# Is English difficult to learn? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [June 24, 2003, 1:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009 "2003-06-24T13:04:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![\_ceQueen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/_/b9bd4f/32.png) [@\_ceQueen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/_ceQueen)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2003, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/41 "2003-06-26T00:28:04Z")
IMHO, English is one of the easiest languages. Of course, it also depends on how close your native language is to English. Mine is Russian, and it was relatively easy to learn English. Of course, it helps if you’re naturally good at the linguistic sort of thing in general. But whatever. English is no Chinese. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2003, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/42 "2003-06-26T00:28:10Z")
We have to dismiss the notion that any language can be, in and of itself, hard or easy to learn. Barring extraordinary circumstances such as mental deficiency, children the world over learn their mother tongues at apprxomimately the same age. Also, the loss of morphological complexity in one area is always offset by new complexity elsewhere. For example, we don’t have much in the way of verb conjugation in English. The endings are either -s, -, -ed, and maybe /have/+ -en. But to use verbs effectively in English you have to use various forms of the verb _be_, which is still quite irregular. So in addition to the regular verb endings you have /am/was/is/are/were/ + ing on the other end of the verb. Then you have the “emphatic” construction with “do”/“does”. I’ll wager that it usually takes foreign learners of English some time to fully comprehend the uses and nuances here. By the same token, I don’t think it’s so hard for native English speakers to learn to deal with more intricate case and conjugation systems as we’re making out here. So German has /der/den/dem/das/die for “the”. You just learn it. It takes a little concentration and memorization at first, but you do get the feel of it. So my conclusion is that it depends entirely on where you’re coming from. ---
**Author:** ![Sattua](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sattua/32/11906_2.png) [@Sattua](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sattua)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2003, 3:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/43 "2003-06-26T03:47:16Z")
I gotta disagree with an earlier post that said a native English speaker can most easily learn other Germanic languages. I think that it’s easier for a native English speaker to learn one of the Romance languages that has a small number of cases… learning German cases is a pain in the rear for English speakers. The grammar of Romance languages isn’t so radically different from English. ---
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2003, 3:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/44 "2003-06-26T03:48:10Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by !ceQueen \* > \*\*English is no Chinese. \*\* Not to beat on a dead horse or anything but I’m currently studying Chinese and it’s pretty easy. Why? Because I already know Japanese, which means that I can already read something like 40 to 50% of the vocabulary. The grammar is _a lot_ simpler than English. All I need to work on hard really are the tones and it’s still not that hard. That is, if you know Japanese. ---
**Author:** ![Flamsterette\_X](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/41988e/32.png) [@Flamsterette\_X](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Flamsterette_X)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2003, 4:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/45 "2003-06-26T04:34:11Z")
All I remember on the subject is what one of my teachers in elementary school told us: English can be difficult for people who aren’t native speakers of it, because of all the slang in it… ever-changing meanings of words make it hard to keep up for some people. For example, the word “bad”: The way MOST people use it, it would mean something not good at all, as in: “I ate a bad apple and it gave me a painful stomachache.” The way SOME other poeple use it, though… it means something GOOD. (the exact opposite of the word’s intended meaning) As in: “That was some BAD shit, man! It made me want to be JUST like them, coz it was awesome!” (meaning, the stuff was GOOD…) F\_X ---
**Author:** ![Urban\_Ranger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/e9c0ed/32.png) [@Urban\_Ranger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urban_Ranger)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2003, 4:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/46 "2003-06-26T04:59:44Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by !ceQueen \* > Of course, it helps if you’re naturally good at the linguistic sort of thing in general. But whatever. English is no Chinese. I’d say Chinese is much simpler than English grammar wise because of regularity. There are no plurals, no tenses, no articles, etc. The only difficult parts are the huge number of characters you need to memorise, and the tonal variations. ---
**Author:** ![Dunderman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ecb155/32.png) [@Dunderman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dunderman)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2003, 8:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/47 "2003-06-26T08:14:47Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Nichol\_storm \* > **So if your native language is structured around hundreds of verb forms, then yes, you’ll find a similar language easy to learn. You’ll just be applying old equipment to new uses.** Easy to learn, yes, but easier than a language that has a single verb form? I think not. For example, Swedish has about seven different plural forms. German has several whereas English has just one (regular, anyway), and I, as a native Swedish speaker, still found the English way much easier to learn. I’d say in general Swedish is closer to German than to English, but English was so much easier to me. As for the Navajo German speaker, that’s one guy. I’m one guy speaking for the other side. Tie at one-all. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2003, 12:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/48 "2003-06-26T12:47:58Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Priceguy \* > \*\* > Maybe not to a baby, but to an adult it can be. For example, let’s say I invent a language whose verbs have a hundred different forms dependent on gender, number, tense and any combination thereof, whose nouns have twenty different plural forms dependent on five different factors, and so on. Surely you agree that this language will be much more difficult to master than one in which all verbs are regular and all plural forms are the same? > > In the same way, I cannot see how English couldn’t be easier than, for example, German. English has none of the hellish grammar that every German student is painfully familiar with. Sure, English has idiosyncrasies like any other language, but once you learn the plural form, you’ve got it down. Verbs have very few different forms. And so on. \*\* The flaw in this argument is that you’d be inventing the language. Language is just another aspect of natural human behavior, and cannot be invented, Esperanto notwithstanding. Therefore there’s little point in drawing conclusions about the difficulty of natural language acquisition based on an invented language. Personally I didn’t find German that hard to learn. Sure it’s got all those cases and verb forms, but those aren’t rocket science. A good teacher can make the significance of each clear, and after that it’s just a bit of memorization. I would probably find Swedish more difficult to get used to; IIRC, it’s the language that has the articles at the ends of words which would be difficult at first ---
**Author:** ![Dunderman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ecb155/32.png) [@Dunderman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dunderman)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2003, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/49 "2003-06-26T13:38:58Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Spectre of Pithecanthropus \* > **Personally I didn’t find German that hard to learn. Sure it’s got all those cases and verb forms, but those aren’t rocket science. A good teacher can make the significance of each clear, and after that it’s just a bit of memorization.** Yes, it’s just memorization, but it’s _a lot of_ memorization. Surely, a language with less to memorize must be easier to learn? Every special case, every special exception, makes mastery of the language more difficult to obtain. > [@](#): > > \*\*I would probably find Swedish more difficult to get used to; IIRC, it’s the language that has the articles at the ends of words which would be difficult at first \*\* Well, one of the languages rather than the language, but yep. And I do believe Swedish to be a difficult language to learn, but **amanset** seems to disagree. Maybe it’s all just subjective. ---
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2003, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/50 "2003-06-26T13:49:38Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Priceguy \* > **Yes, it’s just memorization, but it’s _a lot of_ memorization. Surely, a language with less to memorize must be easier to learn? Every special case, every special exception, makes mastery of the language more difficult to obtain.** You know what I found the most difficult in my study of Japanese? It wasn’t the thousands of characters, and thousands of completely new words. The single most difficult aspect was learning how to restructure how I thought. Not just the micro, sentence level. If you’re a speaker of a European language, you need to reorganize your entire train of thought. (A Hangul speaker on the other hand will have a much easier time.) Memorization takes time, yes, but it’s easy. It’s the inner differences that are a bitch. ---
**Author:** ![Dunderman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ecb155/32.png) [@Dunderman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dunderman)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2003, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/51 "2003-06-26T13:54:49Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by jovan \* > **The single most difficult aspect was learning how to restructure how I thought. Not just the micro, sentence level. If you’re a speaker of a European language, you need to reorganize your entire train of thought.** I find this aspect intriguing. Do you think you could explain more closely how and why you had to change your thinking? What’s so different? ---
**Author:** ![amanset](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8dc957/32.png) [@amanset](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/amanset)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2003, 1:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/52 "2003-06-26T13:55:05Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Priceguy \* > \*\*And I do believe Swedish to be a difficult language to learn, but **amanset** seems to disagree. > > Maybe it’s all just subjective. \*\* Don’t get me wrong, I think all languages are difficult to learn. I just think that Swedish has a lot more rules and is less irregular than English, thus once you have the rules down you are home free (apart from en/ett of course). To be honest, the article at the end of the word thing isn’t really difficult at all - I had more difficulty with the variants on the plural. ---
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2003, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/53 "2003-06-26T14:12:41Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Priceguy \* > \*\*I find this aspect intriguing. Do you think you could explain more closely how and why you had to change your thinking? What’s so different? \*\* For instance, when I have a text to translate, I cannot do a sentence by sentence translation. I _have_ to work at the paragraph level. An idea that you would present first in English will show up in the middle or at the end of the paragraph in Japanese. When I was teaching English, the exercise that my student would always fail miserably was “replace these words in the correct order.” ---
**Author:** ![sotally\_tober](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/46a35a/32.png) [@sotally\_tober](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sotally_tober)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2003, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/54 "2003-06-26T14:36:58Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Flamsterette\_X \* > \*\*All I remember on the subject is what one of my teachers in elementary school told us: > > English can be difficult for people who aren’t native speakers of it, because of all the slang in it… ever-changing meanings of words make it hard to keep up for some people. > > For example, the word “bad”: > > The way MOST people use it, it would mean something not good at all, as in: “I ate a bad apple and it gave me a painful stomachache.” > > The way SOME other poeple use it, though… it means something GOOD. (the exact opposite of the word’s intended meaning) As in: “That was some BAD shit, man! It made me want to be JUST like them, coz it was awesome!” (meaning, the stuff was GOOD…) > F\_X \*\* Er… I think that’s just how you pronounce it. Your tone and body language (if applicable) convey much more than just the meaning. I think that the litmus test is: If the meanings can be retained if written on paper. Using your example, i’d pronounce the bad in ‘bad apple’ with a short ‘a’ sound, but i’d drag out the baaaad in ‘some bad shit’. The difference in tone and inflexion gives away the meaning, implying sarcasm/irony etc. I’d give an example in another language but for the fact that the other languages i know are chinese and a little japanese, and i’m guessing you can’t read either? Anyhow > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by jovan \* > \*\*Not to beat on a dead horse or anything but I’m currently studying Chinese and it’s pretty easy. Why? Because I already know Japanese, which means that I can already read something like 40 to 50% of the vocabulary. \*\* True, but many are false friends. Also, one may understand what a japanese character means but be unable to pronounce it in chinese. Anyway, Chinese characters are derived from pictograms, so i guess a case could be made for it being the simplest language to pick up. > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Urban Ranger \* > \*\*I’d say Chinese is much simpler than English grammar wise because of regularity. There are no plurals, no tenses, no articles, etc. The only difficult parts are the huge number of characters you need to memorise, and the tonal variations. \*\* Learning the alphabet is daunting, but one thing i love about Chinese is that if you create a new ‘phrasing’, everyone would be able to understand it, even though they may not have seen before. Chinese characters represent concepts and once you can understand a standard bode of characters, your vocabulary will be limitless. There is very little you won’t be able to understand. Also, the paradox of chinese is that it is, at the same time, the most concise and redundant language ever! (or at least that’s what i’ve observed) ah…i love Chinese…😃 ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2003, 2:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/55 "2003-06-26T14:48:43Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Optihut \* > \*\*German is my native language and I had no problem whatsoever learning English. French and Latin on the other hand were a problem and as a result I’m not fluent in French. > > \*\* This was probably because English is still much more closely related to German than French, despite all the Romance language vocabulary. Even though English has lost the complicated inflections, it still “thinks” and is pronounced “Germanically” Romance words such as all those ending in _-tion_, are completely Anglicized in their pronunciation. And, like German, English strings together multiple words to form a new one, even though when we write them down we keep the spaces between the component words. \*\* > [@](#): > > - English sounds great (even better than my native tongue, imho). > \*\* Actually German has the reputation, among English speakers, of being unpleasant-sounding, but I always liked the sounds of it. I enjoyed learning, speaking, and reading it. In general, maybe the reputation of English being hard comes from the fact that so many foreigners trying to learn it do not come from European language backgrounds, but from Asian ones. I’m sure we’ll all agree that it’s got to be much harder for a Vietnamese immigrant to learn English than, say, a Swede. ---
**Author:** ![Flamsterette\_X](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/41988e/32.png) [@Flamsterette\_X](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Flamsterette_X)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2003, 5:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/56 "2003-06-29T05:45:28Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by sotally tober \* > \*\*Er… I think that’s just how you pronounce it. Your tone and body language (if applicable) convey much more than just the meaning. I think that the litmus test is: If the meanings can be retained if written on paper. > > Using your example, i’d pronounce the bad in ‘bad apple’ with a short ‘a’ sound, but i’d drag out the baaaad in ‘some bad shit’. The difference in tone and inflexion gives away the meaning, implying sarcasm/irony etc. I’d give an example in another language but for the fact that the other languages i know are chinese and a little japanese, and i’m guessing you can’t read either?\*\* Okay, I take your point. And it’s a good thing I stopped to think about what your last phrase really meant… the heat has melted my brain. (otherwise, I’d ask you whether you really thought I couldn’t read) No, I can’t read Japanese… and only a very little bit of Chinese. F\_X ---
**Author:** ![sotally\_tober](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/46a35a/32.png) [@sotally\_tober](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sotally_tober)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2003, 6:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/57 "2003-06-29T06:18:41Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Flamsterette\_X \* > \*\*Okay, I take your point. And it’s a good thing I stopped to think about what your last phrase really meant… the heat has melted my brain. (otherwise, I’d ask you whether you really thought I couldn’t read) > \*\* I just realised that my last phrase could be read in another manner! heh LOL 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Grelby](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a5b964/32.png) [@Grelby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grelby)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2003, 6:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/58 "2003-06-29T06:58:13Z")
Hrm. Like **Priceguy,** suggested, maybe this is all subjective. However, I think I tend to agree with the fact that the subjectivity is connected to what the language student’s native language is. So, for an English speaker, the two languages that might be considered easiest to learn would be German and French. But this is not necessarily the case. Also, I would argue that most of the Romance languages are probably easier to learn for the average English speaker than German, because the structure is closer. **Spectre** , the relationship between French and English is a lot more significant than just the vocabulary. The influence of French is what separates Old English from Middle English. In order to read Old English, you need to learn it. So English is not really ‘much more closely related’ to German than French. The structure and order of English is much closer to French than German, as a matter of fact; English does not, in fact, ‘think’ very much like German does, but it is still linguistically related. This example is actually very interesting; it is probably harder for the average German speaker to learn French than the average English speaker, but easier to learn French than German for the average English speaker, rather than vice versa. Part of what makes it hard to call which languages are ‘harder,’ probably has a lot to do with how language families interrelate, as in this example. So you have the Indo-European languages, which includes Greek, Germanic, Romance (latin) and other branches, which then come back together and react, with English and French being a particular example. A linguistics professor might be able to make sense out of all this. I can’t. But it’s cool to think about 🆒. ---
**Author:** ![Flamsterette\_X](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/41988e/32.png) [@Flamsterette\_X](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Flamsterette_X)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2003, 7:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/59 "2003-06-29T07:50:49Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by sotally tober \* > \*\*I just realised that my last phrase could be read in another manner! > > heh > > LOL 😃 \*\* Heh… no worries here, since I _did_ get the correct meaning! 😃 F\_X ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2003, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/60 "2003-07-01T17:41:18Z")
**Grelby** , from your location and knowledge of the subject, you’ll probably turn out to be an MIT linguistics prof, waiting in the wings to nab Chomsky’s place when he retires, but I beg to differ. The only real similarity, other than vocabulary, that I can find between French and English is word order. And where compound concepts have to be expressed, English word order is much more like German. “German Club Leadership” is much more like “Deutchesvereinleitung”, in its structure, than it is like “Administration de la Societe Allemande”. It’s this way of expressing relationships between concepts that makes English and German more similar to each other than either is to French. Going futher, I’d say that German word order has become more rigid over the centuries; I’ve heard it said that it’s in the process of losing its case and conjugation systems, as with other IE languages. I was also taught that word-order rigidity tends to be the complement to a case system…as you lose one you gain the other. Even though German currently marks case in many situations, especially when articles or adjectives are given, meaning that German speakers _could_ vary their word order more than they customarily do, they usually don’t do this. Instead, my impression is that a German speaker is most likely to construct a declarative sentence in the same way an English speaker would…subject-verb-object. This suggests that case marking may be on the way out, albeit gradually. Usages such as the -e ending on masc. and neut. datives have already pretty much passed out of daily use. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009.md?page=4)