Is English considered a hard language to learn by those who learn it as their 2nd language?

[pepperbear]

I've always wondered about that.

I've always heard it is easier for a child to learn a second language than an adult. When I lived in the UK, we were taking French in my 2nd year.

[JTG of the PRB]

1. I'd imagine it's one of the most difficult languages to learn as a second language.

Whereas many other languages have a series of straightforward, logical rules regarding sentence structure, conjugation, and tenses and when to use all those thing, English is instead a messy amalgam of half a dozen other languages that incorporate the rules but not the order or the logic.

At least, that's my take on it. I started with English and learned Spanish in middle/high school, and Spanish is much more well-organized.

[Redstone]

2. Yes, it is, because so many of the rules make NO sense whatsoever. Also,

English contains about three times as many words as does any other language.

That's why it's so rich a medium to write in.

Redstone

[Xipe Totec]

5. What rules?

It's all arbitrary memorization.

It's worse than learning organic chemistry.

Trust me, I had to learn both.

[Odin2005]

11. I have to disagree.

English's grammar is much more reasonable compared to the complicated and irregular declensions and conjugations of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Lithuanian, Russian, and other conservative Indo-European languages; or the 3-consonant-root system of the Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, or the Noun Classes of the Bantu languages like Zulu and Swahili, or the extreme agglutination found in Chechen or Ojibwe.

[dimbear]

19. Because over the centuries, English has been a conscienceless

thief of the words of other languages. Other tiny little languages like French and Spanish actually discourage robbing their neighbors.

Drop into a French 'tchat' room some time. Yeah, there are exceptions.

[mix]

3. Not as hard as Chinese or Arabic, but for those in their teens and older,

very difficult to become fully literate. Speaking and some reading maybe, but because of its irregular phonetic structure and quirky spelling conventions, it is hard to fully master unless one has been exposed to the language continuously from a young age onwards.

But then again, it is a widely spoken language and immersion and practice are possible.

[NewJeffCT]

29. Mandarin is supposed to be fairly easy to learn to speak

as Mandarin does not have any tenses - past, present, future, past perfect, etc, are all the same.

Writing it is another story.

[rrneck]

4. To those who speak a tonal language

like Mandarin or Cantonese I understand it is difficult. We all sound like we are singing to them. And that's a two way street. My brother had to learn Cantonese and he said it damn near killed him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_%28linguistics%29

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Such tonal phonemes are sometimes called tonemes.

In the most widely-spoken tonal language, Chinese, tones are distinguished by their shape (contour) and pitch range (or register), most syllables carry their own tone, and many words are differentiated solely by tone. Moreover, tone plays little role in modern Chinese grammar, though the tones descend from features in Old Chinese that did have morphological significance. In many tonal African languages, such as most Bantu languages, however, tones are distinguished by their relative level, words are longer, there are fewer minimal tone pairs, and a single tone may be carried by the entire word, rather than a different tone on each syllable. Often grammatical information, such as past versus present, "I" versus "you", or positive versus negative, is conveyed solely by tone.

Many languages use tone in a more limited way. Somali, for example, may only have one high tone per word. In Japanese, less than half of the words have drop in pitch; words contrast according to which syllable this drop follows. Such minimal systems are sometimes called pitch accent, since they are reminiscent of stress accent languages which typically allow one principal stressed syllable per word. However, there is debate over the definition of pitch accent, and whether a coherent definition is even possible.

[Odin2005]

12. My dialect here in the Upper Midwest seems to be developing a pitch accent.

Partially it is influence from the pitch accent of Norwegian and Swedish, and also from dropping final consonants in fast speech. "Mound" becomes "moun" with a slight falling tone and "mount" becomes "moun" with a slight rising tone.

[Iggo]

13. I took a year of Chinese in the 8th grade.

One of the things I remember Mr Li stressing at length and from the get-go was the difference between shr, shr, and shr. One of them, the one with the downward inflection, is the verb "to be." One of them, the one that starts low, bottoms out, and inflects sightly up at the end, is "shit." The third one, the one with an inflection that starts high and stays high, as if you're singing a single note, is the number 10. (I think I have that right, but I may have mixed them up. Eighth Grade was back in '74-'75, so cut me some slack...lol.)

The other thing I remember is we didn't cover near as much as we did in Spanish class, mostly because we didn't have to learn a completely new written laguage in Spanish class.

[old mark]

6. English has MANY source languages and has little logical ground,

rather relies on a large number of rules that make no sense - pronunciation and grammar are very complex and without real cohesion.

mark

[HopeHoops]

7. Hell, most AMERICANS haven't mastered it as a FIRST language.

No, I'm not talking about teabaggers -they're bottom of the barrel, closely followed by FOX idiots.

[meow2u3]

46. You're dead on. English is a real bitch to learn, even for native speakers

In fact, comedians such as Gallagher and linguists such as Richard Lederer have a blast pointing out the craziness of the English language.

Take a look here: some girls are reading student bloopers, and I don't know who they could keep a straight face. :rofl:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0eAz2_GCUc

[HopeHoops]

48. Damn. I LOVE Gallagher's stuff. "The Sledge-O-Matic" - "And YOU people thought you had good seats!

I loved his routine about cops.

"Cops only do two things. First, they drive the speed limit and that's just going to slow EVERYBODY down. Second, they chase people doing a dangerous speed and all that does is double the number of cars doing a dangerous speed. I think we should just get the cops off of the road. When you get your license, you should be issued one of these dart guns. When someone cuts you off, you fire one and it sticks on the back of their car (suction cup dart with a flag that says 'stupid'). When a cop sees a car with a half-dozen or so of these on the back, he should pull him over and give him a ticket for being an asshole."

[emilyg]

8. English is my second

language. It was hard to learn.

[Odin2005]

10. Outside spelling, what was hardest?

The irregular verbs? The verb tense forms? The idiomatic phrasal verbs (got on, got off, got away, put up with, put on, etc), the usage of "do" as a dummy helper verb in questions and negative sentences?

[lunamagica]

14. To me the hardest is pronunciation

In Spanish each letter has one sound only. You read from a book and even if you don't know a word you'd ask someone and you would say it right, whereas if I read a book in English and find an unfamiliar word I'd rather show it to someone than say it out loud for fear of mispronouncing it and sounding like an idiot.

I also find that with practice most people who learn Spanish can virtually speak it with no foreign accent; while I haven't been able to get rid of mine.

ETA. I forgot about spelling. Hard, hard

[Odin2005]

15. Well, that is spelling, I was talking grammar.

[lunamagica]

16. I think it would be the double negatives and verbs. But I never found them *that* hard. nt

[SwissTony]

18. Dutch is quite similar. If come across an unknown word,

there's a good chance you can work out its correct pronunciation.

When I was visiting the maths department at my old university some years ago, a Professor who originally hailed from Czechoslovakia was expressing his frustrations with some of the finer details of the English language. One pompous prat suggested he "follow the rules of the English language" to which the prof replied "there are no rules in English."

[TreasonousBastard]

20. A Czech complaining abut English? I gave up any attempts to try Czech...

when I tried to order the chicken and three people were ready to kick my ass while the rest of the staff were bent over laughing their asses off.

(Prague rocks, though.)

[Odin2005]

30. The Slavic languages, like Czech, have a bunch of consonants English doesn't have.

:crazy:

[spinbaby]

35. English is my second language, too

I learned it at the age of five. I don't remember thinking it was difficult, but was transferred to a private school after kindergarten because the teacher in the public school thought I was retarded. I don't think she realized I could read. I also had a hard time with the "th" sound and was given speech lessons for my speech impediment. I'm predominantly an English speaker nowadays, although a bit of German sometimes sneaks in--usually in the form of extra syllables. Aluminium, for instance.

[Odin2005]

9. Outside it's inane orthography...

...English is not spectacularly hard, but the grammar can still be difficult for those who do not speak a fellow Germanic language. It has no grammatical gender and has very regular plural-marking. The hard part of English grammar is the Germanic Strong Verbs (sing-sang-sung, get-got-gotten, etc.), the great complexity in verb forms (such as "I was going to have been being stopped", where "was" indicates past tense, "going to" indicating the Intentional Mood, "have" indicating Perfect aspect, "been" indicating Progressive aspect, and "being" indicating the Passive Voice.), and the phrasal verbs (put on, put off, take out, blow off, got on, got off, got after, etc. But English's grammar is still much more reasonable to the complicated and irregular declensions and conjugations of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Lithuanian, Russian, and other conservative Indo-European languages; or the 3-consonant-root system of the Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, or the Noun Classes of the Bantu languages like Zulu and Swahili, or the extreme agglutination found in Chechen or Ojibwe.

[elleng]

26. 'I was going to have been being stopped?'

Where you at, bro?!!!

:rofl:

:hug:

[Odin2005]

28. LOL!

:rofl:

[krispos42]

42. My eyes just glazed over

I have virtually zero ability to understand grammar. This is why I sucked big time in Spanish despite taking it in middle school and in college. I spend three years in MS Spanish and still had no idea what the word "conjugation" meant or why it was important.


I can write reasonably well, just don't ask me how I knew how to do it!

[Odin2005]

43. "conjugations" = class of verb endings.

So Spanish has -ar verbs, -er verbs, and -ir verbs. :)

[krispos42]

44. Which english doesn't have, so that just blew me out of the water

I go, you go, he/she/it goes, we go, they go.

Voy, vas, va, vamos, van.


I will go, you will go, he/she/it will go, we will go, they will go

Iré, irás, irá, iremos, irán


I eventually got what they were trying to tell me so that I UNDERSTOOD, rather than just spewing back vocalizations, but it never came naturally to me.

And don't even try to explain the imperfect tense to me. :scared:

[Odin2005]

45. The imperfect is a pain in the ass!

[hyphenate]

17. English is among the worst

languages to learn, speaking-wise. We have too many languages from which it is derived, so we have -ough words like bough and rough and through with completely different sounds.

I would say Chinese would be the most difficult to learn written wise, because there are so many different symbols that look generally the same, but can make a huge difference in meaning.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

21. Ask a Teabagger. They can't speak or spell English

and it's the only language they know (or don't know).

[valerief]

41. Ha!!!!

:rofl:

[WilmywoodNCparalegal]

22. To me, it's the easiest

I'm an Italian native, with fluency in Spanish and French, as well as Latin and ancient Greek. To me, learning English, especially since I had to learn it in high school in rural North Carolina (with the southern accent and all), was very very easy, but then I seem to pick up languages rather easily.

[AsahinaKimi]

23. I have a friend...

She speaks Five Languages. She speaks

Japanese
Korean
Mandarin
Cantonese
English

She always told me English, (Her last language)was the hardest to learn. She grew up in Hong Kong, so her first Languages were Mandarin and Cantonese. She often visited her Uncle in South Korea, and there she learned Korean. Her Grandparents lived in Japan, so she learned Japanese, while visiting. When
she moved to America, she had already started to learn English.

She now works out at the San Francisco Airport, where she puts her languages to good use, in Security. I only know two languages, and one of them, not very well, though I am still trying hard to continue my education. My Father is from Japan and speaks both Japanese and English. My mother, born in the USA speaks Japanese, Korean and English. My mother was an English teacher, and was my father's English teacher. My dad found speaking English very difficult, but has become quite proficient.

While I did hear Japanese spoken around the house growning up, my parents felt my early education should be in English since I was born here. I had often asked them to help me with Japanese, but was always told, that the USA is my country, and I should learn English first. It had only been in the last couple of years, I had begun to learn Japanese. I love it, however my dad speaks Kansai Ben which is a dialect of the Kansai district (Osaka). So I don't get too much help from Dad. He has instructed me he would teach me, once I have mastered standard Japanese. Then, eventually my mother will help me with Korean.

Oh boy! So much to learn!!

[raccoon]

24. It would depend on the person's native language (as well as other factors, of course).

The State Department (or I think it was them) ranked foreign languages on four levels according to their level of difficulty for English speakers.

Afrikaans and Dutch, for instance, are level 1 (Least difficult.)

Arabic and Chinese are level 4 (most difficult).

I couldn't find a link to that, but I did find this:

Wikibooks:Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers
From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

This world is full of thousands of languages. Wikibooks also hosts many different language learning books, but on a smaller scale, of course.

Becoming fluent in a language is no walk in the park, even if you do already display an aptitude for languages. This Wikibook will act as a very useful guide showing how difficult learning any particular language you have set your eyes on is.

Many people wonder how long it will take them to become proficient in a certain language. This question, of course, is impossible to answer because a lot depends on a person's language learning ability, motivation, learning environment, intensity of instruction, and prior experience in learning foreign languages. Last, but not least, it depends on the level of proficiency the person wishes to attain.

Category I: Languages closely related to English

23-24 weeks (575-600 class hours)


Afrikaans

Danish

Dutch

French

Italian

Norwegian


Category III: Languages which are quite difficult for native English speakers

88 weeks (2200 class hours)(about half that time preferably spent studying in-country)

Arabic

Chinese

Japanese

Korean



http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers

[hedgehog]

25. One might also ask, how much English does one have to learn to achieve

basic communication vs. reaching that level in other languages. I ask that because I reads a theory that English is a pidgin trading language developed at the confluence of Germanic, Latin and some Celtic languages.

I think we also need to take into account that it is always easier to learn a "familial" language than one outside the family; I would expect a native Cantonese speaker to have an easier time with Mandarin than English; or Dene or Hindu for that matter.

[KurtNYC]

27. It is a hash made of at least 3 other languages

inconsistent conjugations, inconsistent phonetics, weird spellings and now text abbreviations.

[Odin2005]

31. Just the vocab, English grammar is still perfectly Germanic.

I get annoyed when people say English is "part French", it absorbed lots of French words, but grammatically it is still plainly Germanic, right to our phrasal verbs, which are related to German's "Separable Verbs".

[KurtNYC]

32. I think vocab counts just as much as grammar.

A computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd ed.) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff (1973) which estimated the origin of English words as follows:

French, including Old French and early Anglo-French: 28.3%

[LeftishBrit]

33. It depends on what their first language is.

No spoken language is objectively easier or more difficult than others; but people find it easier to learn a second language that is similar to their first, than one which is very different from their first.

Thus English people find it easier to learn French than Chinese. Similarly, French people learn English more easily than Chinese people do.

On the whole, non-English people learn English more readily than English people learn other languages; but this seems to be a matter of motivation and necessity.

[UndertheOcean]

34. English is one of the easiest 2nd languages to learn . But it can be tricky to master .

Reading Shakespeare can be tough , but I am not sure native speakers have an advantage .

[FarLeftRage]

36. Yes... according to my Italian cousin.

She speaks very little English when I was there visiting and told me often it is very hard to learn.
She was taught French in school as a second language.

I HAD to learn basic Italian before I went over for my visit in 2006.
My family there said I spoke good Italian... although I'm not fluent in Italian.

[kedrys]

37. I didn't think so

I'm glad I learned French first, otherwise I might never have learned it. Compared to French, English is a breeze.

[YellowRubberDuckie]

38. I have heard it is extremely difficult to learn.

Especially since there are so many words that sound the same but mean entirely different things.
I took a Language Development class in College. Apparently your language button is turned off at age 9 for most people. If you're going to learn another language, it is recommended that you allow your child to grasp their first language before you start teaching them their second. My goddaughter, though, speaks a mixture of English, Spanish and Mandarin because of the shows she watches. It's nearly impossible to understand her most of the time, and it's not just because she's two.
Duckie

[rug]

39. It comes as easily as swimming does to a ghoti.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

[Nikia]

40. From teaching ESL to adults

It was more difficult for the Hmong speakers than Spanish speakers to learn English. Hmong is an East Asian language and tonal.

[Common Sense Party]

47. Yes. There are no rules.