by comparrision to spelling is all over the place. Its grammer is fairy messy too, for one of the rules of spelling that was taught in schools, they found out that there were actually more exceptions to it than examples of it. Massive amounts of irrigularity in verbs and the SVO structure of sentences is also quite unusual.

One of the big problems is that there is no proper standard English. The closest thing to an authority on the language is the Oxford dictionary, but even then you have several other versions of the language that don't always go along with that.

Atletico56

An Coilean wrote: »

English is a horrible mess of a language by comparrision to many others. How words are pronounced by comparrision to spelling is all over the place. Its grammer is fairy messy too, for one of the rules of spelling that was taught in schools, they found out that there were actually more exceptions to it than examples of it. Massive amounts of irrigularity in verbs and the SVO structure of sentences is also quite unusual.

One of the big problems is that there is no proper standard English. The closest thing to an authority on the language is the Oxford dictionary, but even then you have several other versions of the language that don't always go along with that.

Yes but is it more if a "horrible mess" than French or Finnish?

I don't think it's that difficult
I hear non native speakers having the same issues with phrasal verbs and prepositions that I know I have with german. auflesen has nothing to do with reading! ich freue mich auf/an/ueber! ich rede um den heissen brei herum :pac:
As for borrowed pronunciations, I haven't a notion if an english word in german is pronounced english or not. Half the time it's one way and half the time it's another. We get a great giggle out of it in class :pac:

Nah I'd say it's grand especially for the basics, then you need to get into the higher subtleties. I did hear a french guy tell me once that english was useless and it hardly had any synonyms or useful adjectives, though. Maybe you don't know them, pal... :pac:
French was okay as well but I only took it to honours LC, that was certainly straightforward enough

I'm sure trying to learn something like japanese or russian as an english speaking native is hard, though I don't know much about them - maybe they're ok once you get past the whole alphabet thing...