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Why English is hard to learn | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5057 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes  Speaks: Russian* | Message 41 of 84 17 June 2012 at 7:32pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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My personal experiance: English has tough phonetics, crazy spelling system, quite a lot
of unfamiliar words (although there are familiar words too), articles, a lot of tense- aspect distinctions, conversion, defficiency of prepositions and conjunctions. 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 42 of 84 17 June 2012 at 8:45pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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@ Von Peter Hoff
"I'm pretty sure that these three are the same point, namely that English orthography is non-phonetic, non-phonemic, inconsistent and just plain bizarre. It's your only point that I completely agree with. Well, except maybe for the dyslexia bit. I'm not that familiar with the subject, but I don't know if the complexity of the orthography is really the issue there. Besides, I've heard of studies that say that in countries that use Chinese characters a different form of dyslexia has been identified that applies to those characters rather than alphabetical ones." 1. I would not doubt that dyslexia would be present in Chinese, being that every word is basically its own character, that means having poor memory would make one dyslexic. Likewise being unable to remember all the non patterns and exceptions in English could present similar problems, which is also why adult illiteracy was so widespread not too long ago even in first world English speaking countries. The points are a little different. Point 1 is the spelling system is hard. 15 is that hard spelling makes for hard reading and hard to learn and hard to learn to speak as well because there is no way to easily distinguish a car c(kuh) versus a receiver (cee) c or a yacht (silent) c or a c in certain (cuh). 16. Is kind of similar, no accents just make 15 worse and the fact that certain letters technically don't even have their own sounds raises questions to a logical thinker why not just eliminate the C altogether. "For a language spoken so widely English is actually not that diverse, compared to many other languages. Granted, in a lot of countries "dialects" are actually different enough to be considered separate languages and are only considered dialects for political reasons - the only cases where this applies in English are Scots (and even there the position of modern Scots as a separate language is much more arguable) and the various English-based creoles. In most cases decent exposure goes a long way." 2. Many of the dialects are unintelligeable to average English speakers. I'm not sure I fully understand your point so I would like you to clarify. Are you saying English dialects should should be considered separate languages but are only dialects for political reasons? The point of this thread is if English is the hardest language. Having to learn British, cockney, Australian, Jamaican, North American, Deep Southernm varying East Coast accents, Irish, African accents, Asian accents etc. adds to the difficult for a foreign language speaker. With the exception of British and Australian most films would use subtitles to understand these various groups if they were not speaking standard north American English, yet they speak English in India but it is hard to understand for someone like me who has a fair bit of exposure to Indian English, I could just imagine the trouble an ESL would have. I have met Quebec immigrants who understand normal English but told me to put on subtitles during tv programs that involve the deep south, or England. Yet people from Cote d'ivore speak perfect french whereas most English speakers have trouble with say Nigerian English. "All languages have phonological patterns, even if they do vary greatly between dialects. This case can be explained by the fact that certain consonant (not "constant") clusters in English are less permissible than others. The reason the "g is silent" (phonologically there was no [g] there in the first place) is that [nθs] is easier to pronounce than [ŋθs] (although I'm pretty sure I've heard it pronounced like that by some people, as well as [ŋs] by others) And the "7 constants and only 1 vowel" can get much, much worse in other languages. cf. Georgian /ɡvbrdɣvnis/ and Nuxálk /xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ/" 3. I am certain you can find me examples of other languages where there are similar irregularities as English, but none of them possess all the same problems. Spell check sometimes auto corrects what I write before I finish it. The thing about English is you think you understand it, then some words like floccinaucinihilipilification pops up and makes one say wtf. Not having knowledge of Georgian it makes it hard for me to comment, but what I know of languages from that region is often those consonants have vowel like sounds or are full of silent letters. I am also aware that Georgian allows you to say rather complex things in one word, which would explain the consonant clusters with pauses. Ie. I go to the store appears as a single word. Anyways, Georgian is usually clasified as one of the moderate languages to learn, not as hard as japanese or Chinese. What I always get a kick out of is how people from these countries with the "hardest" language have so much trouble learning English, yet can master 5 other languages which tells you loads about English. 4. "Okay, this is just outright false. "I went to the large store" is perfectly fine in German ("Ich ging zum großen Geschäft"), Norwegian ("Jeg gikk til den store butikken") and Russian ("Я пошел в большой магазин"). In the former two putting the adjective after the noun isn't allowed, and in Russian it may be allowed, but it would sound really weird and contrived, as if you were trying to rhyme it with something. If I had to make an observation based on the languages that I am at least partially familiar I would say that it's the "noun adjective" pattern that is the unusual one, although it is overrepresented in Europe thanks to the Romance languages and some Slavic languages." German can be an exception as well, but it is far less common in most languages. I know for a fact Norwegian word order would be: Jeg gikk til den store butikken You cannot put butikken before store. Russian seems to work on the surface. I went to the large store = Я пошел в большой магазин and I went to the large house= Я пошел в Большой дом But I went to the large RED house (red describing the type of house = adj) =Я пошел в большой дом, красный So at best, Russian allows both as you describe, but it is not firm in the way it is in English. To everyone else who doesn't speak German, Chinese or Russian, this will appear as a strange construct. "Present in every single natural language." 5.Not exactly, many languages have quiet strict rules that explains everything, English has more gaps, more sound right factors, more lack of rules that no book will be able to explain to you why it is wrong because it technically correct but still wrong. I never encountered such a thing in French, where my grammar was all correct but my sentence still wrong. If it exist in other languages then at best it is far less prevalent. "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)" 6. I don't think you have read your own sources. One is about acronyms. The others are using English loan words and rearranging them to make them easier to pronounce in their own tongues. I never said English is the only language to use compound words. Its the only one that allows you to use both to describe the same thing. Those languages that you listed that allow you to combine words, like German, would consider it improper to seperate them. Lets use Breath analyzer German =Atem-Analysator French = analyseur d'haleine However, French doesn't allow you to combine analyseur and d'haleine and likewise, German won't allow you to seperate the 2. In English you can say breathalyzer machine, breath analyzer machine or analyzer of breath machine (although it is not so common and may border on sounding "not right"). This creates confusion because there is no pattern. "Again, hardly unique to English." 7. Most languages do not have things 100% unique to that language, cases are not unique to German, but they certainly make it harder to learn for some. It is all these parts. It is like saying a space shuttle is not unique because you can find similar parts on another machine, true, but not all of them. 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 43 of 84 17 June 2012 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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1.
"This is common in languages that have a relatively fixed word order and can't emphasize certain parts of sentences by moving them around." Many languages do not have stress or tones at all. I think russian is famous for its monotone, and if you speak Russian like English you sound sarcastic. 2."Applies to many languages with a long literary tradition. Many, if not most, idioms in Mandarin and Chinese in general come from Classical Chinese, which was probably about as different from the modern Chinese languages morphologically, syntactically and phonologically (although the latter has not been properly preserved because of the low phonetic qualities of the Chinese writing system) as Proto-Germanic from modern English and other Germanic languages. While few modern Chinese people study Classical Chinese as a language, they do end up learning many patterns from it at the higher stages of their schooling. Classical Japanese, which was standardized some time between the 8th and the 12th centuries, is actually studied by modern Japanese school students, and I can attest from personal experience that the patterns that are borrowed from it are just as confusing to foreigners as the ones you mentioned in English. And some languages, like Czech, Arabic and Tamil, actually use an older, classical version of the language as the official written language. 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)." Yes but these many languages do not share the other areas, and English has a far more richer literary history that is far more relevant because of Shakespeare. Further ancient Japanese or ancient Chinese are not considered MODERN forms of the language. Shakespearean English is considered modern English, that is the exact same English. Often those text were written in a way to be purposely impossible to understand for anyone who was not part of a specific elite. Not so for English 3. "Again, most languages where qenuine questions have to be rephrased work the exact same way." Yes but most and many, aftet 16 times starts to give you a very narrow list that only includes English. Its like saying a spaceship can go fast, but so can a bugatti, yeah but a spaceship has rockets, well so does a car in a drag race, but a race car can't fly, yes but there are flying cars. Well no car has all the components of a space ship. Just like no other language has all the other complexities of English. 4."Well, then they wouldn't be irregular, would they? :) Irregular verbs are present to some extent in all Indo-European languages, since the "regular" conjugations and declensions are a more recent development - changing shades of meaning by changing the stem vowel was the default pattern in Proto-Indo-European, and various Indo-European languages have preserved it to varying degrees. English really isn't much worse at it that the other Germanic languages." No they'd be irregular because they follow no pattern. In the romance languages something like 95-80% of words are regular. Yes some Germanic languages might share this, but all the other Germanic languages but German are ridiculously easy, in fact the easiest real languages objectively are probably Norwegian, Dutch and Afrikaans. Norwegian has a fairly standard regular verb usage, so I think English is worse in that regard. Only German can come close to complexity in this area, and to understand English you need to build a far larger vocabulary. 5. "English is one of the more analytic Indo-European languages (the aforementioned two languages are also pretty close), but it's far from a pure one. Chinese is much purer in this regard." And that makes English harder. Where Chinese has I go shop today, I go shop tomorrow, I go shop yesterday, English is more complex. I went shopping today, I will go shop tomorrow, I went shopping yesterday. European languages that are less analytical are less complex and follow set patterns. 6. "Slang is a feature of most languages, but what you're describing seems more like a colloquial pronunciation/accent issue to me (I always thought that "slang" was more about vocabulary than pronunciation). The "t sounds like d between two vowels" things is not present in most British and Irish varieties (in fact in London you're more likely to hear "Wo'a grey'cah"). Either way, plenty of languages have this problem." It is hard to classify it properly because it is unique to English. Not only does it have a unique pronounciation, but the words are different too. the English language is undergoing a major change, and the older folks, over 50 are trying to resist it, but come 30 years from now, many new words will be there and many old words will be gone and the whole pattern of speech will change. The issue is its Not considered standard English therefore one would not encounter it in a textbook or a classroom, yet without understanding the word gonna, gotcha, whadyasay, you have zero chance of understanding regular day English outside of highly formal settings where speakers make a concerted effort to speak with perfect inflection. People under 30 almost do not even possess these patterns of speech in much of north america. That is listen to how Donald Trump who is in his 60s says the word you all (with a strange pause) versus how someone under 30 would say it. The person in the link thinks Spanish sounds slurred whereas to me it sounds crystal clear, whereas even though I understand French it still sounds slurred. Better yet, when you listen to a movie from the 50s versus one from now, the speech is entirely different. Yes Irish and Brits have their own sets of accents, and the Irish also speak another language. Then you have the half of Brits who are scots and welsh claiming other languages too, and who are also hard to understand, especially the scots. Maybe it is an accent issue, but most people under 30 speak only this way, under 50 can speak in both, and immigrants will be confused by the obvious discord between what's taught and what they hear. 7. "Seriously?" Yes. Nothing irks me more than people claiming fluency who can barely parse toegther a sentence. I've met Canadians who tell me they speak French, ok lets talk in French, and then they confess they don't remember when I start talking. Generally this applies to people who are not from Quebec but have a French language background ie. took some course, or parents are from Syria or Lebanon. Then you have Jean Chritien who counts as bilingual, LOL, gimme a break, he speaks franglais and has a heavy accent, to the point of not being able to understand without trying to decipher what he is saying. Then these Scandinavians telling me they speak English, because they have the basics down but grammar on professional documents is worse than how I am writing here and looks like a kid from grade 6. And they are the best ESL speakers in the world mind you. 8."I'm not sure I understand this point. Did you miss a "not" somewhere in that first sentence? Either way, yes, probably the greatest determinant of the difficulty of a particular language to a particular person is the relatedness/similarity of the language in question to the person's native language and/or other languages that they speak fluently. The data that get thrown around the most in these discussions are the FSI ratings of language difficulty to native English speakers. Many people either omit the "English speakers" bit altogether and take the rating as a sign of absolute objective difficulty, while others simply extrapolate the ratings to speakers of other (Indo-)European languages." The point is that if Japanese, Chinese, arabic, Russian or Georgian are the hardest languages, then certainly learning English should be a breeze from them if English isn't hard. Yet more often then not a Chinese, Russian or East European speaker sticks out like a sore thumb. And only The Norwegians and Swedish can come close to saying they have a high level proficiency in English. And even at it is questionable because its not very good. And they learn it so long and have so much exposure, its highly questionable if it is even a second language to them rather than just being raised bilingually like in Quebec. If English is so simpler than Arabic, Russian or Chinese, why is the stereotypical Russian or Chinese so poor in English compared even to other ESL speakers. My theory is all the things we see that make these languages difficult, they see as making it simpler, and all the things we see as making sense or being easy in English, make no sense or make English difficult for others. There are no other languages like English that have that level of mutual intelligeability. English speakers cannot turn the channel on German TV and understand 50% of what is said. Whereas languages like Hindi, Chinese, Russian have highly close dialects/languages that make. 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 44 of 84 17 June 2012 at 10:50pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'm a bit busy right now, so I'll respond to the other points later. Edited by vonPeterhof on 17 June 2012 at 10:52pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4845 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 45 of 84 17 June 2012 at 11:39pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Interesting, in another thread a native French speaker claimed that French was the most difficult language, because there are so many rules of "bon usage", i.e. how to say things stylistically correctly. By the way, I have read all your posts and they are biased, ignorant, and arrogant and show that you don't know a single thing that you are writing about. I am German, I have learned English to quite a high degree. No, I'm not perfect, but it's silly to demand this from a second langugage learner. Why would I want to know the word "embosser"? I hardly know what a "Prägestempel" is in German. And yes, I have read Shakespeare - in English, several works. In fact, Shakespeare English has aspects that are easier to understand for native German speakers than for native English speakers - like dativus ethicus etc. There are lots of languages that take the adjective before the noun, and if you want to see irregular verbs, have a look at Icelandic, which is by the way one of the most complex European languages despite being Germanic. This whole "my own language is the most difficult" thing is absolutely ridiculous. Do you think immigrants in Germany speak perfect German? News flash: No, they don't! In fact, Turkish German is often ridiculed. There even was a TV show called "Was guckst du?" that dealt whith immigrants and their way of living and speaking - and no, that was not racist or discriminatory, but very clever and very funny. And here it comes and it may be shocking news to you: For me, English was the easiest language to learn! Despite its verb tenses and phrasal verbs and idiomatic expressions - and most of all despite its orthography, which has never really troubled me. You cannot expect everybody to become perfect in a foreign language. Instead of judging other people's English, you might want to report about your own experiences with foreign languages - which by the way don't seem to be very intense. So, stop trolling this thread and do something constructive! Edited by Josquin on 18 June 2012 at 1:31pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6660 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 46 of 84 18 June 2012 at 12:23am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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hernanday, are you serious? I've never ever been abroad and yet I speak what most people consider fluent English
and none of the aspects you bring up are what's been hard. Gonna, havta and other colloquial abbreviations are things that I've somehow learnt trough osmosis because I sure damn haven't been taught that at school. As for irregular verbs there are quite few in English, most verbs considered irregular are strong verbs and abide to rules -- although they're a bit complicated and rarely taught. And in what sense are Germanic languages objectively easy? What makes English harder than Norwegian? That's bullshit. I understand English better than I understand Norwegian and Norwegian and Swedish are quite closely related. The English verbal system might be stupid, but, it's not hard nor impossible to learn. Most Swedish children learn the strong and irregular verbs in drills in both primary and secondary school and they're not the feature of English that makes our English stand out. Shakespeare isn't considered to be English as it is today. His style is named Early Modern English by historical linguistics – that does in no way mean that a person that speak English today shall understand the language of the past. That's ridiculous. I most say, however, that English has changed less than many other languages. I can easily read a 16th century text in English but to try to read something from the same time in Swedish would be much much harder. Don't mistake names of language periods for what the mundane meaning of the word 'modern' has. Modern English is a broad term that include the English from Early modern English to contemporary English. There are subgroups. The thing is, that Modern English as a group sets itself apart from Middle English more than it does from the subgroups within itself. Off to bed... 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4866 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 47 of 84 18 June 2012 at 9:41am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I'm going to introduce my own, controversial theory on why English is difficult to learn. I'm sure this will NOT be a popular theory.
First, allow me to quote Isabel Allende: Yo solamente puedo escribir en español, pero me doy cuenta de que me ha cambiado el estilo desde que vivo en Estados Unidos. Se ha hecho más conciso, más preciso. El ejercicio permanente de pensar en Inglés y de hablar en inglés te obliga a ser mucho más preciso en tu propia lengua también ... thinking an speaking in English requires you to be much more precise in your own language as well. My theory is that many languages allow sloppy, or imprecise thinking in situations where English requires (or at the very least, allows) greater precision. In reading parallel texts in English/Spanish I frequently encounter instances where an original English sentence with a clear, precise meaning is rendered vague or ambiguous in Spanish translation. Or where a definite mood is conveyed by the English which becomes bland, or generic when rendered in Spanish. Going in the other direction, native Spanish texts translated into English seem to retain all the qualities of the Spanish original. In other words, I am proposing that English can faithfully capture anything written in Spanish, but that Spanish cannot always capture everything that is written in English. I have no experience with Chinese, but I have a collection of 17 translations of the Tao Te Ching and it is clear by comparing those translations with each other that the original Chinese must have been practically without meaning, at least in the English sense of "meaning". So the difficultly in learning English is not that the language is more difficult, but that the degree linear, analytic thinking and precision required is sufficiently different from some other languages that learning English is not about learning how to TALK, but is about learning how to THINK with the clarity and accuracy required by English. Now I'm certain that this will be a very unpopular theory, and that everyone will jump to the defense of their own native language, but I'm going out on a limb with it anyway. After all, not all truth is politically correct. And don't forget that anything English lacks, it will steal from another language, which is why the English dictionary is so full of Latin, French, German, Spanish, Sanskrit, Swahili, ... words. So if you suffer angst over your kindergarten student enjoying an apéritif on the chaise lounge on your patio overlooking the arroyo while discussing his karma with his guru just remember that the reason English is more precise is that it takes what it needs to achieve that precision from every other language in the world. You could say that our language is constantly on safari hunting down more precise meanings that it can steal from other languages. The only way any other language could match the precision of English would be for it to become more like English by stealing more words from other languages. (By the way, I'm sure somebody will point out that English has no word for "gemütlich", but in fact, it does. The English word for "gemütlich" is "gemütlich". Both the winning and losing words in the 2006 Scripps National Spelling Bee were of German origin. During the final round, held in Washington, D.C. on June 1 and broadcast live on U.S. television, Katharine ("Kerry") Close won the top prize by correctly spelling the word "Ursprache." Before that the runner-up, Canadian Finola Hackett, had misspelled the word "Weltschmerz," starting with a "v" instead of "w." And I haven;t even mentioned the delightful assortment of Yiddish words in common use in English.) 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 48 of 84 18 June 2012 at 9:50am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Looks like Josquin and Hampie have already made some of the points I was going to make, so I'll be brief.
Unclear word categories are more widespread in the more analytic languages, but I wouldn't say that this makes them unequivocally easier or harder. In a language where you don't have to change the form of the word to turn it from a noun to a verb (or any other part of speech) and where you don't have to worry about conjugation and declension to take into account time, direction of action, and other circumstances, making sentences will be easier, but interpreting them will be harder and more reliant on context or additional classifiers. Essentially, the difficulty has been shifted to another place.
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