# 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:** 14\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2003, 6:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/61 "2003-07-01T18:25:20Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by thatDDperson \* > \*\*Can you really pronounce “goat” as “fish”? > > No, unless you spell it GHOTI > > GH as in tough > o as in women > TI as in conjunction > > I am a compendium of useless information. > > Anybody here ever hear of Interlingua? It’s supposed to be the new and improved, we’re better version of Esperanto, with fewer confusing issues. \*\* Uh, I pronounce the o in `women’ as /@/.\* \*For non-geeks, that’s an ASCII schwa. (IPA likes to represent the schwa with an upside-down e, something that’s in Unicode and some Extended Latin codepages but not 7-bit ASCII.) The schwa being English’s unstressed vowel sound, a good example of it being the e in `vowel’ or the sound you make when you can’t think of a word (uhhhh… ). So your little trick sounds like `fush’ when I try it. 🙂 Anyway, I came here to hype a work by the late, great Samuel Langhorn Clemens, known to the linguistics profs hunting squirrels in the Bob Marshall Wilderness as Mark Twain: [“The Awful German Language.”](http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html) 😃 An example: > [@](#): > > The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called “separable verbs.” The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance. A favorite one is reiste ab – which means departed. Here is an example which I culled from a novel and reduced to English: > > > [@](#): > > > > “The trunks being now ready, he **DE-** after kissing his mother and sisters, and once more pressing to his bosom his adored Gretchen, who, dressed in simple white muslin, with a single tuberose in the ample folds of her rich brown hair, had tottered feebly down the stairs, still pale from the terror and excitement of the past evening, but longing to lay her poor aching head yet once again upon the breast of him whom she loved more dearly than life itself, **PARTED**.” Emphasis his, actually. Heh. – **Der** (I’ve always thought Germans would make ripping good Forth programmers.) **leth** ---
**Author:** ![Dreaming\_of\_Maria\_Callas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/f14d63/32.png) [@Dreaming\_of\_Maria\_Callas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dreaming_of_Maria_Callas)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2003, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/62 "2003-07-01T20:16:25Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by thatDDperson \* > \*\*Anybody here ever hear of Interlingua? It’s supposed to be the new and improved, we’re better version of Esperanto, with fewer confusing issues. \*\* Interlingua and Esperanto are in no way related. Esperanto was initiated in 1887 as a universal language and its vocabulary comes chiefly from Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages. The touch of “non-IE grammar”, if indeed it exists - as it is denied by a least one member of the Academy that Esperanto is not a purely European language - can be attributed to Zamenhof’s knowledge of Hebrew. Interlingua was introduced some decades afterwards, in 1950. It’s vocabulary is drawn only from the Romance languages. It aims to be understandable for all speakers of a Romance language, and does not consider other peoples, Germans or Poles for example. Interlingua has more “confusing issues” than Esperanto from the fact that it is chiefly meant to be a language one merely reads, and does not use in social discourse. Esperanto on the other, has a streamlined grammar as it is meant to be a spoken language. UnuMondo ---
**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:** [July 2, 2003, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/63 "2003-07-02T02:15:18Z")
A twist to the OP. Saw in today’s papers: **[Why Mandrin is harder to learn](http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/topstories/story/0,4386,197394,00.html)** ---
**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:** [July 2, 2003, 10:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/64 "2003-07-02T10:45:41Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by sotally tober \* > 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. Ah, but you will still have trouble with the ancient texts. 😃 > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by sotally tober \* > 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) Yes, it can be very precise, even though remembering all the foreign terms (e.g. in accounting) in Chinese can be a royal pain in the arse. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Nichol\_storm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/3ec8ea/32.png) [@Nichol\_storm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nichol_storm)\ **Post date:** [July 9, 2003, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/65 "2003-07-09T19:35:09Z")
Something interesting I found today – [a ranking of languages](http://www.toyama-cmt.ac.jp/~kanagawa/language/rank.html) according to their difficulty for **a native Japanese speaker**. The list goes from levels 1 to 4, 1 being easiest and 4 being hardest: 1. Swahili, Indonesian, Malaysian, Turkish, Korean 2. Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese 3. French, German, Greek, Czech, Thai, Hungarian 4. Hindi, Urdu, Russian, Arabic, English I’m surprised that Swahili is so easy, but Indonesian, Malaysian, Turkish and Korean are all either related to Japanese or share some vocabulary. The level two languages are European and Chinese, the latter of which, while sharing a writing system, is substantially different from Japanese. The level three languages are all European except for Thai and Hungarian, both of which are very distantly related to Japanese. I’m surprised Thai is so far down the list, as it shares a similar geographic area, but perhaps there hasn’t been much crossover between the two. The level four languages are all utterly unrelated – Arabic is Semitic; Urdu, English, and Russian are all Indo-European and very structurally different from Japanese. The Defense Language Institute’s [ranking of languages](http://www.wjsavage.com/images/DLIlanguagecategories.pdf) according to difficulty for **native English speakers** goes like this: 1. Afrikaans, Danish, French, Haitian-Creole, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish 2. German, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Romanian/Moldavian, Urdu 3. Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azeri, Bashkir, Belorussian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Cambodian, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Kazahk, Laotian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Farsi, Polish, Russian, Serbian-Croation, Slovenian, Somalian, Tadzhik, Tagalog, Tatar, Thai, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Vietnamese 4. Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Japanese, Korean Level one is compromised of cousins from the Indo-European family, and kissing cousins at that: Afrikaans, Dutch, French, etc, except for Swahili – what is it about Swahili that makes it so easy to learn? The level two languages stay primarily within the same family (German is related to English, Hindi, Romanian, and Urdu are all Indo-European) but branches out now to some Asian tongues. The third level consists of more exotic relatives like Bulgarian, Farsi, Russian and Greek, but also includes a number of Asian languages, especially Central Asians like Uzbek and Kazahk from the former Soviet Union. Level four has no related languages whatsoever – unless you count a few loanwords, Arabic has little in common with English, and Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are incredibly different. Obviously, gentlemen and ladies, the choice is clear; the perfect language for inter-cultural relations is: Swahili! 😉 ---
**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:** [July 10, 2003, 12:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/66 "2003-07-10T12:30:04Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Nichol\_storm \* > \*\*Something interesting I found today – [a ranking of languages](http://www.toyama-cmt.ac.jp/~kanagawa/language/rank.html) according to their difficulty for **a native Japanese speaker**. The list goes from levels 1 to 4, 1 being easiest and 4 being hardest: > > 1. Swahili, Indonesian, Malaysian, Turkish, Korean > 2. Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese > 3. French, German, Greek, Czech, Thai, Hungarian > 4. Hindi, Urdu, Russian, Arabic, English > > I’m surprised that Swahili is so easy, but Indonesian, Malaysian, Turkish and Korean are all either related to Japanese or share some vocabulary. The level two languages are European and Chinese, the latter of which, while sharing a writing system, is substantially different from Japanese. > \*\* Er…First of all i believe you mean malay, when you say malaysian? And as for Malay being easier a language to learn for a Japanese speaker than Chinese, that’s not true. Malay is closest to English, having heavily borrowed many terms from the English language. It even uses the English alphabet. And Malay does not “share some vocabulary” with Japanese, nor is it even remotely related. Chinese, on the other hand, shares characters with Japanese, which would be definitely easier for a Japanese to pick up. Hence, Malay ought to be grouped with English. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2003, 1:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/67 "2003-07-10T13:45:00Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by sotally tober \* > **Er…First of all i believe you mean malay, when you say malaysian? And as for Malay being easier a language to learn for a Japanese speaker than Chinese, that’s not true. Malay is closest to English, having heavily borrowed many terms from the English language. It even uses the English alphabet. And Malay does not “share some vocabulary” with Japanese, nor is it even remotely related.** You’re confusing “shares vocabulary” with being related linguistically. About 10% of the modern Japanese vocabulary is borrowed from English. That does not mean Japanese and English are related. That said, Japanese shares vocabulary with other languages that have imported large numbers of words from Chinese, but native Japanese vocabulary is quite unique, so yes, I agree that it’s probably wrong to say to Japanese shares much vocabulary with languages like Malay. However, it has been my (albeit limited) experience that native Japanese speakers are indeed quite good at picking up Indonesian and Malay. Second, your Chinese character argument doesn’t hold, and I should know. Yes, the Japanese reader gets a big head start over the English reader, but that doesn’t make learning Chinese “easy”. Japanese uses about 2000 kanji, in order to read Chinese, you’ll not only need to learn _at least_ another 1000 characters, but you’ll also need to learn the different forms (either traditional or simplified) of the characters you already know. And you’ll also have to learn completely new readings for each of those characters. The 26 letters of the roman alphabet look puny by comparison. ---
**Author:** ![asterion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/4da419/32.png) [@asterion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asterion)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2003, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/68 "2003-07-10T16:45:08Z")
This is a bit of a hijack, but it seems better suited here than it does for the latest **even sven** GD. Actually, this probably relates to my German problems as well. I’m a native English speaker. I also basically taught myself to read before I started formal schooling. I also think of myself as being quite good with the language, having a large vocabulary and a good inherent grasp of the language. As such, I never saw the point of phonic lessons or grammar lessons. I still don’t understand it, to some degree. Sure, they tried to teach me phonics, but I pretty much ignored them. My take on it has always been one of who cares what a schwa does or how something is pronounced when you isolate it inside a word. It’s the same with me for grammar. Who cares about being able to diagram a sentence or what tense (I mean the smaller subcategories) it’s in? It didn’t help that I don’t like tedious busywork, and both phonics and grammar seemed like a prime example of tedious busywork. Anyway, I wonder if that’s what gave me trouble with German. It seems to me that the prescriptivists for English grammar are more trying to make a wrong connection with Latin and that such an attempt actually makes English grammar more complicated than it should be, while the German grammar (what kind of language comes up with adjective endings depending on case, anyway?) is also prescriptive, but prescriptive with a reason. Heck, I still learned more about English grammar in German class than I ever did in English class. ---
**Author:** ![Dreaming\_of\_Maria\_Callas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/f14d63/32.png) [@Dreaming\_of\_Maria\_Callas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dreaming_of_Maria_Callas)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2003, 9:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/69 "2003-07-11T09:49:50Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Nichol\_storm \* > \*\*I’m surprised that Swahili is so easy, but Indonesian, Malaysian, Turkish and Korean are all either related to Japanese or share some vocabulary. \*\* None of them are related to Japanese. According to all reputable linguists Japanese is a language isolate. It does share structural similarities with Korean and Altaic languages, but there is not enough evidence to be able to say they are related. UnuMondo ---
**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:** [July 11, 2003, 12:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/70 "2003-07-11T12:30:14Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by jovan \* > **You’re confusing “shares vocabulary” with being related linguistically. About 10% of the modern Japanese vocabulary is borrowed from English. That does not mean Japanese and English are related.** I am making a point that the more “shared vocabulary” 2 languages have, the easier one native speaker would be able to pick up the other. Based on that, I’m comparing how the languages are linguistically linked (vs. historically linked). Since Malay assimilates English terms at rapidly, and also shares the same alphabet (and for that matter, grammer is relatively similar), then yes, i’d say that both English and Malay are more ‘related’ than Japanese and Malay. A native speaker of either language thus generally has an easier time picking up the other, than say, Japanese. Historical links are hence unimportant in this context. First, > [@](#): > > \*\*Second, your Chinese character argument doesn’t hold, and I should know. \*\* I’ll have to ask: why should you know? :dubious: (heh, couldn’t reisist) Second, > [@](#): > > Yes, the Japanese reader gets a big head start over the English reader, but that doesn’t make learning Chinese “easy”. Japanese uses about 2000 kanji, in order to read Chinese, you’ll not only need to learn _at least_ another 1000 characters, but you’ll also need to learn the different forms (either traditional or simplified) of the characters you already know. And you’ll also have to learn completely new readings for each of those characters. The 26 letters of the roman alphabet look puny by comparison. I guess it depends on your view of how easy it is to pick up a similar language (ie historically linked, shared vocab etc) vs. picking up a totally foreign language. A case could be made for both. For eg, as you argued, a Japanese would only have to learn the 26 letters of the alphabet, hence, English/Malay might be (in absolute terms)easier to pick up. Also, Chinese might be confusing due to false friends, etc, which might confuse a native Japanese. However, bear in mind that due to historical reasons, Chinese might be easier to pick up for a Japanese than Malay. Chinese shares more vocab with Japanese, as you have agreed, hence by inference, more similar ‘concepts or ideas’ with Japanese. Hot springs, using an example, are written the same both in CHinese and Japanese. Only the pronunciations differ (wen quan vs. onsen). One, however, would be hard pressed, to find something similar in the Malay language (simply because hot springs are generally not found in Malaysia). Geisha, or ji nu, is another example. The cultural meaning is similar enough in both Japanese and Chinese culture for speakers of either language to recognise. Hence, i conclude that insofar as languages share similar vocabulary, or are historically related, they are easier for one to pick up, than a language totally foreign in culture (and hence vocab). ---
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2003, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/71 "2003-07-11T13:35:47Z")
**sotally tober** , your arguments are valid and I don’t disagree that Chinese is not particularly difficult for Japanese speakers, for the reasons you mention. However, there are other factors to consider also. I assume that the list mentioned above was compiled based on learners’ experiences rather than just reasoning. I’ll repeat that the few native Japanese speakers I know who took up Indonesian and Malay found them very easy. The question is much more “why do Japanese find Malay easy?” rather than “do Japanese find Malay easy?”. I know that my sample size of three people is not statistically significant but the general agreement was that, to a Japanese, Malay and Indonesian lacked major hurdles. The difficult aspects aren’t so difficult; nothing like Chinese phonetics, or French verb tenses. YMMV. ---
**Author:** ![blogg](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/8e8cbc/32.png) [@blogg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/blogg)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2013, 10:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/72 "2013-07-18T22:43:41Z")
> [@\_ceQueen](#): > > 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. After living in Russia for 6 years, I started to chuckle every time I heard a Russian say this: “English very easy language to learn”… They may find it a relatively easy language to communicate in on a basic level, but when it comes to articles and phrasal verbs…forget it. It’s a similar story with other Slavic languages, too, like Polish. And one other thing - I think any foreign language you begin learning at the age of 5 would seem easy to learn. ---
**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2013, 12:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/73 "2013-07-19T00:04:56Z")
My father’s native language is Hungarian. He’s had to learn German, English, and French over the course of his life, in that order. He’s told me that English was by far the easiest. Whoops, I just realized this thread is a zombie. Oh well, maybe someone finds it interesting anyway. ---
**Author:** ![MrSquishy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b9e5f3/32.png) [@MrSquishy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrSquishy)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2013, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009/74 "2013-07-19T19:00:01Z")
> [@Hello\_Again](#): > > **There is no offical gender to nouns but some nouns have gender you’re just supposed to “know.”** Huh? Can you give me an example, other than a ship being referred to as “she”? > [@easy\_e](#): > > I was taught to look at the “tion” combination as a unique syllable. That is, when I was learning how to read, someone told me that “tion” sounds like “shun.” Cation. On edit, I also did not notice the vintage of the thread. Still curious about gender in English. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-english-difficult-to-learn/184009.md?page=3)