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What makes English difficult? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4667 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 41 of 45 21 December 2012 at 8:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've wondered about that before: Chinese seems to be cited as the quintessential "hard" language by many natives of IE languages, so do Chinese speakers find IE languages similarly difficult? Apparently some of them find French to be so, at least. :-)
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| Aquila123 Tetraglot Senior Member Norway mydeltapi.com Joined 5308 days ago 201 posts - 262 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Italian, Spanish Studies: Finnish, Russian | Message 42 of 45 22 December 2012 at 4:27am | IP Logged | ||
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I hate the English orthography and have allways done. I find it a great waste of time and energy to actually learn each word twice, once to write it and once to pronounce it.
I even think English orthography not even deserves the name orthography, which means wright-writing, but rather dysgraphy. Due to this I have allways had a rather relaxed position weather i write English correctly or not, even though I think I gradually have got pretty far in mastership of English due to all the exposure and practice of this language. Edited by Aquila123 on 22 December 2012 at 4:30am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5768 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 43 of 45 22 December 2012 at 7:16pm | IP Logged | ||
Not Beano, but I actually managed to read your posting wrongly, instead of "whether speakers of other Germanic languages find the English phrasal verbs difficult" I read "whether speakers of other than Germanic languages find the English phrasal verbs difficult". And not only once! But I still think the paper I linked to might indicate that yes, even if Swedish speakers don't find it as difficult as speakers of other languages, they still tend to avoid using phrasal verbs. And apparently that shows those learners do not only find phrasal verbs difficult to acquire initially, they also are aware of their difficulties and try to avoid making mistakes. German speakers certainly are the same. For phrasal verbs like aufgeben/to give up we use our transparency bonus, and all others take their time to acquire. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4624 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 44 of 45 22 December 2012 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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English even has double phrasal verbs.
"Put up with" and "put up to" mean totally different things. Just to complicate matters, "put up" on its own means something else again. You can also put someone up, meaning to offer them accomodation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rykketid Diglot Groupie Italy Joined 4835 days ago 88 posts - 146 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: French | Message 45 of 45 23 December 2012 at 2:24am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't really understand what you mean by "the English past tense is horribly
irregular". To me it seems quite the opposite: nicely regular, with few exceptions... And I'm using especially Romance languages as the criterion for comparison. English past tense is much less riddled with exceptions than say French. Furthermore, I don't know what languages you are speaking about when you say that in many languages all of those past tenses can be condensed to 2 forms; once again, as far as neo-Latin languages are concerned, they have more or less 10 different types of past tense... And by that I don't mean that English is an easy language. Yes, it's true this cliché is quite common but, personally, I stopped believing it long ago, and I'm going to tell you what I actually find hard about English: -listening: for the first years of study, English sounds to Italian speakers as an incomprehensible buzz. -pronunciation/spelling: the fact that there are not real rules for the pronunciation of letters (especially vowels), syllables, diphthongs and hence words, makes everything harder. For the same reason, writing English is also quite difficult. -prepositions: it's not easy to pick the right preposition sometimes. For instance, in Italian, in order to say "to depend on" we say "dipendere da" but literally it would translate as "to depend from"... Another tricky thing that has to do with prepositions is the phrasal verbs; I've never found them in any other language. And for a beginner, it takes some time before getting accustomed to them, at least this was my case. Edited by Rykketid on 23 December 2012 at 2:28am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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