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Why English is hard to learn | ||
Tags: Difficulty | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6473 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 33 of 84 12 April 2007 at 1:26pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I think the major obstacle to learning English is the orthography. It's probably the most irregular orthography there is (though writing systems like Chinese and Japanese pose even bigger problems). Other than that, I don't see why it'd be harder than any other language, in general.
- Kef 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Declan1991 Tetraglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6440 days ago 233 posts - 359 votes Speaks: English*, German, Irish, French | Message 34 of 84 12 April 2007 at 1:46pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
What is your native language? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Andy_Liu Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong leibby.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6787 days ago 255 posts - 257 votes Speaks: Mandarin, Cantonese*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 35 of 84 12 April 2007 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The cases are different. The same graph can have different pronunciations of English, some of which being unpredictable. Yet, there's still a degree of "readability". By looking a new word, you can at least guess half of the phonetic symbols. Chinese and Japanese are different. The obstacle is you have to learn every character from scratch. That's exactly what every Chinese speaker has to do to learn any other Chinese language. But this can be extremely troublesome if one is learning an obscure Chinese language, where no reliable dictionary and good romanization scheme are available - and that's the reasons why schemes like bopomofo and pinyin were invented. Edited by Andy_Liu on 12 April 2007 at 9:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| hernanday Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 4545 days ago 18 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 36 of 84 17 June 2012 at 3:08am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
English is easy to you, because its your first language, but to people who don't learn English from birth, its not easy. There are so many inconsistency, and lack of patterns in the language that something as simple as spelling is difficult for the majority of the students. If English is truly easy then students ought to be acing English classes, but this is not the case, often it is among the most difficult social science class of all. I'd love for one of those English is easy crowd have to submit an essay to one of my English high school teachers and get a big fat D-. I agree English is easy to gain basic proficiency in, but linguist have found that certain sounds in English appear to be unlearnable for most ESLs after a certain age in childhood. English is full of words that have double meanings and sub-dialects. I was watching a movie with Brad Pitt imitating a southern accent, and my Norwegian friends who believed they spoke perfect English all of a sudden needed subtitles because they couldn't understand a word of what he was saying. English is a language that is virtually impossible for an ESL to ever master. Most ESL speakers cannot fool someone who is trained in English that they are even semi fluent. Far too many mispronunciations and misspellings. And even their mistakes are different than that of a normal English person. I've even taken a crack at Chinese, but here are just more reasons why English is hard 1. Difficult spelling system, and that's an understatement. Almost every word spelling has to be memorized differently. IE. no clear reason why through and though sound so different, or why throw and through sound the same but are spelled different. 2. Wildly different dialects, often even I have trouble understanding say a Carribean, Indian, Australian or even a British accent, although they speak the exact same English as me. Not to mention things like Newfie accents, southern accents, west coast accents, new york accents, mass. accents, foreign accents, aave accents, cockney, cajun etc. 3. Rich language base and Lack of patterns. In French, words seemed to follow an unwritten pattern system. No such thing exist in English. A word like strengths would be virtually impossible to understand to pronounce without help, and it goes back to point 1. I could just imagine a latin speaker looking at a word like that and pulling their hair out, why is g silent, and why does it sound that way. How come words can just be randomly put together with no real pattern. How is it you can have words with 7 constants and only 1 vowel. 4. Adjective Word order. Besides Chinese English is the only language to use SVAO. I went to the large store. Most other languages it is I went to the store large. 5. The "sound right" factor. You've all had that English teacher point out to you there is nothing grammatically wrong in your sentence it just doesn't sound right. Well that's part of English grammar. You cannot explain why a cute little car is more correct than a little cute car, but it just is and an immigrant can never understand why other than that explanation. 5. Only language that allows you to both form words by joining 2 words together and by keeping them apart. breakfast + lunch = brunch bard + idolatry = bardolatry camera + record = camcorder breath + analyzer = breathalyzer banker +gangster = bankster cyber-genetic + organism = cyborg car + hijack = carjack smoke + fog = smog vital + amine = vitamin napalm = naphthene + palmitate But electronic + mail = email instead of following the pattern (electronicmail) There is no pattern here, and it'd be very confusing and would require an ESL to learn each one individually. For example, why is breakfast + lunch = brunch but car + hijack =carjack and not chijack? Why is vital + amine = vitamin (what happens to the final e anyways) but naphthene + palmitate = napalm instead of napalmitat or nalpalmit? 6. Silly synonyms that have tense selective applications that cannot be found in grammar books. You can watch a film, or see a film. However, you can watch tv, but you can never see tv. Further thesaurus gives you list of synonyms which you can never really know when to use if your ESL. You can view a channel but you cannot view the tv. You can see a television set but you cannot say I am seeing tv, but you can be watching tv. But you could have saw the game last night or watched the game last night. Ironically if you watch a certain program like CNN you are a viewer, even though one cannot say they view TV. 7.Stress, where you stress a sentence can change the meaning of the entire sentence. I entered my car can mean different things depending on where you stress. 8. Older English which is actually considered modern English, as olde English is incomprehensible even to most EFLs. Think "thou shalt not...". The word though is probably not even taught to ESLs. Think Shakespeare, which requires translations for most of its books, good luck to an ESL trying to read Shakespeare without translation. I'd understand most Shakespearean text because of what I learned in high school, but an ESL would have no chance because of lack of exposure. 9. Interrogative. Is it cold? and it's cold? Mean different things. The first is a genuine question, the second is asking for affirmation. 10. Irregular conjugations. Seemingly an unending patterns of irregular verbs. Versus other languages where even irregular verbs follow a regular pattern. Buy becomes bought, but can never be buyed. Even adjectives have strange irregularities. Quick becomes quickness. But strong doesn't become strongness. Power doesn't become powerness. High doesn't become highness. In fact you will have to learn most adjectives irregularities to which there is no pattern. In fact some don't change at all, intelligent becomes intelligence. There is no discernible pattern and that would be just another tick of why English is probably the worst language having to learn every adjective and verb one by one. Then words like awesomeness. Awesomeness describes being in a state of awe. Yet the word awesome seems to already fulfill that and they appear to be redundant but that is not the case. 11. Case system. I have dabbled in a small language that had a case system, it was really quiet silly. But English as a Germanic language still has remnants of it. The worse part is you will never gain any of the benefits of a regular case system. I/ me/mine/my - we/us/our/ours are all the same 2 words. But they are remnants from the case system. Normally a case system allows you to shift around words. Ie. one can say OSV instead of SVO by changing the case. So one can say store went I in a case system and it would make grammatical sense. However because English is always SVO, you can never benefit from the case system, and instead are stuck with having to learn when to use I/me/my/mine for each specific situation yet never getting the benefit of saying slayed the dragon I, like they did 800 years ago. 12. Unclear word categories. A word like trust can be used as a verb or a noun. Abstract is a noun, adjective and a verb. Adjectives can become nouns usually by placing the infront of it. The Gay pride parade, and nouns can become verbs "I'll mop the floor with you" or better yet "I'll cookie you". 13. Slang. English slang is practically another language. I had an indian migrant worker who spoke English second language ask me after 6 years of living in Canada, what does wanna/ havta/ gonna/ hasta/gotta / otta/ ya/ yers/ n etc mean. I hear it all the time and don't know what it means. And this is very surface slang that all English First Language speakers understand. did you, become did ya or did'ju or did'chu Then t sounds like d between two vowels. What a great car sounds more like whad a great car. T is silent between N and e. Counted generally sounds like coun'ed in regular speech. And the list is endless, many sounds are regularly dropped in normal non-highly formal speech and anyone speaking without these idiosyncrasies comes across quickly as either pretentious, suspicious or an ESL speaker. 14. Things like why pineapple has neither pine nor apples, or why hammers don't involve hams, or fingers don't fing, why a boxing ring is square or why slim chance and a fat chance mean the same thing, or why a vegetarian eats vegetables but a humanitarian doesn't eat humans. All only add to the confusion. One doesn't need to even learn the word humanitarian to have passable basic English given how many bad English speakers there are but you will need it to master the language. And when I go to stores in Oslo and ask for an embosser and people have to use Google for 5 minutes to understand what it means, it doesn't indicate to me fluency. 15. English takes 2 times as long to learn basic proficieny for kids, thats double almost any other language. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1233-english-is-toughe st-european-language-to- read.html. "In Finnish, which Seymour found to be the easiest European language to learn to read, the relationship between a letter and its sound is fixed. However, in English a letter's sound often depends on its context within the word. For example, the letter c can sound soft (as in receive) or hard (as in cat). Many words like "yacht" don't seem to follow any logic at all." In fact in many countries dyslexia is reported as non-existant mainly because you will never encounter difficult to pronounce words. 16. No accents, I remember my French teacher telling me, accents are your friends because they let you get away with not having to remember different pronounciations for words spelled with the same letters. Remember how horrible it was to remember every stupid accent in French. Well, imagine if there was no accent and you just had to remember from memory how to pronounce each word, welcome to English. For exmaple, English would be way easier for ESL if certain and soft both started with the same letter and it is the same sound. It makes no sense why the c in certain is used in a word like the c in cook. So you have a hard and a soft c, one sounds like s one sounds like K, but none sound like c. 17. Largest vocabulary. About 2 million words, of which normally only half are published in the dictionary. Doesn't count the middle English or old English. 18. I often hear people saying Chinese or Japanese are the hardest language, yet I have yet to meet someone who grew up in one of those countries (and believe me there are alot of them here in toronto) and speak both languages fluently. That indicates to me that English is just as hard to learn if not harder than these languages for someone with a non Germanic language background. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| lecavaleur Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4778 days ago 146 posts - 295 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish | Message 37 of 84 17 June 2012 at 5:19am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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It's probably relatively easy to get to an automous level in English compared to many
languages (I don't really know; I never actually had to sit down and learn it). However, as a former ESL teacher, I know that it is extremely difficult to achieve perfection if one is not a native speaker. I think the main reason is the tonality. There are no rules to tell you which syllable to stress, and if you don't stress the right syllable even on one single word in a sentence, it's a dead giveaway that you're not a native speaker. Also, what we lack in grammar, we make up for in idiom. I have heard and read countless sentences from non-native speakers that, though technically grammatically correct, were so unidiomatic that they were simply wrong. The only way to combat those difficulties is through long-term immersion, I would think. You just have to get used to the things natives say and imitate them exactly. French, on the other hand, is famous for all its many rules and exceptions, but at least they are there to consult when needed, and the spoken language is more or less faithful to what you can read about it in dictionaries, grammars and other references. That's one thing I love about French. Dans le doute, consultez un ouvrage de référence. In English, the rule is more like "when in doubt, forget the reference book, consult a native speaker." Edited by lecavaleur on 17 June 2012 at 5:20am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4773 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 38 of 84 17 June 2012 at 12:17pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Once again, patently untrue. And the fact that the word "vitamine" was originally coined in Polish makes it even funnier (and the "e" was dropped to deemphasize the "amine" reference)
Besides, the "thou" thing isn't that hard for most Europeans whose languages have retained the T-V distinction. I've met a lot of native English speakers who assume that "thou" must be some sort of solemn, formal form of address, while the reality is the exact opposite (or, at least, it was before the word went out of general usage).
My favourite quote on the subject:
:P
At the end of the day, a lot of these "difficult" and "illogical" features are highly subjective. I have personally heard native Russian speakers talk about how structured and logical English was compared to Russian, and how that made Americans and Brits all so "rational", "businesslike" and "no-nonsense" compared to us. I had a hard time suppressing giggles at this blatant stereotyping, but I could see where they are coming from. A lot of the "nonsensical" features of Russian that we believe Western Europeans to be unable to grasp with their "cold, calculating minds" are absent in English, but it does have a staggering number of peculiarities of its own. Okay, I gotta hurry now, so I'll just stop pretending that I had a point bigger than banal nitpicking and let y'all get on with the discussion ;) Edited by vonPeterhof on 17 June 2012 at 12:22pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 39 of 84 17 June 2012 at 2:59pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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''Why English is hard to learn''
1. Look at the name of the thread: question-like statements used instead of questions (especially in titles): Why English is hard to learn. In most languages, you would write the name of the topic: Why is English hard to learn(?) Or, you would use a full statement: This is why English is hard to learn: And not some kind of a hybrid. 2. you can never guess the correct pronunciation by looking at how the word is spelled: finger does not rhyme with ringer ;) of is pronounced as if it were written ov iron is pronounced EYEearn and not EYEron (but most ESL users don't care about these three, and many more!) 3. comparative of QUITE GOOD: quite good, quite a bit better, quite the best (quite better is incorrect, but most ESL users don't care) There are at least 1000 things like *quite better, which sound ok to foreign learners of English, but sound incorrect to native speakers. English is the language of exceptions even outside the spelling system (Oh we didn't know that!) 4. two norms in conflict: I recommend that you try the cake (in the US), I recommend you to try the cake (in the UK). Americans may correct your English if you use ''I recommend you to + infinitive'', and the opposite is also true. 5. phrasal verbs common in everyday English, but disliked by ESL learners, so all of them understand ''surrender'' but not all of them understand ''give in.'' People say English is easy just because it has simpl(if)e(d) morphology. But all other things are difficult (pronunciation, spelling, syntax, vocabulary, phraseology). English language newspapers are so tiring to read, sometimes they all look like a competition for the most complicated essay, even album reviews are full of pseudo-elegant difficult words (or shall I say ''faux-posh'' to be closer to their style). For example, this review: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2012/01/lana-del- rey-born-to-die.html In a comparable Italian, Spanish or Portuguese article there would be only one word I don't understand, but in this album review I found 10 words I don't understand. And I learned English for 5 years (much longer than my 2 years of Italian). The words in question: cherry Schnapps, tongue-tying, faux-swagger, signifiers, derriere, gambit, Swindle, Wal-Mart end-caps, transfixing, snare drum rolls... Edited by Medulin on 17 June 2012 at 5:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| hernanday Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 4545 days ago 18 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 40 of 84 17 June 2012 at 6:54pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
+1. I never even though of this but an addiional point is that English creates new words freely and they use lots of foreign words that would not appear in a language dictionary. Good luck finding Wal-Mart end-caps, snare drum rolls, cherry Schnapps, or transfixing in your foreign language dictionary 1 person has voted this message useful |
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