Is English an easy language to learn?

[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.

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

"I eat an Apple yesterday."

[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?

"I eat an Apple yesterday."

Lame and inefficient. 

[Tonitrus]

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?

"I eat an Apple yesterday."

Lame and inefficient. 

In more efficient English, with tenses:

"I eat an apple yesterday"

becomes

"I ate an Apple yesterday."

 

[Eddie Teach]

Easiest language I've ever tried.

[celedhring]

I find English pretty easy compared to other languages. Lack of gendered words is a big deal; when I was learning German, learning the genders of every word - particularly when they don't have to correspond with Spanish genders - was a nightmare.

[Martinus]

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...

Yeah, I also heard that "adequate" means something completely different in the EU/Brussels speak and when a Brit says it.

[Martinus]

I find English pretty easy compared to other languages. Lack of gendered words is a big deal; when I was learning German, learning the genders of every word - particularly when they don't have to correspond with Spanish genders - was a nightmare.

That's nothing. In Polish there is also a neutral gender.

So, a table or an armchair is a "he", a gate or a curtain is a "she" but a chair or a door is an "it" (each with its own verb and pronoun form - so "this chair" and "this door" has a different word for "this" each).

[celedhring]

Well, that's exactly like German, it has a neutral gender too, alongside different demonstratives. Spanish technically has a neutral gender but it has limited usage and it's not a big deal.

[Martinus]

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?

"I eat an Apple yesterday."

Lame and inefficient. 

In more efficient English, with tenses:

"I eat an apple yesterday"

becomes

"I ate an Apple yesterday."

 

Why would you eat a global corporation?

[Martinus]

Well, that's exactly like German, it has a neutral gender too, alongside different demonstratives. Spanish technically has a neutral gender but it has limited usage and it's not a big deal.

Yup. And despite the similarities, I stopped learning German - it was just too difficult (admittedly I got into it when I was over 30). That being said, I am thinking of going back to French - I used to learn French when I was in high school and it is a beautiful language.

[Sophie Scholl]

So... what's an easy/easier language to learn?  Any thoughts?  I dabbled with Spanish in High School and Dutch in College.

[Martinus]

So... what's an easy/easier language to learn?  Any thoughts?  I dabbled with Spanish in High School and Dutch in College.

To me English is by far the easiest of all I tried (Russian, German, French and Latin are the others I studied at various points).

[celedhring]

Well, that's exactly like German, it has a neutral gender too, alongside different demonstratives. Spanish technically has a neutral gender but it has limited usage and it's not a big deal.

Yup. And despite the similarities, I stopped learning German - it was just too difficult (admittedly I got into it when I was over 30). That being said, I am thinking of going back to French - I used to learn French when I was in high school and it is a beautiful language.

I have tried twice to learn German. I don't think it was "hard", rather laborious; it was easy to understand and learn the Grammar, but learning the words/declensions/genders made it such a chore. In English, I only needed to learn what "chair" meant and I could use the word straight away in my conversations. In German, I have to learn half a dozen terminations for "Stuhl" plus its gender (Der).

[Martinus]

Yeah. English is very logical. You can almost see why the world's greatest scientific and computer achievements of the last century were developed by people who speak English.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Old English was, apparently, a rather difficult language similar to German, from Wikipedia "...it was fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental), three grammatical numbers (singular, plural, and dual) and three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter)".

Somehow all that was dropped and by Chaucer's time (flourished 1370-1400) the English used is comprehensible (if tricky) to modern speakers. For some 300 years French was used by the elite and that coincides with the simplification of the language, but was it a cause?