To the foreigners!

English spelling and pronunciation are inconsistent, unlike most other languages. This makes it very difficult to learn.

Eh, I'd imagine you're wrong on that one 😂

I'm not a foreigner, but I have seen it said that English is the hardest language to learn out of all the ones that use the latin alphabet.

The main issue with English is that there are patterns, but also a fuckload of exceptions to those patterns, and no real way to know what those are except to just pick it up over time.

For example, we say "i before e except after c", but weirdly even a simple rule like that is not true.

Plurals are a mess. Sometimes you add an s. Cars. Sometimes you change the word completely. Mice. Sometimes the singular and the plural are the same word. Fish. How can you tell? You can't! You just have to learn it!

Pronunciation is a mess. Not only are there silent letters everywhere (island), but the same letter sequence doesn't always make the same sounds. Sometimes two letter sequences make the exact same sound. As treat, on the street, with a book and a boom, I like to beat my great meat. How can you tell? You can't! Just learn it!

Of course, pronunciations also vary regionally. Sometimes book rhymes with took. Unless you're in Dublin where book and cook rhyme with puke, but not always with took.

The saving grace here is that out of all languages, English speakers are probably the most forgiving of mistakes. And this is probably because there are so many exceptions, that it's more important to the listener that they understand what you're trying to say rather than that you get it right. Because we get it wrong all the time too.

So when a foreigner says, "Mouses" or "fishes", there's no question about what they're trying to say.

The best quote I've read about English is that it's 3 languages wearing a trenchcoat, pretending to be one.

English must be hard.

Ask any American. Theyre 250 years trying to learn it and still can't speak it

Probably because the language is a bastardisation of several older languages. People from German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Arabic speaking countries will probably recognise a fair amount of individual words and phrases, but the grammar will be all over the shop to them.

Esperanto. Now that's a language you can set your watch to. Especially if you're European.

Bow to the chough on the bough wearing a bow.

Dearest creation in creation....

My partner is german speaking, but thinks that english was really easy to learn. There's no shortage of "good content" movies/TV etc for immersion.

The fine grammatical details are hard, but getting to the point where you can effectively get your message across is easier than other languages apparently.

To be talking about the way we're not talking it. In English.

having been a student in an advanced Spanish class which served as an ESL class for native Spanish speakers, it was FAR easier to learn Spanish for me, than English for them. TBF, Spanish is known to be the easiest of the romance languages.

I think your wrong in you're post their. They're lots' of people in Ireland that you'll find cannot speak there own language good and struggle with they're English grammar particularly plural's, possession case's and inflections and contraction's.

I learned it as child mainly by watching the BBC which could easily be received in Belgium. It is a very easy language to learn mainly because you can form sentences with the words all out of place and it will still be understood. In my mother tongue, Dutch (and other languages), moving words in a sentence make it sound like gibberish.

Pronunciation is a breeze one you know how how every letter sounds. There are of course some words you need to know as they sound different from their spelling, "Leicester" comes to mind. English has quite a limited amount of sounds for pronunciation which makes it very easy to remember and learn.

Also English has the neat trait that all words are written separately. For instance Waterzuiveringsinstallatie in Dutch consists of the words Water, zuivering (and) installatie. In English that would be Water Treatment Plant.

Yeah there's more to learning a language than just the technical side of it. When I try speaking French in France the locals just speak English back to me because they can tell I'm not a native speaker. French people don't have that issue when speaking English over here. No matter what country you are in on this side of the world, English is ubiquitous, mainly from US cultural domination when it comes to movies, the internet etc. I've plenty of friends who might be e.g. Finnish and Portuguese, and they will speak English to each other because it's the language they have in common.

Even if you go somewhere like Japan, far fewer people will have any English, but in tourist spots English will be the only latin alphabet language. You're not going to see German or Spanish anywhere, so if you are German or Spanish and you don't speak Japanese you're going to end up relying on your English knowledge.

I learned to pronounce it "shedule" in "shool"