Seriously, some of the dumbest people in the world speak it. It takes no skill to speak. Whereas other languages such as Русский, Español, Tiếng Việt, 日本語, 汉语, 한국어 and several others require skill. I'm sick of hearing this comment about how English is one of the most difficult languages in the world. It's the easiest. Anglophones are also some of the most ignorant and obnoxious people in the world.
Name:
Anonymous2006-12-29 16:15
English was invented by chipmonks
Name:
Anonymous2006-12-29 17:19
English is an easy language to speak? What a laughable thought. I wish I could properly clarify what I'm thinking. The use of auxillary verbs, and no clear reasoning as to when to use each form. Examples:
He reads occasionally. He is reading the book. Does he read occasionally? Is he reading the book?
If you speak English as your first language, or you learned it as a young child, that may seem quite natural to you. However, if English isn't your first language, it's quite confusing.
Why does English have so many ways to pronounce simple words? Rough, through, though. The ough part sounds different in each case. How about their, there and they're? Your and you're? Those are mistakes many people make.
English has many irregular verbs as well. The past perfect tense is done so many ways it's confusing.
There are many other things. The point is, English isn't a simple language. However, it's not the hardest langauge to learn. Any language is "easy" to learn provided you're exposed to it when you're younger than 6 or so.
Personally, I think the romantic languages are relatively simple, however, this is because of personal bias. If I was raised with Japanese, I suppose I'd consider Chinese or Korean to be simple compared to the romantic languages or Arabic.
Wow, an ignorant white person who thinks Korean, Chinese, and Japanese are similar.
Name:
Anonymous2006-12-30 6:17
>> about their, there and they're? Your and you're? Those are mistakes many people make.
If you're properly taught the differences among these words then they aren't hard to understand at all. People constantly mistake them for one another because they don't pay enough attention when they're taught the differences.
Name:
Anonymous2006-12-30 8:03
what you say someone set us up the bomb main screen turn on all your base are belong to us - Zero Wing for Nintendo. I think that proves Moonspeakers have trouble with it.
Ok, perhaps I was wrong. But are they not in the same language group, like how English, French, Spanish, German and such are quite similar?
And relatively speaking, they may not be similar when compared to each other. However, when you compare them to languages on a broader base, one might notice more similarities between them, however small.
Yes, I know that if one is properly taught the differences, one will know how to use them the correct way. However, apparently many people aren't taught the correct way or they didn't pay enough attention. It's because those words are so phonetically similar that the confusion arises in the first place.
Name:
Anonymous2006-12-31 9:59
>>49 Actually, English is more similar to German and Dutch, because it's a Germanic language. French and Spanish are latin languages, which is one of the reasons why French people generally suck at English. English is similar to French in terms of vocabulary (because of the French invasion of the British island in 1066), but when you look at the grammar, it's quite different.
As for the subject, English is by no means the hardest language in the world. It can be hard if you didn't grow up hearing it, because when you're young, it's very easy to pick up nearly any language. It only gets more difficult after that. For example, my mother tongue is Dutch, but by watching Cartoon Network a lot, I learned English quite easily.
English can be hard in the sense that its grammatical rules have a lot of exceptions. Other languages, however, such as Dutch, pretty much have no grammatical rules. Almost every other verb is conjugated in a different way, which can really confuse people who want to learn this language when they're over 10 years old. We find it rather easy, because we grew up hearing it everywhere. There are a lot of other things, but I think the idea's clear by now.
Maybe I'm just weird for finding English and French (and other romantic languages) to be relatively similar grammatically. Most often they're all svo order, but I guess there are exceptions (object pronouns in the romantic languages). They all have the same subject pronouns. Compare that to Arabic, which has not just subject pronouns for single person, two people, and three or more people, but also different subject pronouns depending on case (well, I'm not sure, I don't know exactly how it works).
When it comes to conjugation, though, the romantic languages and English are very different.
So Dutch has (nearly) no grammatical rules? Sounds a bit scary to me.
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-01 0:43
WHY DON'T YOU TRY SPEAKING ELFISH AND TELL ME HOW YOU LIKE IT, YOU DUMB FUCK!
No, you misunderstood. With Dutch verbs you can't just use the form you like, but there is no global system for verbs. Let's just say we have a rule-set, but there are tons of exceptions. It's also unclear when to use accents for example, so our language is just quite illogical.
>English is an easy language to speak? What a laughable >thought. I wish I could properly clarify what I'm thinking. >The use of auxillary verbs, and no clear reasoning as to when >to use each form. Examples:
He reads occasionally. <-- He reads from time to time. This is always the case. (No, he doesn't read all the time, but you can answer the question "Does he read occassionally" with the same answer, no matter when you ask it).
He is reading the book. <-- He is doing it at this moment only. You don't know anything whether he does this all the time, or at occassions; you only know that he performs this action at this moment.
Does he read occasionally? Is he reading the book? <--- Same story.
I think it's pretty fucking clear when to use them alright.
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-01 14:28
>French and Spanish are latin languages, which is one of the reasons why French people generally suck at English.
you got anything to back that up?
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-02 6:12
Well, he is correct- in Europe at least, statistically people who come from countries which speak the 'Romance' languages have poorer English than those who come from the germanic family. How much of this is due to education etc is debatable, but I will say one thing: I was learning Swedish for a while, and it is shockingly similar to English.
English isn't hard. I'm Dutch, I picked it up very fast, and many I know did too.
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-03 14:48
I'm trilingual, acquiring English in elementry school, Hebrew and Russian being mother tongues.
I would say that learning-wise, English is in the middle between the other two. One of the ways to objectively think of the difficulty of a specific language is asking oneself: how many exceptions to rules are there?
English has its fair amount; Hebrew - almost none (since it wasn't spoken for nearly two millenia and only recently artificially revived); Russian - a fuckton. In fact, that's one of the reasons it's considered to be the 3rd hardest language to learn (after Chinese and Japanese).
In conclusion, saying such things about English is simply not accurate. How many languages do you know? 2? 4? To accurately answer such a thing one would need to be a major polyglot, with at least 8 languages of different kinds (one asian, one Indo- european, one middle- eastern etc). I direct you to the University nearest to you, linguistics dept.
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-05 14:34
DERE ER FITTER!
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-06 16:37
I think one of the factors that makes English seem difficult is it's flexability. You can ignore grammar and spelling (see ebonics), make up new words on the fly, combine existing words, and although English is a low-context language you can use it as if it were high-context, and another native-English speaker will usually be able to understand you. However, a non-native speaker of English may have a great deal of difficulty understanding what you just said.
On the flip side, if you never learn proper English and really only learn the bastardized version that most people speak anyway, learning the proper way can be very difficult.
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-08 1:10
>>59
I'm trilingual, acquiring English in elementry school, Hebrew and Russian being mother tongues.
Dutch is about the closest language to English... Frisian is closer (all being west germanic languages and Saxon(English) was very very similar to Frankish(Dutch)) So it's not a very good argument that dutch speakers can learn English pretty quick...
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-09 9:32
The closest language to English I've seen is Scots. Look it up sometime.
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-09 20:51
English is by no means easy.
Some words are spoken the same but spelled differently. Some words are spelled the same but mean different things. Verb conjugation is a miserable little pile of vowel changes. And speaking of vowels, they often overlap into each other regarding how you pronounce them. Let's not forget that we have the widest vocabulary out of any other language. But that's what happens when make a hodgepodge of Latin, Germanic, French, and Greek languages.
Be thankful we don't have genders for our nouns.
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-09 22:51
A minute to learn, a lifetime to master.
It's pretty easy to speak/write BAD English, hell almost everyone is doing it! Ever spoken to a telemarketer from India? They might have the grammar and words figured out, but their pronunciation...
Then there are those for whom the situation is the opposite.
Not too many get it both right though.
I'll stick to speaking/writing broken English for now :)
English. The sheer vocabulary and flexibility lets you express things in subtle ways that other languages can't.
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-10 21:19
English is very hard unless you've grown up in the western world. Then it really isn't.
Agree w/ 71.
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-11 3:24
The problem with English is that spoken English has "evolved" much quicker than written English. There's many rules and exceptions that aren't written out. Many words have a unique pronunciation, whereas in many Asian languages it's opposite. In Japanese, once you learn the 46 or so syllables, you know how to speak it. No exceptions there. The 2000+ daily kanji is a completely different story though.
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-11 8:32
Just because there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet doesn't mean that it's easier to learn than other languages which have hundreds of characters. There are so many different exceptions and whatnot which other languages don't have. "I before E, except after C, or in neighbor, reign, or weigh..."
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-11 9:50
English when it comes to how it's written is memorizing every single word. There's no "sound it out" in English.
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-11 16:10
Dutchies can't pronounce it. It sounds like they just came out of the center for the mentally challenged.
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-11 16:58
what say you me come fomr hong kong cant understend
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-12 1:31
Is English the only language that has spelling bees?
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-12 10:06
Finnish is the hardest language. Period.
Name:
Anonymous2007-01-12 22:58
Very hard - English, Russian, Arabic
Hard - French, Germany, Finnish
Middle - Italian, Spanish
Easy - Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese
Very easy - Japanese, Korean, Indonesian