Is English A Difficult Language?

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Originally Posted by Brasil

ENGLISH----- PORTUGUESE

Present----- Presente
I love------- eu amo
you love----- tu amas
he loves----- ele ama
we love----- nós amamos
you all love--- vós amais
they love ----- eles amam

Past--------- Pretérito
I loved------- eu amei
you loved----- tu amaste
he loved----- ele amou
we loved----- nós amamos
you all loved--- vós amastes
they loved----- eles amaram

Future--------- Futuro
I will love------- eu amarei
you will love----- tu amarás
he will love----- ele amará
we will love----- nós amaremos
you all will love--- vós amareis
they will love----- eles amarão

So, I think English conjugation is very simple, almost no variation.
Now, look at the red letters in portuguese conjugation. That kind of variation is complex.
I've taken Portuguese grammar as example. The same I say about Portuguese is also for any neo-latin language and other languages.

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Yes, that is the point I was trying to make earlier. ;)

I'm sorry, but that is a terrible example Brazil. the words function the same way, your endings are just at the end of the word. That is not more difficult, because it is simpler to remember that rule.

Try hebrew though, that has 26 binyanim of verb types. That has far more endings, especially since it is also inflected to time, speaker, and gender. Either way, these grammar rules aren't the hardest part. it is vocabulary consistency which is the difficult, and English has plenty of homonyms and similar sounding accents that it can jar even native speakers.

That being said, I am in no way saying you are wrong about Portuguese being harder, I am just saying that is a terrible example.

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Originally Posted by JBI

I'm sorry, but that is a terrible example Brazil. the words function the same way, your endings are just at the end of the word. That is not more difficult, because it is simpler to remember that rule.

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Lol, sure, just try to remember 50+ variations per verb, it will make your head spin. English speakers should not be discouraged on account of this, though. If you ask a native for ALL of these conjugations, chances are he will not know. You don't need to turn into Luís de Camões or Cervantes to be able to communicate fluently. ;)

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Originally Posted by JBI

Try hebrew though, that has 26 binyanim of verb types. That has far more endings, especially since it is also inflected to time, speaker, and gender.

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Hebrew is a semitic language. That is a different arena altogether. Portuguese and english are indo-european languages.

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Originally Posted by JBI

Either way, these grammar rules aren't the hardest part.

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This is true. _THESE_ grammar rules are not the hardest part... there are other grammar rules that make it even more difficult, lol.

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Originally Posted by JBI

it is vocabulary consistency which is the difficult,

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Uh, no... "vocabulary consistency" is actually just the first part of learning a language. The last part would be to master the grammar. It may take years to master the grammar -- if you ever manage to master it, that is. Some people never do.

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Originally Posted by JBI

and English has plenty of homonyms and similar sounding accents that it can jar even native speakers.

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This, although true, is by no means a particularity of the english language! Just about EVERY language "has plenty of homonyms and similar sounding accents that it can jar even native speakers." It seems like english speakers like very much to drop this line simply because they can't find anything else that makes their language appear fancy. ;)

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Originally Posted by JBI

That being said, I am in no way saying you are wrong about Portuguese being harder, I am just saying that is a terrible example.

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It is a terrible example to prove what? That there are harder languages than english? If this is the point addressed, then portuguese is not "a terrible example", at all.

Brasil is correct in his assertions.

The debate about "Portuguese and English languages" is very deep!!!!
(The debate about languages begins in the post #44 of the thread Brazilian Literature)

Just an example (the complete version is in "Brazilian Literature" thread):

We have in Portuguese the verb that means "to get a cold". It is gripar. See the conjugation at the Present:
Eu gripo, Tu gripas, Ele gripa, Nós gripamos, etc...
(=I get a cold, you get a cold, he get a cold, we get a cold...)

The word gripado is the past participle of the verb gripar.
The word gripar is the infinitive form.

If you are a female you have to say: Eu estou gripada
If you are a male you have to say: Eu estou gripado

English does not have declinations by male/female and singular/plural.
English article "a" in Portuguese can assume four forms: um, uma, uns, umas.
English article "the" in Portuguese can assume four forms: o, a, os, as.

That is why I think English is simple and easy. In English you don't have to conjugate verbs and there is (almost) no declination.

But I apreciate all languages, they are all beatiful for me. I love English, Arabic and all romance languages.

I love English but I do not really think that it is easy to learn. The first stages are attained pretty fast. But I do think that later on it gets more and more difficult. Not the understanding part but the writing...

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Originally Posted by Pyrrho

I love English but I do not really think that it is easy to learn.

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To attain fluency in any language is not an easy task. I don't think it is easy to learn english. But compared to any other major european language, english is easy.

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Originally Posted by Pyrrho

The first stages are attained pretty fast. But I do think that later on it gets more and more difficult. Not the understanding part but the writing...

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That is exactly how it goes... first you acquire a vague understanding of the words -- you associate words to objects and/or ideas -- then you begin to vaguely understand a text. But to write is a bit more difficult, you are right. That is part of learning the grammar already. That may take years. That is the last part.

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Originally Posted by Pyrrho

I love English but I do not really think that it is easy to learn. The first stages are attained pretty fast. But I do think that later on it gets more and more difficult. Not the understanding part but the writing...

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?
I don't quite understand that very well. Wish I haven't sound obtuse, eh?

Learning a new language is not that difficult only if you are in that language community. But being distant from the community and imagine when one becomes compelled to learn a live language depending upon signs or prints, is not it a tedious thing to do. That is how I learn it.

I do not speak a single word in English in my community. I simply read it in print, watch TV programs, listen to songs in English, and these are the sources of my knowledge in English.

What about yours?

That is just my very subjective view. I study English literature and while at school learning English was always very easy for me I have some problems to write on a more academic level. It' s just that I read and read and read but, nonetheless, it still does not work out the way I would wish it to. And many of my fellow students have the same problem. Like EdwardJ said: advanced grammar...hm... and style. Not so easy to obtain.

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Originally Posted by blazeofglory

I do not speak a single word in English in my community. I simply read it in print, watch TV programs, listen to songs in English, and these are the sources of my knowledge in English.

What about yours?

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I mainly use English in the internet; sometimes I search on English websites when I couldn't get enough info on German websites; I read English online newspapers or this forum and occasionally a novel in English, and I also have a friend to whom I write in English.

Fact is, I've never uttered a word of it ever since I've left my English class in school, and even back then the focus was far more on reading/writing than on listening and speaking. Thus, it's quite inaccurate to say that I can speak it, since I never had an actual opportunity to do so.

Concerning the difficulty: besides my native language German I've studied two foreign languages in school, English and Russian, and I can easily tell you that Russian has caused me a lot more troubles than English, but that's very likely only because English and German are far more related than Russian and German, the grammar of English comes more natural and it's easier to build the vocabulary... I certainly do not believe that English is an easier language per se.

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Originally Posted by Pyrrho

That is just my very subjective view. I study English literature and while at school learning English was always very easy for me I have some problems to write on a more academic level. It' s just that I read and read and read but, nonetheless, it still does not work out the way I would wish it to. And many of my fellow students have the same problem. Like EdwardJ said: advanced grammar...hm... and style. Not so easy to obtain.

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I have never had any prolbems with English but at academic level I remember feeling the need of lack of vocabulary.

Ah an old post. Still. Indo-European languages are easy in general. I will stand by that.

Excuse me, important news: a passive wifi device has been developed to see through walls. This will help police and people determine de actual positions of criminals. Still working on sensitivity issues like, for example, if the criminals don't move, they cannot be detected. But a higher sensitivity is coming soon where the device will detect breathing.

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Originally Posted by JBI

Ah an old post. Still. Indo-European languages are easy in general. I will stand by that.

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What is the most difficult language according to you?

I don't know if this has already been said, but the greatest determinant of the difficulty of other languages is your native language. If your native language is Cantonese, you will find Mandarin relatively easy to learn. If your native language is Kurdish, you will find Persian relatively easy to learn. And so on.

Yes, probably if you know your own language and its rules and things, and it's quite an elaborate one, then you'll probably find English a breeze. If you're English and you are taught the few rules there are (which is already not a given these days apparently), you'll probably find any other language very difficult.

That said, I think English is often only mistaken for being easy. The trap to me is in the surface. The surface is very easy, learners can express themselves adequately and rightly fairly quickly and so they think they know 'English'. Not so in French or German (that's the ones I know). Apart from the tenses and maybe when to use 'will' and 'going to' for the future, there is not much to remember. Everything comes fairly naturally. And no-one even seems to mind you are using the present perfect with 'yesterday'. Yesterday, I have gone to the shop. Do that in any other language and you'll drop down a level in the eyes of your audience...
But the deeper you go in English, the worse it gets. You've got remnants of inversion, you've got incredible amounts of phrasal verbs, you've got subjunctive, preposition at the end or not (it seems to be mainly a question of register), not to mention the vast amounts of vocab which will express exactly down to a tee what you actually want to say... And all these things they never teach, because there are no real rules for those.
And then if you know these things, for everything to sound absolutely natural, you'll just need feeling.

So you can have a situation where you can have a perfect conversation in a shop, read the newspaper, no problem and then you'll try and do something out of that level, and boom, you know nothing.

Hmm, maybe not difficult then, but treacherous. :D

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Originally Posted by lichtrausch

I don't know if this has already been said, but the greatest determinant of the difficulty of other languages is your native language. If your native language is Cantonese, you will find Mandarin relatively easy to learn. If your native language is Kurdish, you will find Persian relatively easy to learn. And so on.

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I agree that it is very difficult to stop thinking in your native language. We learn much easier things that are similar to ones we already know.

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Originally Posted by kiki1982

Yes, probably if you know your own language and its rules and things, and it's quite an elaborate one, then you'll probably find English a breeze. If you're English and you are taught the few rules there are (which is already not a given these days apparently), you'll probably find any other language very difficult.

That said, I think English is often only mistaken for being easy. The trap to me is in the surface. The surface is very easy, learners can express themselves adequately and rightly fairly quickly and so they think they know 'English'. Not so in French or German (that's the ones I know). Apart from the tenses and maybe when to use 'will' and 'going to' for the future, there is not much to remember. Everything comes fairly naturally. And no-one even seems to mind you are using the present perfect with 'yesterday'. Yesterday, I have gone to the shop. Do that in any other language and you'll drop down a level in the eyes of your audience...
But the deeper you go in English, the worse it gets. You've got remnants of inversion, you've got incredible amounts of phrasal verbs, you've got subjunctive, preposition at the end or not (it seems to be mainly a question of register), not to mention the vast amounts of vocab which will express exactly down to a tee what you actually want to say... And all these things they never teach, because there are no real rules for those.
And then if you know these things, for everything to sound absolutely natural, you'll just need feeling.

So you can have a situation where you can have a perfect conversation in a shop, read the newspaper, no problem and then you'll try and do something out of that level, and boom, you know nothing.

Hmm, maybe not difficult then, but treacherous. :D

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I have already gone into subjunctive, unreal tenses and so on and I have to admit that despite the fact that such things don`t exist in Polish, it wasn`t such adifficult things I thought earlier. I am sure that I still will commit mistakes, maybe not so big ones but I`ll.

But thanks to very funny, a little bit strange differences between constructions and forms, english is very interesting language.

OK, English grammer is technically easier than many as it has less alterations of word endings.

But how do you work out the subtle differences between I walk, I am walking, I do walk, all versions of the present tense, which as far as I know will only be in one form in other languages?

And how do you know when the use the Latinate form or a word (altitude) and the Germanic (height)?

And the different nuances of beautiful, pretty, handsome and good looking?

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But how do you work out the subtle differences between I walk, I am walking, I do walk, all versions of the present tense, which as far as I know will only be in one form in other languages?

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Such differences are always explained in English textbooks. :)

Background: half chinese half english, living in hk. My first languages are English and Cantonese, and I also know Mandarin. I've been learning Spanish for 6 years, French for 1.

I didn't realise till recently that people had such an issue with English pronunciation. I can't comment on learning English as I mainly picked it up from reading books, watching tv, and speaking to my parents. I was always ahead of my local chinese classmates so I didn't pay attention when my teachers taught grammar.
I must say though, that Chinese is terribly difficult.
Imagine not having an alphabet, having to memorise a few thousand complicated characters. (We learn traditional, not simplified.chinese)
There are almost no clues as to how the word is pronounced.
Worse still, there are.two kinds of Chinese, formal and informal. Spoken Cantonese is significantly.different from written Chinese.
In the chinese language public exams, we.even have to do unseen comprehension test on ancient texts which make.no sense to modern readers whatsoever. You find chaucer hard? We have to read texts from more than 2000 years ago. And that's not even the literature paper, but just the compulsory chinese language paper. But at least the grammar is simple.
However, at the end of the day, I'm really glad that I have access to a wealth of Chinese literature. :)


Btw, I've always wondered: how does English sound to foreign ears?

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Originally Posted by seaofmilktea

Background: half chinese half english, living in hk. My first languages are English and Cantonese, and I also know Mandarin. I've been learning Spanish for 6 years, French for 1.

I didn't realise till recently that people had such an issue with English pronunciation. I can't comment on learning English as I mainly picked it up from reading books, watching tv, and speaking to my parents. I was always ahead of my local chinese classmates so I didn't pay attention when my teachers taught grammar.
I must say though, that Chinese is terribly difficult.
Imagine not having an alphabet, having to memorise a few thousand complicated characters. (We learn traditional, not simplified.chinese)
There are almost no clues as to how the word is pronounced.
Worse still, there are.two kinds of Chinese, formal and informal. Spoken Cantonese is significantly.different from written Chinese.
In the chinese language public exams, we.even have to do unseen comprehension test on ancient texts which make.no sense to modern readers whatsoever. You find chaucer hard? We have to read texts from more than 2000 years ago. And that's not even the literature paper, but just the compulsory chinese language paper. But at least the grammar is simple.
However, at the end of the day, I'm really glad that I have access to a wealth of Chinese literature. :)


Btw, I've always wondered: how does English sound to foreign ears?

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Chinese and Japanese are for me impossible to learn:) I mean, by me. One of my husband`s friends studies Chinese in China what is for me completely astonishing. First of all the alphabeth is very difficult. I heard that Chinese doesn`t distinguish nouns, verbs and so on. Is it true?

Haha, pronunciation, that's a good one :lol:.

I always say that if you want to pronounce English properly, you can't move your mouth at all. Being a Dutch speaker I do (I can imagine how difficult Germans find it). After about 13 years I have now mastered the shwa, and I feel I move my mouth differently, but still it's no good. Mind you, I can do it, if I put my mind to it, but it doesn't sound like me. I guess I'll have to read aloud a bit more, then it'll be alright (acquired a nice accent in French like that).

You can actually express many of the small nuances in English in other languages, but it's usually done with adverbs like really or something.
As to Latinate words, some are explained in text book, but only to a certain level. I mean altitude and height have a different meaning, but how can you explain to liberate and to free?

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Originally Posted by kiki1982

Haha, pronunciation, that's a good one :lol:.

I always say that if you want to pronounce English properly, you can't move your mouth at all. Being a Dutch speaker I do (I can imagine how difficult Germans find it). After about 13 years I have now mastered the shwa, and I feel I move my mouth differently, but still it's no good. Mind you, I can do it, if I put my mind to it, but it doesn't sound like me. I guess I'll have to read aloud a bit more, then it'll be alright (acquired a nice accent in French like that).

You can actually express many of the small nuances in English in other languages, but it's usually done with adverbs like really or something.
As to Latinate words, some are explained in text book, but only to a certain level. I mean altitude and height have a different meaning, but how can you explain to liberate and to free?

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Sometimes it seems to me that I won`t be able to learn hearing accent. I can learn by heart the rules but it`s all:)

I am a native Spanish speaker but I prefer English. English has more, what should I call them, "tools" to work with which help give freer rein to the imagination. I don't think English is difficult to learn but I learned it young. Any language can be difficult if you try to learn it when you are older and you didn't learn a second language when you were young. I studied French in college and didn't find it difficult perhaps because its structure is so similar to Spanish and there are so many cognitives in the three languages. I found the most difficult part of learning French to be understanding the run-on sound of the spoken language. If your native language has no cognitives with English and the grammatical structure is completely different then you will find English much more difficult. I noticed this when I tried to learn Japanese.

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Originally Posted by papillondemai

I am a native Spanish speaker but I prefer English. English has more, what should I call them, "tools" to work with which help give freer rein to the imagination. I don't think English is difficult to learn but I learned it young. Any language can be difficult if you try to learn it when you are older and you didn't learn a second language when you were young. I studied French in college and didn't find it difficult perhaps because its structure is so similar to Spanish and there are so many cognitives in the three languages. I found the most difficult part of learning French to be understanding the run-on sound of the spoken language. If your native language has no cognitives with English and the grammatical structure is completely different then you will find English much more difficult. I noticed this when I tried to learn Japanese.

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Despite English, I really love Spanish:) However few years ago I had a serious problem with subjuntivo. My native language is Polish and we don`t have such contruction. If yopu are interested, I can give you a link to my texts written in Spanish. I hope that I don`t make many mistakes.

Hannah:

Yes I'd like to read some of your Spanish work. I do not know anything about Polish except that it is a Slavic language. I have always thought of Slavic languages as being far removed from Spanish in regard to the elements necessary to learn it, i.e., grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation. Is there any similarity at all? How did you develop a love for Spanish? Were you a language major in college? I studied French primarily so I could read Rimbaud in French. Mistakes? I bet you write Spanish better than I do. Native Spanish speakers that grow up in the U.S. get most of the Spanish beat out of them unless they stay in a Spanish speaking community such as Miami. You can live in Miami now and never have to speak English.

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Originally Posted by papillondemai

Hannah:

Yes I'd like to read some of your Spanish work. I do not know anything about Polish except that it is a Slavic language. I have always thought of Slavic languages as being far removed from Spanish in regard to the elements necessary to learn it, i.e., grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation. Is there any similarity at all? How did you develop a love for Spanish? Were you a language major in college? I studied French primarily so I could read Rimbaud in French. Mistakes? I bet you write Spanish better than I do. Native Spanish speakers that grow up in the U.S. get most of the Spanish beat out of them unless they stay in a Spanish speaking community such as Miami. You can live in Miami now and never have to speak English.

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I am sending you link in a PM:) Slavic Languages are very remote from Spanish, French or English. We don`t have such construction as subjuntivo for example. There is only 1 verb meaning "to be". Conditional Clauses aren`t so complicated. However Polish has cases which is quite difficult.

I learned French at school (well I didn`t have then English). Then, at secondary school, I had German (still without English). I graduated from Polish Philology and now I am studying english Philology.

The issue of languages in USA is very interesting. In Poland you can only use Polish but there places inhabited by Germans, Lithuanians or Ucrainians.

Well sometimes words are specifically nouns or verbs etc, but sometimes the same word can be used as a noun or a.verb, especially in archaic chinese. It depends on context. Modern Chinese uses a lot of word compounds, for example 'butter' would be a two character compound: 'cow oil'. So the idea of a 'word' is a little different. I'm not a linguist so I don't know what the proper terms are used to describe the language!

We don't really have an alphabet. There is a Pinyin system for foreigners to know how to pronounce words, but actual written chinese has a unique way of writing each character, so unlike european languages, it is extremely difficult to guess how a word is pronounced by looking it. Most foreigners don't bother to learn how to read and write the language, which is perfectly understandable! Your husband's friend seems to be pretty amazing - even the Chinese find Chinese difficult. If he/she can learn Chinese, maybe I should try Russian? :D

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Originally Posted by seaofmilktea

Well sometimes words are specifically nouns or verbs etc, but sometimes the same word can be used as a noun or a.verb, especially in archaic chinese. It depends on context. Modern Chinese uses a lot of word compounds, for example 'butter' would be a two character compound: 'cow oil'. So the idea of a 'word' is a little different. I'm not a linguist so I don't know what the proper terms are used to describe the language!

We don't really have an alphabet. There is a Pinyin system for foreigners to know how to pronounce words, but actual written chinese has a unique way of writing each character, so unlike european languages, it is extremely difficult to guess how a word is pronounced by looking it. Most foreigners don't bother to learn how to read and write the language, which is perfectly understandable! Your husband's friend seems to be pretty amazing - even the Chinese find Chinese difficult. If he/she can learn Chinese, maybe I should try Russian? :D

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I have learnt Russian alphabeth:) It`s not so bad:D

I think that he can speak Chinese quite well. It is amazing the way Chinese use their language. I wouldn`t be able to learn it.

Where do you put Hindu and Punjabi, the two languages I am "struggling" to learn as I live in the mid of their speakers?

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Originally Posted by muhsin

Where do you put Hindu and Punjabi, the two languages I am "struggling" to learn as I live in the mid of their speakers?

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I wouldn`t be able to learn them. I think that they represent completely different point of view at many things. What do you think are the most difficult things in Hindu or Punjabi?

Okay. For both, the pronunciation and the orthography. They sound and look very weird to me; lol.

English is an incredibly difficult language to learn. Being from Germany, I speak German, French, Swedish, and I know how to carry a very basic conversation in Greek. I'm currently learning Welsh, as well. When I moved to America, English was a hassle to understand. So many rules in the writing and speaking of it are not always consistent. It was very frustrating.

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Originally Posted by Nacht-Jagen

English is an incredibly difficult language to learn. Being from Germany, I speak German, French, Swedish, and I know how to carry a very basic conversation in Greek. I'm currently learning Welsh, as well. When I moved to America, English was a hassle to understand. So many rules in the writing and speaking of it are not always consistent. It was very frustrating.

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Do you think that German is easier than English? Cases were very difficult for me.And the place of the verb in the sentence. Now I coped with it but at the beginning it`s difficult. Unfortunately, Poles don`t want to learn German. Recently I have been travelled through Austria and I must admit that the ability of speaking German helped me a lot.

What do you think about Welsh?

I found German easy to learn, but my native language is Dutch, so that's cheating. No, I think, on the surface, German looks difficult with all its rules, but as soon as you know a few, it's pretty simple: they always apply. There are only a few places the conjugated verb can be in: after the subject if the tense is not compound (past participle goes a the end with everything in the middle), at the end after most conjunctions (not denn = as/becaause) or before the subject if something stands in the place of the subject. There is gramatically only one place to be filled before the conjugated verb (otherwise you're most likely asking a question) and that's mostly the subject (in English you've got two: "I usually have", "I just do"), if the place is taken by something like 'yesterday', or 'this evening', the subject takes the first evailable place which is after the verb. Mind you, this 'place' can be a whole sentence/clause if that happêns to be the object or something to do with time. 'He was coming to the party, he said' or in the past the latter bit would have been 'said he' in English. German would still use in inversion in this case.

There are a few lingguists who have argued that calling Dutch and German SVO languages (subject-verb-object languages as in main sentence structure) is misleading, as most often you are not using the simple present/past, but some compound tense and then the most important verb that is the sense of everything is at the back. So really it should be the Latin model SOV, only if there is no participle of some kind does a verb feature in the beginning of the sentence.

In proper English, you've got all kinds of mad remainders of the past. You can invert the subject and verb in English, only in very few cases can you do that, but there definitely are as I just proved; You can also not do it. It's your own choice.

Where I find that German is tricky, is the addition of that little something more. Like 'Auswertung'. It means evaluation/appraisal (in this case the latter may be best), but it gives you a direction 'out of' (aus) which you can't get across. You've got many verbs like that.
Enough about German.

So how is it with Welsh? I heard it was pretty straightforward.

English was hard at first for me but I picked up I say within 3 to 4 fours years of learning and immersing in the English culture.
I think any language is hard to grasp at first not just English and so it is down to the person and their instinctive to communicate regardless of what the language is.

Welsh straightforward? Whoever told you that? They lied.

I'm a native English speaker who has learned French, Italian and German as living languages and Latin and Old English (Anglo Saxon) as dead (ie read only) languages. I found the Latin-based languages easiest to learn, modern German marginally more difficult and OE/AS quite difficult.

But Welsh? I struggled. I learned it because I lived in a Welsh-speaking part of Wales for many years and thought it would be courteous to learn the language my new friends used. I was warned it was not easy but I persevered and gradually, very gradually, acquired enough of the language to be able to hold a very simple conversation, watch a little tv and read a simple passage. I was learning part-time and possibly with intensive study would have made faster progress.

Why did I find it so difficult? Possibly because it bore no relation to any language I had previously learned, no useful clues from word formation but mostly because the grammatical rules were unlike anything I had come across before. It was the use of mutation that confused me greatly at first - certain letters change in certain circumstances: I found it hard to take in all the situations where mutation is used. It's not a question of learning a few at a time, you need to know them all from almost the word go and though the same letters are mutated, they change in different ways according to the usage required.

Nacht Jagen did not say why he/she is learning Welsh - if it is for reading Old Welsh literature then I can understand the reason but NJ should be aware that Classical Welsh is unlike the vernacular Welsh in use today, much as Old and Middle English are at a remove from present day usage, also the Welsh spoken in North Wales is different from that spoken in South Wales, so much so that at first, they seem like different languages. My (Welsh born but not Welsh speaking) parents used to say that only the Welsh spoke Welsh and if I were going to make the effort to learn another language, at least I should learn one that would be useful to me. Hence, I left learning Welsh until such time as I heard it spoken by friends and neighbours.

I suspect the reason Welsh is said to be easy is that on the whole it is pronounced as it is written: however, not all letters remain the same (the 's' in siarad - speak - is not the same as the 's' in Dydd Sadwrn - Saturday) and as well as having letters peculiar to itself (ll, ff, dd, all regarded as letters despite having two symbols) most of the vowels are pronounced differently to the English vowels and 'w' and 'y' are treated as vowels.

Good Luck to anyone who tries to learn it but don't expect it to be easy!

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Originally Posted by kasie

Welsh straightforward? Whoever told you that? They lied.

I'm a native English speaker who has learned French, Italian and German as living languages and Latin and Old English (Anglo Saxon) as dead (ie read only) languages. I found the Latin-based languages easiest to learn, modern German marginally more difficult and OE/AS quite difficult.

But Welsh? I struggled. I learned it because I lived in a Welsh-speaking part of Wales for many years and thought it would be courteous to learn the language my new friends used. I was warned it was not easy but I persevered and gradually, very gradually, acquired enough of the language to be able to hold a very simple conversation, watch a little tv and read a simple passage. I was learning part-time and possibly with intensive study would have made faster progress.

Why did I find it so difficult? Possibly because it bore no relation to any language I had previously learned, no useful clues from word formation but mostly because the grammatical rules were unlike anything I had come across before. It was the use of mutation that confused me greatly at first - certain letters change in certain circumstances: I found it hard to take in all the situations where mutation is used. It's not a question of learning a few at a time, you need to know them all from almost the word go and though the same letters are mutated, they change in different ways according to the usage required.

Nacht Jagen did not say why he/she is learning Welsh - if it is for reading Old Welsh literature then I can understand the reason but NJ should be aware that Classical Welsh is unlike the vernacular Welsh in use today, much as Old and Middle English are at a remove from present day usage, also the Welsh spoken in North Wales is different from that spoken in South Wales, so much so that at first, they seem like different languages. My (Welsh born but not Welsh speaking) parents used to say that only the Welsh spoke Welsh and if I were going to make the effort to learn another language, at least I should learn one that would be useful to me. Hence, I left learning Welsh until such time as I heard it spoken by friends and neighbours.

I suspect the reason Welsh is said to be easy is that on the whole it is pronounced as it is written: however, not all letters remain the same (the 's' in siarad - speak - is not the same as the 's' in Dydd Sadwrn - Saturday) and as well as having letters peculiar to itself (ll, ff, dd, all regarded as letters despite having two symbols) most of the vowels are pronounced differently to the English vowels and 'w' and 'y' are treated as vowels.

Good Luck to anyone who tries to learn it but don't expect it to be easy!

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I have always wanted to learn Welsh and I hope that maybe one day it will possible:) I know that it will be difficult because this language is completely different from every language I have ever been learning. Maybe it`s the reason why it seems to be interesting. Probably Polish won`t be neither easy for you.

French is hard to learn, easy to master while English is easy to learn, hard to master.