Great Annamariah, you are right by bringing such reasons as what make English easy to you.
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Great Annamariah, you are right by bringing such reasons as what make English easy to you.
Im currently learning Italian, i find some of it easy some hard. The hardest part is getting of the ground, learning the words that make the language flow.
As for English, obviously being English i find it diffcult;) I make spelling mistakes all the time. Lots of the words i use aint in the dictionary :D
Speeling errors? How that's happening while you are an English? I'm suprise.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ubiquitous Prat
Who is above mistake?Quote:
Originally Posted by muhsin
Who is above mistake?:idea:Quote:
Originally Posted by muhsin
That's true. I now got it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Goodfella
I make spelling mistakes beacuse of the way i talk, i have a cockney accent, i suppose. Well at least it's my excuse :D
I'm a native English speaker, and thus it is my mother tongue, but I was also brought up speaking French as a second language. One thing I have learned about both tongues is that there are millions of exceptions to the grammatical rules of both languages! And, the exceptions have exceptions! haha
Wow. You guys are crazy. As an American who has spoken English all my life, and speaks it better than most people I know, I can't believe you all say it's an easy language. In my opinion, it is an INCREDIBLY difficult language to learn. And why? Because it is one of the most complex languages there is. I took some spanish in high school and have had exposure to Italian due to my ancestory and those languages are easy because the rules are straight forward and simple. But English has an incredible amount of rules and stipulations and the language doesn't even always follow those rules; there are an enormous number of exceptions. All these rules like i before e excpet after c and yet, look at words like science, policies, consciece, etc. Boatloads of similar, often misused words like affet/effect, between/among, lie/lay, etc. I saw a Gallagher skit once where he compared a bunch of words and how they sound and are spelled. Look at words like comb, tomb, bomb. All spelled the same except for the root letter, all sound different. Comb, home, roam. All sound the same, all spelled different. It seems easy to those who have spoken it all our lives, but I don't buy the notion for one second that this as an easy language. It is, in fact, one of the hardest.
:lol: I can't believe you used that as an example.Quote:
Originally Posted by metal134
You Americans are sometimes really unbelievable...Your language is the most difficult, your literature is the best, your culture is the greatest etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by metal134
You think Spanish or any other language is easy? Ask Cervantes what does he think about your Spanish...I think(and my friends and my teacher and some tourists:D ) that my English is very good, but when I had a discussion with Mono, I needed dictionary, every third or fourth word he used was totally unknown to me! So I guess it's not that good.
Every language has many exceptions, if you don't know them; that doesn't mean they do not exist.
I cannot offer but an answer based on personal experience, which might differ slightly or greatly from the experiences of other individuals; the question in itself, of course, cannot be answered objectively.
To me, English was the easiest foreign language to learn. That can be due to many factors - the fact that I started to study English at the age of four, and thus grew up with it; the fact that, because of its international role, English has been very present around and I have had constant exposure to it through the media; or the fact that I have been using it myself a lot since I was a child as my preferred language for reading, personal correspondence, etc. In fact, I do not recall "studying" English - my command of it grew through the years, and I always somehow "knew" it; English was probably not easy due to its structure, but due to exposure and usage - I mastered it as my own language and it is hard for me to view it as "foreign" language.
However, if I were asked to compare the structure of English with the structure of other languages I have studied, there would be a couple of points worth considering.
To start with, morphology - or lack thereof. Compared to any other language I can speak - especially compared to my native Slavic ones or to classical ones - English is a language with practically no morphology to speak of; its words cannot be altered and thus their meanings nuanced in the way Russian language permits it, nor do its verbs have large number of possible forms with multiple endings that must be learnt, as in the case of Ancient Greek; due to its certain lack of complex morphology, English relies to syntax a lot - which, to speak frankly, limits the possibilities of poetic expression quite a bit.
Secondly, the question of vocabulary. English is, without a doubt, rich in vocabulary - but how much of that vocabulary is Anglo-Saxon in origin? Roughly 70% [the source is vague in my head, but I have actually read it somewhere] of the modern English vocabulary is Latin-based and acquired via French, with smaller percentages of words from other languages, and thus is modern English vocabulary - for a language which considers itself to be Germanic - one huge mess, and a great discount for learners whose native languages are the Romance ones, especially when one is past the basics [the very basic everyday words in English tend to be of Germanic origin]. Therefore, I would say that English is only moderately difficult in terms of vocabulary for a learner whose objective is not to read authors such as Milton or Shakespeare.
The orthography is, perhaps, the only area in which I would dare to say that English is difficult, because its illogical spelling is the hardest out of all the languages I can speak. Speaking honestly, though, one gets used to all the oddities of the languages one studies, and even though the spelling is messy, its difficulty is still, in my humble opinion, overrated, especially in times like this, when English is everywhere and when it is easier than ever for one to visually get used to the English orthography.
From the acoustic point of view, English is relatively easy to pronounce, its pronunciation is not as "clear" in some languages, but it is not difficult to copy as the sounds English employs are to be found in other languages as well and for the speakers of European languages, it can have a couple of unknown sounds.
Overall, it all depends on what was one's native language, how exposed one is to English, at what age one has started to study it, and how motivated one is at all to learn it. English was not close to my native languages, but I had all the other elements filled - therefore, English was a piece of cake to me, and easier to acquire than languages stereotypically viewed to be "easy", such as Italian [which I started to study at somewhat older age].
I'm Italian and study English, German and Spanish. In my opinion English is not that simple if compared to the other languages I study, I mean, its rules (especially those concerning tenses) are not as specific and strict as the German ones and I still have some difficulties.
To be honest, I'm better at English than I am at German and Spanish, probably because it's the language I like the most, but my classmates find it much harder....
Now, being italian, I tend to have the classical Italian accent while speaking, so I can say that pronunciation is my great problem, but despite this fact, I like speaking in front of people in English (with my teacher, at MUN sessions, when I travel abroad..) and believe this is one of the most important ways to improve one's skills.
It keeps one on one's toes.Quote:
Originally Posted by srpbritlit
Exactly. I'm not saying that english is hard to boost my culture's ego (I do not think America has the best music, movies, or literature (although Faulkner and Steinbeck make a strong tandum)). But having studied Spanish and a little Italian, I have seen how simple the rules are, how few of them there are and how strictly the language adheres to those rules. English has many ruloes, many of which don't even make sense and there are so many deviations from the rule that it can be confusing as hell. Having spoken to people who speak English as a second language, or have mastered a foriegn language, they all tell me that languages like Spanish and Italian easy to learn when compared to english. All of my foriegn language and forigen culture teachers have been universal in the sentiment that English is one of the hardest languages to learn next to Chinese.Quote:
Originally Posted by Silvia