So, from around 1st grade, you always hear that English is so incredibly hard to learn. I hear many native English speakers always talk about this. However, when I talk with someone who isn't a native English speaker, they say it was very easy to learn. In all cases. So, is English really difficult to learn or is it easy? Directed at people whose native tongue isn't English.

The main thing is that with English you have an alphabet where each letter makes a distinct sound. Where as many languages have symbols that mean a word entirely. Or so I'm told. The only challenging thing with English is Homonyms.

The language itself(though I'm native) seems pretty easy, but the classes in all grades seem to be what's difficult. It doesn't seem like we're learning the language, so much as writing essays and the likes.

I know plenty of languages, (including English, surprisingly) and I'd say English is the easiest. Though that may simply be because it's my first language...

Edit:

@Johnny: Believe me, writing essays in French and Arabic make English ones look like a piece of cake.

I mean, from a non-native English speaker's opinion. Yeah essays and stuff get complicated, but just being able to speak and write it fluently, not necessarily being able to write a book with perfect grammar and sentence structure, because even the best English speakers don't do that without revision.

I learned English quite easily. French, on the other hand, is a pretty difficult language to learn, in my opinion. From the conjugation of the verbs to the long list of exceptions to the rules in grammar... It's one hell of a ride, learning French.

I think because english demands lots of memorization than being logical. And for people who have it as a second language and say its easy were probably taught throughout schoo.
Just my guess I only know english.

I think it's just easy to immerse yourself in learning English. Many popular TV shows originally are in English, many books have been translated into English, and not to mention the accessibility to speaking with another English speaking person ( on the Internet ). Classes can get you started in learning a language, but the problem a lot of people have is finding a practical way to use that knowledge. So, I believe all that makes it a helluva lot easier to learn than, say, Portuguese.

The whole reason to use English would be whether or not it's necessary, which would partially dictate how quickly one learns and communicates effectively with it. The other portion is how smart or how willing the person is to learn it. When I lived in California I saw native Mexicans (born there, second/third generation) who were smart but refused to learn and speak English, pretty much ruining chances at most opportunities that would otherwise come their way in the country. I've met some from China or Pakistan or India who went out of their way to take (free) courses to pick up on the language and it was no sweat for them. If you put out the effort, even if not the most intelligent individual, you should be able to catch on pretty fast, especially those at a younger age.

English is without a doubt the easiest language I've had to learn. I didn't even go through the process of learning it, I just picked it up slowly as a child through video games and movies and could already speak the language when I entered the grade where you start learning English in Iceland.

Of course I didn't and I still don't have a perfect mastery of all the rules surrounding the English language but I don't even have a mastery over my home language so little difference there. But building up a sufficient vocabulary and learning the proper grammar for said vocabulary is quite easy when it comes to English.

So no, English is not a hard language to learn and start using. I'm currently studying Danish in school yet after years of studying I know that language far worse than English and can hardly speak it, and that′s at a college level of Danish. And if you want something really hard there is always Japanese which I doubt I will ever be able to learn without just moving into the country forcing myself to learn it.

English however is a language kids start grasping around the age of 6 and just learn it in their free time and are capable of speaking it by the age of 10 if not sooner (I base this on my little brother who like me started taking an interest in English around the time he was 5 or 6, and now that he′s 10 I am capable of conversing with him fully in English).

Edit: But it should probably be noted that it may be easier for people who speak certain languages to learn it than others. When I call Japanese hard it′s probably easy for a Chinese person to learn Japanese but hard for him to learn English, while for me and others living in Europe it would be easy to learn English but hard to learn a language like Japanese.

English is pretty easy to learn, I'd say, especially if you know other European languages. It has fewer tenses, rules, articles, etc. than others. However, its awkward origins in French and Germanic make it hard to master, since there are no concrete rules as to pronunciation or spelling. That's probably what native speakers mean when they say that English is difficult to learn.


Hells no. With Spanish or Russian you have a letter making a distinct sound. With English you have letters which make the same sounds and letters which make half a dozen different sounds depending on the word. Like I said above, English is a huge mess.

My native is Russian, then German, then English. I learned Spanish in school.

The only thing that's probably difficult is remembering the huge number of irregular verbs and such that follow no set grammatical rules. The language itself is not particularly cryptic.

If it makes you feel any better, native French speakers have a really (and I mean REALLY) difficult time learning how to spell properly. Most of us don't master our own language

English was very hard for me to learn (I'm still learning it) because as a child I had terrible teachers and zero contact with English in rural France. All the movies are dubbed in French, all the books are translated, etc. The only contact with English I had as a child was through songs, but I didn't really try to understand what they meant. I've always liked the sound of English, though, my dad would often listen to English pop music. Moonlight Shadow is the song I best remember from that time, I loved it even though I didn't understand a single word. I think loving the language is what really encouraged me to learn it.

But yeah, English is not easy at all when you don't have access to movies and books in their original versions, although now with the Internet I suspect this is no longer a problem. I think there are far more difficult languages to master, though, such as Russian... now that is very tough language to learn!

I think words ending in "-ough" are the best example of the "huge mess", having at least 10 different pronunciations, none of which are especially obvious.

From the discussion I would say English is easy to learn, but difficult to master. I am only fluent in English and I still make grammatical errors. For the most part though, issues with grammar don't seem to harm a sentence.

This has got to help. The more exposure you have to a language outside of class the easier it is to learn. That's probably why Spanish is the easiest one for North Americans. Lots of Spanish speaking immigrants, dozens of Spanish TV channels and easy access to Spanish newspapers and magazines.




Its interesting what speakers of other languages think of English. Most English speakers think French sounds "pretty", but it surprising to hear that a native French speaker thinks English sounds nice. I had a coworker from Germany and she said that English was a prettier language than German to her ears (especially RP or "BBC" English, although she liked the standard American accent too).

Espeshully N a clture tht seemz used too tlking liek th1s

English is suppose to be the second hardest language to learn in the world. Chinese or Cantonese is suppose to be the hardest language.

I believe one of the reasons why English is so hard is because there is too many meanings for one world.

C

What am I saying? Is it water, as in sea, or eyes, you see with your eyes, or is it the letter C. Then you have it's saw. We all "saw" the trailer for Skyrim, but someone new to enlish is why are they taking a tool to cut up Skyrim trailer? Then again, why are we looking at at something that is attatched behind another vehicle?

Then we have Knights, nite or night. Why is it when we cut our meat, the instrument we use begins with a K and not an N? Another thing, in alot of languages, there is a masculin and feminin terminology. There is none of that in the English Language. No accents either, so people really have to know why you pronounce things properly. Eg, I before E except after C or when pronounced as A. Also a vowel is suppose to be soft unles it is followed by ONE concenate followed by ONE E at the end. Eg Lite. take away the E and it is lit. Also when you follow the other rules, like EE as in Meet, or ea also sounds the same Meat, there are words that don't even follow the rules and are still pronounced differently that makes no sense at all. Like how some vowels are pronounced HARD when they should be SOFT. (can't remember the example now. )

There is so many rules for the English language. The problem is, most people espically native US or Canadian citizens (I mean people born there not Indians) don't even know how to talk and write properly. It is pretty damn sad that "ain't" has to be offically in the english dicitonary just because peopel do not know how to speak English properly.

So while many people think English is easy to learn, it might be easy to pick up and talk and speak with other people with English, but it doesn't mean people are using it correctly. I find forieners can use the English language properly than most native born English speaking people.

Being an English speaker as a first language, I don't know how difficult it is to learn, but I did French in school and I svcked at it. The only thing I was looking forward to was the oral examination....... and that wasn't what I expected.

What amazes me is you can be in the most remote place in the world and someone can speak English. I was in Greece nowhere near any tourist area at all, it was right in the mountains right in the back country. I got a bit lost so (making myself look like an idiot started mimming and using a few English words to a few kids, asking the way to go), they replied in better English than half the teenagers back in my own country.

I would think Mandarin or Arabic etc would be harder because you are not only learning a new language but a new alphabet as well.

I had NEVER heard that :confused: Only the opposite actually. People usually say the number 1 reason english is a "universal launguage" is it's ease of learning.



In comparison to other languages, english is probably the easiest one to learn :shrug:

Well, C isn't a valid word outside text chats, but I agree that there are a lot of homonyms.

If you consider 1% to be most. Plenty of words are added to dictionaries each year, and ain't has its purpose. I don't think ain't is a very classy word, but that's all me.

Are you serious? Maybe you are just forgetting all the foreigners who can't speak English properly and are letting the ones who are excellent at speaking English stick out. Out of all the non-native English speakers I've met, only a handful were actually better at communicating with me than native English speakers.

I think we have a love/hate relationship with English in France. Many people think "oh noes English is threatening our language (obviously the best)" but at the same time English sounds very.... I hope this doesn't sound weird, but it sounds "modern." English is associated with pop music, blockbuster movies, computers... in a way French isn't. Which makes English very attractive. I think other countries in Europe may have a similar love/hate relationship with English.
On a personal level I think English sounds really nice because of the variety of vowels and the way some syllables are stressed. French can be a very flat language compared to the variety of intonations you hear in English.

Irregular verbs are not too hard, imo. The pronunciation is much more difficult, as is the huge amount of words that exist in English. English is a very "accurate" language, there seem to be words for everything. In French for instance you have far fewer words to describe the act of looking, while in English you have verbs like glare, peer, gaze, peep, squint, ogle... We have similar expressions in French, but not single words. That's part of what makes English both awesome and difficult to really master.

Well of course English sounds nice to Germans, have you ever heard two Germans carry on a conversation? It could be about how delicious this pork is, but it would still sound like they are arguing.

That's coming from my step father, who speaks fluent German and spent a lot of time in Germany as a child with his native German father. German was relatively easy for him to learn, sense English is based of that, French, and Latin.

My mom speaks a little French, she spent some time in up state New York and had some French Canadian friends, but she swears she is never going north of the Mason Dixon line again, in New York, she says, the sweet tea tastes awful, you can't find a good sausage/chicken/steak biscut for the life of you and that 95% of the population were lacking in decent manners, she also said that people up there don't get/use basic expressions, like "Its as broad as it is long" or "Beating a dead horse".

I have no idea if its all true, but what she said is enough to keep me away.

I don't think english is easy to learn, but atm it's more widely use which is why more people are taught english in school. I've seen various languages require several words and/or phrases put together while in english it may only be 2 to 3 words maybe 1. Know for a fact that in Japan I think around middle school they start to learn english along with their regular language so that they can mingle about more easily. The one reason people may find english hard is that there is english and I believe "Proper" english or Britain style english. Not sure if this is proper example, but there is the word Judgment which can also be spelled Judgement.

Another problem are words that sound alike yet have different meanings along with words that can become convoluted at times. One problem I always seem to have is between effect and affect along with effecting and affecting.

Only time I will say that going from another language to english is hard is when you are changing symbols. Even though french has some unique symbols quite a few of them are characteristic of the english language. However if you go to Japan or Russia you get some very unique characters that may not properly translate to english.

Not the only thing, but certainly one of the most challenging (if not the most). I have a friend whose fourth language is english, and she said learning to speak it was easy, but learning to write in it was hard (mainly because of homonyms).

One non-homonym example she gave was the contraction would've. Very few people say would have, preferring to use the contraction instead. This leads many to erroneously believe that the correct way to write/type it is would of.

Another thing she pointed out was that some words sound like they're synonyms, but aren't. For instance, "look" and "see" are similar since both refer to sight, but "overlook" and "oversee" don't have even remotely similar meanings.

From what I gathered from a brothers from India, and two from Vietnam, they had a really easy time learning it once they got a hold of the phonetics and general grammar (the latter only have a year before heading to the states). Of course, there are words in the English language that are exceptions, but they weren't much of a problem to them once they knew about it. The brother from India learned it earlier, but he speaks English as if he were a native speaker (heck, better than me). The two Vietnamese brothers had an accent, but it was easy enough to understand them after a week of talking with them for a while.

I would say it helps that English is pretty gender neutral. No need to classify inanimate objects as being male or female, thankfully, though multiple versions of "the," "a," and "an."