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Why is English so easy? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6052 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 33 of 78 29 December 2009 at 10:30am | IP Logged | |||||
Selection bias. The people who type perfect English are the ones that post. Simple as that. Trust me, there are tons of people, TONS that speak broken English. A key to this theory is that there are a ton of Scandinavian people here for some reason, who grasp English quickly. Most of the more remote from English native posters do not have perfect English, and therefore, don't post. 11 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6770 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 34 of 78 29 December 2009 at 1:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
Got it in one. It's like the psychiatrist who complains that everyone he meets is crazy. 11 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6044 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 35 of 78 01 January 2010 at 4:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think that basic English is very easy. No gender. No case endings.
The hardest thing about learning English is not something that is a part of the living language. The writing system. If English spelling was a little more logical English would definitely be one of the easiest languages to learn. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Muz9 Diglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 5526 days ago 84 posts - 112 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Somali | Message 36 of 78 01 January 2010 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
All languages have 'easy' characteristics. For example most Germanic languages like to crush ‘simple’ words together to create new ‘advanced’ words for example werktuigbouwkundige might sound very long and difficult but literally means ‘work-gear-building-knowledgeable-person’ or another example kortetermijnverplichtingen means short-term-obligation. Vocabulary wise Germanic languages are definitely easier than English because English uses more advanced terminology (usually from Latin or French). I wouldn't consider English easy by any definition, especially on the higher levels of the language. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6911 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 37 of 78 01 January 2010 at 7:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
You know that English is a Germanic language, right? 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Muz9 Diglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 5526 days ago 84 posts - 112 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Somali | Message 38 of 78 01 January 2010 at 7:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
I should've used 'other' in front of Germanic! But we all know it is more of a half-breed than a real Germanic language. Edited by Muz9 on 01 January 2010 at 7:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5840 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 39 of 78 01 January 2010 at 7:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
Good point irrationale. In work situations I often hear English colleagues say:
In reality it is just as Irrationale says: All the people who DON'T speak English well stay away from the situations where it is needed. So the when it seems that "everyone" speaks English it's because the self-selection has already taken place. In business situations people might do anything from not picking up the phone if they see "44" or "1" (country numbers) when the phone rings... Or getting out of the lift on the wrong floor rather than have to chit-chat in English... Pretending they have other plans for lunch, so they don't have to speak English while having lunch. Even call in sick rather than attend a meeting where they will have to speak English. All of these things have happened to me. Usually the business liasion people are precisely the ones that are known in their office for their English skills. One time I was working with a Spanish woman who very sincerely asked me to pretend that she spoke better English than she did, to her boss and colleagues etc. The trouble was that she had exaggerated her English skills quite a bit some time in the past. As a result she had been nominated as a main contact person for a major project that I was working on. I agreed to play along. Interestingly her English skills improved quite a bit during the period we worked together. Another time, my boss forced me to pin a failure that was really my own (or rather the fault of my team) on a German persons' poor English skills. He had misunderstood an email that I had forwarded to him which contained instructions that he needed to follow while doing some work on the weekend. I was forced to make a big stink of the fact that I had told him what he needed to do in "plain English" and he had not done it... In reality, the email had been overly complicated and ambiguous and I had failed to follow it up with a phone call to check that he had understood. The guy was 100% competent and conscientious. Other mixups are related to people accidentally using the wrong word and the native speaker getting offended even though no offense was intended. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 40 of 78 02 January 2010 at 3:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
The easiest thing about English is the first year. Wilfred Decoo said (as a justification of why different languages need different methods and different orders of learning; ESL stands for English as a Second Language):
English gets you past beginner very quickly before you get mired in the complexities of idiom and co-occurring words. By contrast, French is really complicated at the beginner level, and it's only once you get past the beginner level that the regularity and predictability of the language becomes apparent. I reckon people are simply more likely to give up on something at the start than further down the line, so something that's easy to start is far more likely to succeed than something that is hard to start, but easy overall. 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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