Is English an easy language to learn?

[Razgovory]

When I was in school, our teachers told us that English was a very difficult language to learn.  I didn't quite buy that, I mean I get by with it.  Hell I picked it up fairly early.  Now that I'm older I look at other languages and it doesn't have things like grammatical gender, or bizarre cases like "instrumental".  It's not tonal and has an alphabet which seems to make it easier then say, Chinese.    Spelling and syntax can be a bit of a chore, but "good enough" acceptable in most settings.  Now I know a lot of your learned English in school, so this is more directed at you guys.  Was it difficult?


Also, I had a teacher that taught us that when no one is looking, the French secretly speak German rather then their ridiculous difficult language and that the French language is actually a way to trip up foreigners.  I don't know if that's true either.

[DGuller]

Rather easy, except for stupid articles.

[The Brain]

I'm still struggling with it.

[Barrister]

I'm still struggling with it.

We can survive your occasional bork bork bork.

[jimmy olsen]

When I was in school, our teachers told us that English was a very difficult language to learn.  I didn't quite buy that, I mean I get by with it.  Hell I picked it up fairly early.  Now that I'm older I look at other languages and it doesn't have things like grammatical gender, or bizarre cases like "instrumental".  It's not tonal and has an alphabet which seems to make it easier then say, Chinese.    Spelling and syntax can be a bit of a chore, but "good enough" acceptable in most settings.  Now I know a lot of your learned English in school, so this is more directed at you guys.  Was it difficult?

Depends how closely related the native language of the english language learner is to English. If it's very close like German or French it's easy. If it's distant like Korean or Mandarin it's difficult. Just like you'd expect.

[Grinning_Colossus]

In my experience, the biggest issues for English learners are 1) that it's only semi-phonetic, and 2) the vast number of irregular simple past tense verbs.

[Martinus]

Very easy compared to say German, French or even Russian (and that's despite Russian came easier to me due to similarities to Polish).

There are no declinations of nouns, there are hardly any conjugations outside of a handful verbs (like "to be" and even then there are separate forms for masculine, feminine and neuter), adjectives can be built by placing a noun in front of another noun etc.

[Monoriu]

It is difficult for people with Chinese as their first language.   

[Martinus]

In my experience, the biggest issues for English learners are 1) that it's only semi-phonetic, and 2) the vast number of irregular simple past tense verbs.

Yes, but compared to Polish, for example, it is much more phonetic and in Polish you conjugate all verbs in simple past tense not just according to a person (I, you, he/she/it, we, you, they) but you often have different forms for if you are talking about male, female, neuter, a group of males, a group of females and a mixed group. (for example, "we were" uses a different form of the verb depending on whether the "we" is a bunch of guys, a bunch of girls, or guys and girls).

[Martinus]

When I was in school, our teachers told us that English was a very difficult language to learn.  I didn't quite buy that, I mean I get by with it.  Hell I picked it up fairly early.  Now that I'm older I look at other languages and it doesn't have things like grammatical gender, or bizarre cases like "instrumental".  It's not tonal and has an alphabet which seems to make it easier then say, Chinese.    Spelling and syntax can be a bit of a chore, but "good enough" acceptable in most settings.  Now I know a lot of your learned English in school, so this is more directed at you guys.  Was it difficult?

Depends how closely related the native language of the english language learner is to English. If it's very close like German or French it's easy. If it's distant like Korean or Mandarin it's difficult. Just like you'd expect.

Yes, but it is true for any language. But the fact is that within its group (Indo-European languages) English seems like one of the easier ones to me.

[Monoriu]

Chinese doesn't even use alphabets.  There are no tenses, no concept of singular or plural.  Lots of English pronounciations, like "th", "v", and "r", are not found in Cantonese at all.  There are around 3,000 common Chinese characters.  I think there are far more common English words than that.

[Zanza]

Considerably easier for me than learning French and Spanish. I haven't learned any other languages, so I can't say how it compares to Slavic or non-European languages.

[Zanza]

Chinese doesn't even use alphabets.  There are no tenses, no concept of singular or plural.  Lots of English pronounciations, like "th", "v", and "r", are not found in Cantonese at all.  There are around 3,000 common Chinese characters.  I think there are far more common English words than that.

Probably depends on how you define common.

When you look at international usage of English as a lingua franca, you'll probably find a huge variety. For tourism in many countries, people will only speak very basic English with a very small vocabulary. And there are observations among EU diplomats that while everybody understands the English of everybody just fine, the British seem to speak a different language that is not understood by everybody...

[Syt]

English is easier to learn than other languages. Grammar is relatively straightforward and easy enough to get sufficiently proficient to carry simple conversations, but it can get harder if you want to write grammatically correct, with how adverbs work, which tense to use when etc.

Pronunciation is tricky, because how a word is spelled isn't always a clear indication of how it's spoken (think "oo" in blood, food, foot, moot, or ough in though and cough, or word vs. sword). If you're used to a letter (or short group of letters) almost always being pronounced the same way (as is the case in German) then this can be all kinds of confusing.

That said, it's the easiest language to immerse yourself in, even if you're not living in an English language country. Internet, movies, TV shows, games are readily available if you have access to the internet, and it has become the lingua franca of the 21st century. And exposure to a language makes it easier to learn.

[jimmy olsen]

Chinese doesn't even use alphabets.  There are no tenses, no concept of singular or plural.  Lots of English pronounciations, like "th", "v", and "r", are not found in Cantonese at all.  There are around 3,000 common Chinese characters.  I think there are far more common English words than that.

How do you communicate that something happened in the past or will happen in the future without tenses?