Is English A Difficult Language?

[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?

[hannah_arendt]

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

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?

[muhsin]

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

[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.

[hannah_arendt]

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.

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?

[kiki1982]

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.

[cacian]

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.

[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!

[hannah_arendt]

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!

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.

[mande2013]

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

[JBI]

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

French writing is incredibly difficult, not easy to master at all. As for hard to learn - well, I couldn't learn French, but I guess I may have made process if I put the same effort as I put trying to learn Chinese.

Back on topic though, this is such a subjective question. Is one, for instance learning Chinese, being a native speaker? The grammar is virtually the same, so I can switch between languages midsentence without any real difficulty. It's not exactly learning a new language, in the sense that it is reapplying the same rules already internalized with new vocabulary. There are a few particularities, but not as many as in other pairings of languages.

Now, Japanese as a counter example is far, far harder to make sense of as an English speaker. I cannot seem to get my mind around the grammar, as this actually is a code switch - I am not used to the ordering of words, and it gives me a headache to think like this. The characters don't pose much of a problem as I am proficient in Chinese and Classical Chinese, so I can pretty much memorize them on first glance - but my god, the grammar is murder.

Now, if I were a native speaker of English without Chinese knowledge, it would be impossible to pick up the language in the way I am (characters right from the beginning, instead of the Western approach of starting with fewer characters and "learning" to write Chinese characters). This is what I call really learning a new language - everything is foreign.

So, is English hard? Probably much harder for a certain group, and not so difficult for certain people.

As for the personal element, this is much more difficult. Certain mouths like the sounds of certain languages, and certain people enjoy certain cultures. I don't see the success of much of the "forced" education we have, except in Europe where they somehow converted much of the population to learn English without protest in a way the English speakers of the world will never learn any other language.

[Eiseabhal]

English spelling is weird.

[cacian]

English spelling is weird.

is it? how do you mean?

[hannah_arendt]

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.

How do you find Welsh? I have been fascinated by the sound if this language but for now I don`t have time for it

[hannah_arendt]

French writing is incredibly difficult, not easy to master at all. As for hard to learn - well, I couldn't learn French, but I guess I may have made process if I put the same effort as I put trying to learn Chinese.

Back on topic though, this is such a subjective question. Is one, for instance learning Chinese, being a native speaker? The grammar is virtually the same, so I can switch between languages midsentence without any real difficulty. It's not exactly learning a new language, in the sense that it is reapplying the same rules already internalized with new vocabulary. There are a few particularities, but not as many as in other pairings of languages.

Now, Japanese as a counter example is far, far harder to make sense of as an English speaker. I cannot seem to get my mind around the grammar, as this actually is a code switch - I am not used to the ordering of words, and it gives me a headache to think like this. The characters don't pose much of a problem as I am proficient in Chinese and Classical Chinese, so I can pretty much memorize them on first glance - but my god, the grammar is murder.

Now, if I were a native speaker of English without Chinese knowledge, it would be impossible to pick up the language in the way I am (characters right from the beginning, instead of the Western approach of starting with fewer characters and "learning" to write Chinese characters). This is what I call really learning a new language - everything is foreign.

So, is English hard? Probably much harder for a certain group, and not so difficult for certain people.

As for the personal element, this is much more difficult. Certain mouths like the sounds of certain languages, and certain people enjoy certain cultures. I don't see the success of much of the "forced" education we have, except in Europe where they somehow converted much of the population to learn English without protest in a way the English speakers of the world will never learn any other language.

If it comes to French, I agree with you. At the very beginning, I found this language very difficult but later it was much easier.