Is English harder to learn than other languages?

[Daniela1982]

Do you know more than one language? Which was the hardest to learn?

Poetry to think on.

[Sargentcaptain]

lol, lmao, try learning Japanese, or Croatian, or any Slavic language really. English has its quirks, but they are nothing compared to having to de facto learn 2 languages for Japanese or dealing with messed up phonetics and whatever the hell this nightmare is in Croatian:

Think this is bad?

If you wanna learn Serbian you'll need to know Latin and Cyrillic. If you learn Japanese you'll have to know hiragana, katakana, and devils own invention, kanji.

English you can become fluent in, might take some time but it is possible. Japanese is more annoying, especially with nearly 2000 separate kanji symbols, most of which have 2 different readings, if you're lucky, cause boy that number can go up. But even so, becoming fluent in Japanese is realistic. The grammar of any Slavic language though, just come with the terms that no matter how many years you put into it, you'll probably still make mistakes. Even I, as a native Croatian speaker, find learning other Slavic languages painful due to the grammar. And the thing is that these languages have concepts that most other languages just do not have, so it's especially difficult to come from a , say, Germanic language. On the up side, no matter which Slavic language you speak, you'll at least be able to understand another Slavic language, after you put in ~ 5 to 10 years in the first one, minimum.

[Daniela1982]

I see the female for our works for NASA. So Croatians speak rocket science?

[Losalt]

Thank you for that text.
As for how hard or easy it is to learn...
I think that it depends a lot on your native language.
Speakers of Germanic languages have a advantage because there's still bits of the Germanic structure in there and about 26% of the vocabulary is Germanic I think it was?
Speakers of romance languages enjoy about 29% French and 29% Latin vocabulary, so there's that...
Anyone speaking a Indo-European language (Persian, Hindu, Russian, Urdu, Greek etc) at least are remotely related to English so they also have a advantage.
However if you're starting out with something from a *completely* different language family then Indo-European then I imagine that English would be quite hard.
On one hand the structure is quite simplified because the language evolved in a setting where multiple languages where interacting so speakers had to deal with others not aware of the complexities.
Yet having influences from so many languages also made a mess of a lot of rules making the language inconsistent and full of exceptions to every imaginable rule...
As your text clearly illustrates...

[Emii_Urashima]

Everyone I know says that English is one of the most difficult languages. My primary language is Japanese and I speak Korean, Chinese and English. English was the most difficult because of the incredible amount of slang used in conversation and the total absence of logic as your image shows. My father is fluent in English and he helped me with it. Many times I told him things did not make sense and he just laughed and told me to not expect it to. If you have one goose and two is geese, then why is it that if there is one mouse, two is not meese? 🤦‍♀️

[Daniela1982]

You must love those meeces to pieces.

[Losalt]

It's not so much that it's a particularly difficult language to learn pr say.
But you where at a disadvantage not being a speaker of the other languages it's related to.
It's fairly easy to pick up once you know a few European languages that has influenced it.
Most of the exceptions makes a lot more sense if you know the languages they originated in.

[Losalt]

@Daniela1982
Sorry, "meeces"?

[BlueScorpio]

Sadly I don't know another language, English is my only language. As an English speaker I thought it was interesting to hear people say learning English was hard for them when they came to America, cause to me all other languages seem flat out difficult to learn to me. I tried to learn Spanish but it just never clicked for me. I would love to learn Japanese, German, and many other languages.

[Losalt]

If you want some easy languages for a English speaker consider Frisian, Scots and Norwegian.
Scots is onna language continuum with English, so while the most distant parts of the language is unintelligible to English speakers there's in between dialects that's intelligible to speakers of both languages (I'm not talking Scottish English or Gaelic, but Scots)
After Scots Friesian is the closest relative of English.
Then comes Dutch and low German.
But the reason I'm recommending Norwegian over those is that like English Norwegian has been simplified a lot due to interaction between multiple ethnic groups.
With the country being ruled by the Danes for about 400 years, trading with Dutch and low German speakers, of course having native speakers, Finns and Sami people all being included in the mix.
Oh, and of course, the classics of all European languages, Latin and Greek leaving their mark due to the prestige of those languages.

But yeah, when doing "I am, you are, he is, she is, it is etc it's really simple for Norwegian.

[Losalt]

Damned, posted by accident.
But yeah, we just do:
Jeg er
Du er
Han er
Hun er
Det er
Etc.
"Er" meaning am, are, is etc...
That said, Norwegian is easy to learn but hard to master because of all the dialects...

[Moose304]

English is easy to learn the words. What makes English so hard though is so many of the words have different meanings based on context. Ask any husband what it means when a wife says "alright" after asking her if you can do something. Or what if you hear a man comment on that fox in the lobby? Does that business have animals in the lobby? 100 years ago if someone asked me if I was gay I would say yes I am. Today I would give them a hard look. To be fair human nature being what it is other languages have these issues. However English is one of those languages that are no longer 100% pure. Words like okey dokey it is said might come from the Greek word "dokimos". So with the way words can have different meanings based on context as well as so many words from different languages I would say English is the hardest language to master. I know a man that married a German lady almost 40 years ago. He moved her to the US. Today 40 years later still has problems with understanding all the context changes.

[Moose304]

One last point. I don't normally use the word "fuck" in my writing or when speaking. Just look at that word. That word can be used as a Noun, a Verb, an Adverb, a pronoun, and a preposition.

[MCheetah]

English teacher with a Masters here. No. It's literally one of the easiest in the world. English, Spanish, French, and a few European languages are category I languages. It takes 600 hours to be fluent in English.

Where I'm at, South Korea, they speak the second hardest language in the world. Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Russian, and Japanese are Category IV languages, the hardest in the world to learn. It takes 2,400 hours, roughly two years straight, to be fluent in Korean or any of these other languages.

That poem is using the few rare examples in English (mostly taken from the French) and trying to say it's hard, when a simple grammar chart will help you understand 95% of English grammar. Yeah, sometimes you get lives as a noun and lives as a verb, and fish and moose as plural words, and She and Her not sticking to just using S words throughout, but those are rare. Blame European influence for those.

[AviatorTom]

English is a unique language in that it has lots of rules and weird spellings of words, but you can communicate quite well by ignoring most of the rules. In that sense, English is not difficult to learn, but it is difficult to learn to speak it completely correctly. That rarely happens, even for native-English speakers.

Posts on G@G are a perfect example of that. There are numerous typos, incorrect subject-verb agreements, use of incorrect nouns and verbs, etc. yet we all seem to understand what the person is saying.

[WindAtMyBack]

When I was in school, if people wanted to take an "easy" language they would take a Romance language, probably Spanish.

I've always heard that English is hard to learn, but I guess it depends on your native language and what you are comparing it to.

It's not just about the weird spellings, homonyms, all the exceptions, and stuff like that. English has a ton of idioms and idiomatic words and phrases. Us native speakers don't even notice it.

Someone says "shut up" and native speakers know what it means. They don't think of it as idiomatic. You shut a door. You look up. So where does "shut up" come from? You can't understand it just by knowing what the words mean and how they are used. The language is full of this stuff.

[LikeALog]

Definitely agree about the idiomatic phrases. While on a trip to Japan, I visited a bookstore. The store had a huge area, several aisles, devoted to only idiomatic expressions. (I was seeking an English to Japanese translation book.)

[WindAtMyBack]

@LikeALog
For over a year I've been volunteering at an ESL Q&A site. Of course I already knew that non-native speakers had to learn idioms. But in the past I always thought of idioms like "In one ear and out the other". People don't think of things like "shut up" or "You're on your own" as idioms. But a non-native speaker can't put the individual words together to come up with the meaning.

[Avicenna]

To some exent, it depends on what languages the person already speaks and how much contact you have with English.

Despite inconsistent spelling and pronunciation rules, English has easy grammar. Idioms can be an area of difficulty. There is no real case system to learn, no tones except for emphasis, and no ideographs.

In a nutshell, English is not harder to learn than most other languages. I'd put it around the same difficulty as Spanish, Italian and French, less difficult than German, and definitely much less difficult than Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Russian or Turkish.

[Astarlessnightsky]

English is pretty easy to learn.

Islandic is the hardest language.

German is also really hard, as the grammar is really complicated.

But also depends which is your native language.

In Europe most languages have some latin influence since the Roman Empire reigned half of the continent. So these languages have some similarities.

[WonderBell99]

Spot on! I'm learning German and I find the grammar extremely complex

[lightningwolfo]

I took a Spanish class.
I then proceeded to get a 60 percent in that class only because the teacher boosted me to a D so I would not have to retake her class.
Any language is hard af to learn and it REALLY takes a special kind of brain to actually be able to interpret it.

[Ill_made_Knight]

Yes it is. I studied German for 4 years in Hs and college, Russin for 2 semesters, and have picked up a decent amount of Spanish just through contact.
English has far more irregularities in verbs (conjugations) irregelarities in pronunciation of words with virtually same spelling etc... so much more of it must be learned simply by rote... there is no pronunciation "rule" that can be relied on.

[Massageman]

I have a friend who HAD to have 2 years of a foreign language and he thought that German was the easiest. In hindsight, he said he should have taken Spanish, whether it was easy or not.

One of the biggest differences between English and the European "romance languages" (Spanish, Italian, etc). is the order of the modifier relative to the subject in a sentence.

In English, you can have a "yellow pencil". In Spanish it is "lapis amarillo", or "pencil yellow". Just one of those little differences to keep life interesting!

[Roseboy]

it jsut depends on what your first language is really
it varies
but English is stupid
no diacritics
weird plurals
all that jazz
i speak two langauges, English and welsh and as i was raised speaking both neither were hard to learn

anyway the reason why we have weird pluralisations is because of the middle ages
can't be bothered to explain it in detail but basically the weird ones are just leftovers of the other types of pluralising we used to use but no longer do as they fell out of fashion

[Wade12345]

Spanish is way harder than English.

Chinese is probably the hardest written language in the world to learn. It's so hard a lot of Chinese people don't know how to read their own written language. It's also one of the hardest spoken languages in the world. Every word's tone and inflections must be pronounced exactly correctly or it becomes a different word and means something completely different.

[007kingifrit]

this is a list of exceptions, any language has those. in reality English is mathematically superior to all other languages and here is why

I walk down the street

I walked down the street... see? one change, one tiny change

same sentence in german

Ich Laufen auf dem strasse

Ich habe auf dem strasse gelaufen

look how much changes in german, the verb changed, a new verb was added, the verb MOVES and that's just a short sentence... you don't want to see what happens when there are sub clauses

[starfoxxy64]

I would actually like to learn more Croatian and hopefully be able to enjoy many of the songs which I grew up listening to with my father who is from Croatia. Which English is my first language. Which I had 1 year of German in high school which was okay.

[NamerOfStars]

Despite what you were taught in high school French class, English is EASY (not Esperanto easy, but easy)- until you try to pronounce it. Then heaven help you.

Getting the fine nuances of grammar right is also quite complex, but for basic communication, English is pretty simple.

[MuddyMole]

It depends what you mean. It's very hard to speak absolutely perfect English - even most native English speakers can't (and that's before you get into different regional dialects) - but if you just want to be able to communicate (ie. you can understand what other people are saying and vice versa), it's generally considered one of the easiest languages to learn.

[Theabcking]

It depends if your native language is an eastern language or a western language. And if it is a western language like English how similar is it to English. For instance, if your native language is German it might be easier for you than someone whose native languages is I don't know French.

If your native language is eastern you will struggle more because it's a completely new sound to you not just a new language. You have the learn how things and what makes sense when you hear it.

[sheikalana]

I can speak my mother language and English. Honestly I can't remember how exactly I learnt how to speak English I've been bilingual most of my life. I studied french when I was younger and used to be pretty good at it it wasn't that hard for me to learn it. Nowadays I can't speak french anymore since I stopped french classes. I can still understand some of it.

[Likes2drive]

From what I’m told by people who speak it as a second language it is harder because of so many words that have the same meaning and our vocabulary is much bigger than most other languages and they usually don’t have a different word describing a man or woman, it’s the same word to describe them

[Daniela1982]

A lot of other languages, like Greek, has many words for the same word so it is hard to translate into English where we usually have one.

[Likes2drive]

Yeah that’s what I hear that makes it hard learning certain languages

[888theGreat]

New Yorkers talk like it is a second language. Everything that ends in an A they add a R. Like Indianar. I try to tell them there is no R

[Likes2drive]

@888theGreat maybe some do but I’m from Long Island and don’t talk like that, I try to talk correctly and pronounce words properly, I think people in Boston talk more like that

[Anonymous]

English was super easy for me to learn. My native tongue is Spanish even though I am an American. So, I didn’t go to preschool and my first day of kindergarten I kid you not I learned how to speak English, and the very next day I came home and forgot how to speak Spanish lol. I had to learn to only speak English outside of my home and only speak Spanish inside of my home so that I didn’t loose both my native tongue or second language.

[Opinion Owner]

I tried learning French and Italian and the only thing I learned how to say something in French was how to order a croissant. Sad I know. Italian was easier for me because it sounded like Spanish and in fact Spanish speakers can have a full blown conversations with Italians without even speaking Italian because it’s that identical. Even with the French. Anyways, for Italian I began looking for catchy songs on YouTube from Italian singers and I learned how to sing one and then I went from there. You just have to find your own method to learn a new language.

[Opinion Owner]

https://youtu.be/WI7mmN8-25s

[Opinion Owner]

This is the song by the way

[Opinion Owner]

In case anyone was curious about it.

[Daniela1982]

I don't know the words in Italian but this one was always funny.
https://youtu.be/Wzb35dgR1oY

[convo_king89]

I’ve is harder to learn when ur used to having it straight forward. But there is also a lot of flexibility to use it cuz there is more than one way to say it gives some slack when u screw up. But let not forget British English and American English.

British: Centre, Cheque

American:Center, Check

I don’t know if the British have “check” for like to check on some something. In the us both spelling us the same.