[nitpick]Subjunctive is a mood, not a tense[/nitpick], but your point remains. English has sixteen grammatical tenses, which is a pain in the ass to explain to someone whose language gets by pretty well with just the use of two or three.
Then again, every language has its pitfalls. English has awful orthography, an excess of tenses, and annoyingly difficult conditionals. However, it has no gender, no declensions (except for pronouns), very simple verb conjugations (for the most part), and is readily understandable even if completely butchered. English has a quick learning curve for making sensical sentences, even if they are barely grammatic. In other language, merely using the wrong ending or tone of voice can completely alter the meaning of your sentence. This is not to say the same isn’t possible in English. It’s just that English seems to be, in my experience, more forgiving when spoken imperfectly.
There has been some debate here as to whether English is diffiucult. As someone who has mastered a language that is considered very difficult (Japanese) and as someone who has taught English as a foreign language, I would say that English is a very hard language. Of course, any language is hard to learn–just learning 20k+ vocab words (minimum) is a life-altering piece of work. But I would also say that English is harder for most non-natives to learn than the average language.
As another poster put it, English is easy to get into. One can speak an intelligible pidgin with only a little effort. But assuming that one’s goals are to 1) speak with good pronunciation and fluency, 2) write at a near-native level, 3) and be able to understand the major strains of English, including accents (various American, British, Australian), English is extremely difficult. Here’s why:
Difficult pronunciation. English has more vowels than most other languages, and that probably goes for consonants, too. I think it is the only language in the world with the hard “th” sound (the, this). Further, to speak the language with good and natural intonation is a major task.
Anglo-Saxon verbs plus prepositions. This alone is enough to make English one of the world’s most difficult languages. It’s not the big words that get you, it’s the little ones. A lot of non-natives fake it simply by never using them.
Ask yourself this: How many non-natives do you know who have mastered the use of the word “get”?
A. I got him to do it.
B. She got herself into trouble.
C. I don’t get it.
D. But add the prepositions:
Get about… be mobile
Get across… communicate
Get along with… be compatible
Get around to… do eventually
Get at… hint at
Get by… be viable, eke out a living
Get down… dance
Get into… be interested in
Get off on… find sexually exciting
Get on with… continue
Get it on with… have sex with
Get over… stop needing
Get past… stop thinking about
Get through to… reach someone mentally
Get under [my] skin… annoy, be unforgettable
Get it up… have an erection
Get with it… shape up, get in the groove (oh there’s another!).
OK, now multiply the above chart by every little Anglo-Saxon word, and you’ve got one hell of a language to learn.
Listening is hard is hell. Mostly because of the above short-word-plus-preposition idioms. Sure, all languages have idioms, but many of those in English are quite hard to “get” in the middle of a conversation, if you know what I mean. Add in speed, elided words (C’I’ve a peach = Can I have a peach), slang, etc. etc.
To write well is nearly impossible. Japanese, for example, is easy to fake. The grammar is simple. English is hell. I used to type for extra dough in college. Lots of intelligent people make a lot of mistakes. Basic stuff. But beyond that is a whole land of English into which even most natives do not go: “good writing.”
Huge vocabulary.
Complicated grammar. As another poster noted, lots of tenses.
These particular examples illustrate another “rule”: Words that are both nouns and verbs (content and content, z.B.) have their stresses on different syllables.
The verb stresses the last syllable; the noun stresses the first.
Present, present. Content, content. Desert, desert. Refuse, refuse. So while there isn’t a difference in written English, the pronunciation makes it clear in most cases exactly which meaning is intended. Maybe it’s time to bring in accent marks?
“I presénted my mother her présent on her birthday.”
English Rule #1: Every English rule has an exception.
I’ve always felt that English learners get it easy when it comes to conjugation:
Consider this English/Italian counterpoint:
I want
you/y’all want
he/she/it wants
we want
they want
io voglio
tu voui
lui/leu/è vuole
noi volete
voi voglione
That’s with Italian, which is possibly the easiest language for a native Roman alphabet user to learn.
That said, the vastly difficult English vocabulary must more than compensate, even with the lack of gender. But as others have pointed out, it’s the extreme number of tenses and their bizarre syntaxes that makes me glad I was grew up speaking English.
You’re confusing the rules of grammar, which are pretty inflexible in every language (though of course their nature varies greatly from language to language) with the “rules” you get taught in school. “I before E except after C” and the various rules to try to figure out if a noun ends in “ance” or “ence” (it always takes me two tries to spell “independence”) are not rules - they’re guidelines to help you master the somewhat difficult writing system of English. Linguistics usually distinguishes between grammatical rules for a language and the rules to write it, since the writing systems of languages are really pretty arbitrary (witness, for example, the shift of Romanian from Cyrillic to Roman letters. Those things happen all the time among less widely-used languages.) And English may have a harder orthography than many familiar languages, but Chinese writing is a lot less phonetic and yet they manage somehow.
There aren’t exceptions to rules like “a singular subject noun requires the inflectional ending -s on its verb” - the real grammatical rules. (Leaving aside the separate issue of which nouns are considered plural and which are singular, which tends to vary between the UK and the US.) Of course, native speakers never think about those rules, because they’re pretty solidly wired in. Nor do native speakers struggle with trying to remember when to use “a” or when to use “an” (as discussed above), or trying to remember whether verbs or adjectives ending in “ng” that add a /g/ sound when followed by “-er” (long, longer vs. sing, singer). These are the rules of English, and you don’t usually study them much in school, because it’s simply not necessary to do so. You understand them implicitly from the time you’re in kindergarten. They don’t tend to have exceptions at all.
And English may seem to have a lot of verb tenses (although, and this is a nitpick, it only has two true tenses - past and non-past), and certain rules of how to use them in formal writing may be difficult on occasion but most of the different “tenses” are formed easily. Compare the construction used to form the future in English (“I will go”, “she will walk”, “we will extradite”) with the future tense of Latin, which I can’t even remember enough to offer examples. Even in Spanish, there’s a true future tense which requires memorizing another six verb endings. We just add “will”. No problem, eh? English’s verbs are not all that difficult at all, really.
All these issues are matters of comparison. Is English harder than Chinese just because it has many more inflections? By that definition, Spanish or Italian should be completely impossible to learn. But, if word order matters more in English than in Italian, then there’s no hope of learning Chinese, where word order expresses orders of magnitude more information. It’s easy to come up with examples where English is more complex than any given language, or even most languages, but that’s not a property unique to English. On the contrary; since every language can express every thought, according to theory, than any simple feature of a language must be accompanied by a correspondingly complex one. When it comes to the amount of verbal inflection required, English is more complex than some languages and less than others. When it comes to the amount of information carried by word order, the same thing applies.
English does have a fairly bad orthography (although it’s not as bad as is commonly thought; a truly phonetic spelling system would probably be much harder to use) but it’s not an impossible one. Compare it to Japanese for a truly insane orthography - and yet, foreign learners can learn both eventually. It also has a pretty broad set of vowels, and a number of fairly difficult consonants, but on the whole it doesn’t have anything close to the extremes.
Most foreigners don’t learn languages with native ability, and that’s true of English, Bahasa Indonesia, Georgian, Moroccan Arabic, or any other language you care to name. But all languages are presumably of pretty equal difficulty, on a fundamental level, since babies acquire every language with equal facility. Is English hard to learn? A Dutch speaker could probably learn it more easily than she could learn Italian, and far more easily than she could learn an unrelated language. On the other hand, a lot of the Chinese faculty at my university never acquire near-native ability. It depends a lot on the speaker’s native language, their own motivation in learning it (which may be low if they can live in a native-language community in a large city), and a million other factors. And given English’s importance as a world language, it’s learned pretty heavily by speakers of totally unrelated languages like Chinese or Japanese - so we’re more likely, as English speakers, to run into second-language learners who are really struggling just because their own language is so different.
It’s hard to generalize and compare languages in terms of how hard they are to learn. My opinion would suggest that languages with comparatively unusual grammatical features (unusual meaning fairly rare among different languages) would tend to be harder for nonnative speakers to learn, because the more foreign a language’s grammar is, the harder it is to learn. By that standard, I see no reason why English should pose anywhere near the difficulty of, say, Finnish with its 15 or so cases, or native Australian languages that feature syntactic ergativity, or languages with extremely unusual sounds like the clicks present in Khoisan languages.
Most people I knew in England said “historic” pronouncing the “h.” Including the history professors. But they still said “an historic”…
Speaking of declining numbers, the only thing I can remember from what my ex-wife said about Modern Icelandic is that “five” was the lowest number that did not decline. Her Icelandic grammar book had a cute illustration titled “The man who couldn’t decline numbers” showing a man sitting at a restaurant table with five bowls of soup, five water glasses, and five spoons.
Ergativity on its own is hard to explain, but it has to do with the way some languages (Basque being the best-known example, so even if it’s not a rare feature, it’s not exactly common either) mark subjects and objects.
Nominative-accusative languages (including all the most commonly-known languages) mark the subject of an intransitive verb (one that doesn’t require an object) in the nominative case. They do the same with the subject of transitive verbs. So, in English, you’d say “Vanessa talks” or “Vanessa greets Eustace” and in both cases, “Vanessa” is nominative. (Though English doesn’t mark nominatives explicitly except for pronouns. I don’t feel like trying to give an example in Latin.)
Ergative languages, in contrast, would use the absolutive case for “Vanessa” in “Vanessa talks” and for “Eustace” in “Vanessa greets Eustace”. The “Vanessa” in the latter sentence, by contrast, would be in the ergative case. The subject of a transitive verb and the subject of an intransitive verb are syntactically different in an ergative language.
Syntactic ergativity has to do with maintaining this distinction when creating sentences with multiple clauses. But since I don’t speak any languages with this feature (the only examples I know of are Australian aboriginal languages) I don’t even want to try to explain it. Here’s some cites instead. The second one has a fairly illuminating explanation of syntactic ergativity.
True that Italian is easy for a native English speaker right up there with Spanish, and sorry for the diversion for those who don’t care but I have to nitpick lest any concerned Italian learners be misled - you conjugated volere wrong.
io voglio
tu vuoi
lui/lei/esso vuole
noi vogliamo
voi volete
loro vogliono
I think this is certainly true for basic English. As I’ve said before, English is pretty simple to speak badly and still be understood. Add to that that English speakers are, in my experience, more tolerant of pronunciation and grammatical mistakes (because of so many differing varieties and levels of English) and you can get by pretty quickly with the barest knowledge of English.
Once you start getting into orthography, the myriad of verb tenses, conditionals, etc… things start getting very very tricky. My father and mother have lived in the US for over 30 years, and they speak decent English; but their grammar is atrocious. However, for communication purposes, it’s more than enough to hold intelligent conversation about complex topics.
Hungarian is a notoriously difficult language to learn (supposedly, it’s the hardest Roman alphabet language for an English speaker to learn). Grammarwise, English must seem much easier. But, having lived there six years and having taught English on occassion, once you start talking first, second, & third conditionals and present perfect, past perfect, present perfect progressive, etc…, it becomes very difficult and confusing for the student.
But there’s the point. We don’t “start talking conditionals” etc (in fact, I am not even sure what they are). Most grammar terminology or rules are not to be bothered with (except by pros) as such. One can speak perfect English without knowing any of the grammar terminology. In fact, the terminology gets in the way (note Excalibur trying to explain "syntactic ergativity’ which isn’t really used at all in any significant language). :dubious: The terminology for Grammar yeilds the “MEGO” syndrome, and then kids turn off from it.
Thus, indeed, we do learn tenses- but it is easy to absorb their usage and figure out the "rules’ for them by simply learning to speak and seeing them in context.
Sometimes the “rules” don’t make a lot of sense. But then when they are really silly, usually you can go either way. For example- the rules for “a/an” are basicly simple- “use ‘an’ before words starting with vowels”. The “exceptions” (historic, etc.) can be done “right” (" an historic moment") or “wrong” (“a historic moment” ) and still sound find either way. I doubt if one Cockney dialect is why we say “an historic” I think it is more that the “h” there is nearly silent.
The rules for “whom” are also confusing- but simply disposing of the word (except when writing lines for an English butler) is fine also.
I will note at this point that damn near every sing person I talk to seems to think that their native language is one of the hardest to learn. The French have told me this, English, Dutch, and of course the Chinese and Japanese. I think it is firstly a relative thing, but one common thing I hear about english is that it is very simple to get started speaking. German is a bitch in this matter. In a typical sentence with an indirect and direct object you will have to decline two articles which vary based on the three genders of the nouns in question. Then you have to conjugate the verb. On top of that, if you have any kind of modal verb you have to have a sentence bracket. If you throw an independent clause then you have to have a different structure. I don’t know if English is the easiest language to learn, but it surely can’t be the hardest. People say that it is very hard to master English, but its pretty hard to master any language anyway.
I wonder. As I understand it, Hungarian is not an Indo-European language, and in fact is not closely related to any other language on Earth. Couldn’t a large part of the difficulty be the unfamiliarity? If a speaker of English learns any other Latin-alphabet language, a lot of the vocabulary and some of the grammatical structure is going to be somewhat familiar, because of shared ancestry of the languages, and that’s going to help learning a lot. But if, hypothetically, we had another language as closely related to Hungarian as, say, English is to German, would it be difficult for a speaker of one of those languages to learn the other?
Dr Derth – I didn’t mean “talking first, second, third” conditionals in the sense of rigorous analysis. Of course, in language acquisition the best way to learn is the natural way, through imitation, repetition, and immersion.
Unfortunately, when it comes to preparing students for their English certification exams, they have to know what the names of all the verb tenses and grammatical constructs are. Plus everyone is different. Some students are extremely analytical and insist on being taught “the rules.” Others prefer to go with the flow. There is no one correct way to teach a language, and I prefer a non-technical approach. But when you’re boning up for that Advanced English final, you have to get down to the grammatical nitty-gritty, like it or not.
Chronos - You’re basically right. Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language, and is related to Finnish and Estonian, although it comes from the Ugric side of that language tree. There is very little, if any, vocabulary similarity, but the underlying grammatical structures are similar. Finnish, to me, sounds like Hungarian but with a completely alien vocabulary. I know several Hungarians who speak Finnish, and vice-versa, and the grammatical similarities between both languages does make them somewhat easier to learn.
And you’re right. The main reason for the difficulty in English speakers learning Hungarian is that the grammatical structures are quite foreign to us. There’s a lot of “weirdness” in the language, and if you insist trying to think in English or make it conform to English grammar, you’ll wind up frustrated.
