cckerberos, what about English grammar gives Japanese students the most problems? Is it the transition from SOV to SVO in general, or are there specific trouble spots?
All English nouns have declensions – usually singular and plural, with possessive forms of both, e.g:
thing
thing’s
things
things’
That’s an example of the regular form in English. Examples of irregular ones:
man
man’s
men
men’s
datum
datum’s
data
data’s
he (subject) / him (object)
The word ends differently depending on its function (though I assume that in some languages, it could be something alse than the end of the word which changes). In many languages, the syllabe change, rather than the position of the word in the sentence or such things will indicate is the word is a subject, a direct bject, an indirect object, etc…Latin was such a language. You wouldn’t wrtie/pronounce someone’s name in the same way if you were calling him in the street, if you’re stating that he’s doing something, if something is happening to him, etc…
Without a declension, you must have rigid rules about the position of the word in the sentence, depending on its function. If you change the order of the words in the sentence “John punched Jim in the face”, the sentence doesn’t have the same meaning, or doesn’t have any meaning at all (“Face punched Jim John” for instance) . With declentions, the order of the words doesn’t matter that much. It’s the endings of the nouns which indicates that the punching was done by John, that the face belonged to Jim and not Jim to the face, etc…)
English is actually a fairly easy language to speak, if by “speak” you mean “communicate your point.” It’s usually not very difficult to understand what a nonEnglish speaker is trying to say, even if the grammer and pronounciation are completey screwed up:
“Him no go, you fix him.” i.e. “My automobile is malfunctioning. Would you be so kind as to facilitate repairs?” Pidgin English is often sufficient to convey useful meaning, although purists get their noses all wrinkled.
English, however, is an extremely difficult language to speak perfectly, whence some of the fame of Alistair Cooke and Edwin Newman. Even native speakers frequently make mistake.
[sub]Yes, that was deliberate.[/sub]
English has many factors that make it difficult for non-native speakers to learn.
The size of the vocabulary is really not that big a deal, because a huge percentage of the words included in the English lexicon are either synonyms, scientific terms, or cognates drawn somewhat indiscriminately from other languages.
The grammar system is complex because it has SO MANY exceptions. It’s difficult to find any unbreakable rule in English grammar. Sit down some time and try to come up with ten regular English verbs. Not an easy exercise.
Spelling and pronunciation are almost as bad as in French (and that’s saying a lot).
But what really drives non-English speakers to despair is the sheer number of colloquialisms that are part of our everyday speech. English is incredibly flexible about incorporating words and phrases from other languages, and modern telecommunications allow new “buzzwords” to become widespread throughout the population in a matter of weeks.
The US Army’s Defense Language Institute ranks languages by difficulty. I have no clue *how *they do this, but the ranking goes from 1 (easy-let’s be friends) to 5 (impossible-invade and destroy). IIRC English and Arabic are the only 5s. Mandarin is a 4, Russian is a 3, Spanish is a 1. I’d be guessing at the rest. I got placed in Arabic 
and, curiously, a lot of the people in my class had English degrees. Whether there is a correlation between fluency in English and capability for Arabic proficiency, or if people with English degrees just end up in the Army because they can’t work anyplace else is up in the air. Having studied Arabic, I’m not really sure why it’s believed to be so difficult. Once you learn the letters (took me about a month before I could do sort-of reliable phoenetic pronunciation) the rest is pretty straight forward. Nouns, Verbs and Adjectives have to agree–which actualy makes it *easier *because that gives you greater flexibility with your word order; and vocabulary is easy because most of the words are based on a 2 or 3 leter “root” which is then subjected to one of, like 16 structural patterns–which is cool, because if you come across a word like “mu-kaa’-tib” and you don’t know what it means, you can determine the root as KTB (to write) and the structural pattern mu-xa’-xix (where ‘x’ is a letter of the root) which refers to someone who executes the verb, and determine the word to mean ‘writer.’ Granted, the results aren’t always precise because it’s a pretty old language and the meaning of the word may have strayed somewhat, but with some basic skills you can plow your way through a newspaper and get the gist.
I agree that fluency can really only come with cultural immersion–ya gotta speak with the peeps and have no English to fall back on. Naturally, the level of intensity of the immersion will determine the degree & arrival time of fluency.
I’m wondering whether the premise to this thread is really valid. Everybody I know personally who is not a native English speaker, but who has learned English as well as other second languages in his or her life has told me the same thing: English was the easiest, at least to get to the point of being conversationally fluent.
Now, as others have said, this could depend on what these people’s native languages WERE. I’m sure that a German speaker would have an easier time learning English than a Japanese speaker.
So I’m curious about what any non-native English speakers on this board think.
Ed
As far is as known, the inherent complexity or difficulty of all languages is roughly the same. Allowing for differences in intelligence and other factors, all children the world over learn their native languages at similar ages, whether we’re talking about Inuits with their umpteen words for snow, or Lithuanians with their seven noun cases–or Anglophones with our famously ‘simple’ grammar.
I think the quickest way to answer the OP is this: again, allowing for differences in intelligence, etc., the difficulty for native speakers of language X learning language Y is proportional to how similar language X is to language Y.
I haven’t had my coffee yet and may come up with a better answer later, but:
A lot of the other posters points are right on in regards to this. My students have the most trouble with the elements of English grammar that have no equivalent in Japanese: articles, plurals, the future tense, the past perfect and present perfect tenses, etc. English makes a lot of grammatical distinctions that Japanese doesn’t and the students find them very alien.
I think your question has been answered by others already…
Is there a “farting” smiley that we’re missing? 
I’m sure your High School English teacher would have said: “Look it up in a dictionary!”
Hey, you can even do it online now…
A fellow DLI-er! Yeah!
As I recall it, and I could be wrong, Spanish & French were maybe cat 2 easy, German was cat 3 medium difficulty, Russian was cat 4 hard, and English, Chinese & Arabic were the cat 5 “jeezus christ!” languages. I suspect that English being a cat 5 was a bit of a local urban legend, since the categories were the result of studying how hard it is for a native English speaker to learn the various foreign languages. When I was at DLI I don’t remember ever hearing about an English department teaching anyone English, and if they were, they weren’t teaching native speakers of English. If they were teaching non-native English speakers, they weren’t also teaching these non-natives other foreign languages, so on what did they base this assumption that English is a cat 5?
I think they started that rumor in order to tell the students, “hey, don’t feel bad. At least you already speak English, that’s a cat 5!”
Yeah, but you can’t get away with that if you have to write Russian. Try scribbling the ends of your words.
I think the more closely related a language is to your own, the easier it is. For English speakers that means French, German and Spanish are “easy.” You add a different alphabet like Russian, but is otherwise somewhat related, you get “hard.” Add a different alphabet with an unrelated language, you get “really hard.”
But if you have an aptitude for languages, they’re not hard. Just interesting in different ways.
How fluent can you get? When I was at my prime in Russian and regularly visiting Russia, I was rarely taken for American. Maybe from “somewhere else” in the republics, or somewhere in Eastern Europe. Here in the states I’d get the occasional Russian cab driver or something and after talking to them they assumed I had Russian parents or something, but certainly not just a student of Russian.
So, you can be as fluent as you want to be, with lots of work and practice.
So, as for the `related to what you know’ hypothesis, Basqe and Japanese should be insanely hard to learn for any foreign speaker, simply because they have no close relatives in existence on this planet.
Similarly, the failure rate of Basque-to-anything and Japanese-to-anything should be high.
Is this the case?
As another EFL teacher in Japan, I’ll second this. Time-related tenses and articles may be the most difficult grammatical points for native Japanese speakers to become comfortable with. Further complicating matters is that there are often exceptions to English grammatical rules, or multiple correct structures for expressing the same idea. Here’s one I taught today:
I have lived in Japan since November. (present perfect)
I have been living in Japan since November. (present perfect continuous)
Both of these sentences mean the same thing. However, these two forms usually express different meanings, as in:
I have read the book. (present perfect)
I have been reading the book. (present perfect continuous)
I won’t inflict the whole of today’s lesson on you all here, but take my word for it – these things aren’t easy to teach or to learn. I consider myself lucky to have acquired English the easy way, as a child growing up in an English-speaking environment!
I’m with this guy. I myself is a native Russian speaker, though I consider myself to be near fluent in English. I’ve learned it fairly easy, over a course of just a year, though I’ve done it when I was ten, and living in England for a year at a boarding school, but still, I don’t remember having any significant setbacks in the process.
I have always seen how Russian would be considered far harder to learn for foreigners, this of course coming from a C student in Russian Seriously though, a foreigner can converse freely in Russian after about 3-5 years, however it’s is not real Russian, they get the phonetics wrong, and overall it is a not a good Russian, though you can understand the person, and in my book that’s all you need. I have yet to meet a foreigner that has trully mastered Russian, and when I do, I’ll nominate for the Nobel price for some thing or another, because that man is a genious.
Non-native speaker here. I would find it hard to compare the difficulty of learning foreign languages solely on personal experience, because you learn them at a different age, with a different level of exposure, and get at a different level of proficiency. However, a lot of the remarks made earlier make sense.
It seems as if native speakers of English underestimate the difficulty of writing English properly. Even given a large vocabulary it is pretty tough to come up with a completely grammatically correct sentence, let alone one that is stylistically adequate. There is the question of word placement, the proper choice of adjectives, appropriateness of combining words (mixing slang with sophisticated words). I’m pretty sure every one of my posts contains noticable errors, possibly small, but noticable nonetheless.
As a small example I’ll take the first sentence of the second paragraph: ‘It seems as if …’ Instead of ‘as if’ I first wrote ‘like’, but that seemed to ‘Californian’. Instead of ‘native speakers of English’ I first wrote ‘native english-speakers’. And so it goes on and on. A non-native speaker would probably make these choices subconsciously and correctly. (Being tired doesn’t help)
If you don’t believe me, try attending a conference or course with lots of foreigners. Although most will be able to get around in communicating their thoughts, you will notice that only a few will really speak correct English. I think the simplified version that’s mostly used among foreigners in such situations is called Eurenglish over here.
My best friend from high school joined the navy and was sent to the DLI program to learn Russian. IIRC, he said that Russian was a category 3 language, and Mandarin was category 5.
Each group of students had their own set of t-shirts made to display their scintillating wit. The Russian group wore t-shirts that read “We learn to speak Russian so you don’t have to”. The Mandarin group’s shirts read “We learn to speak Mandarin because you can’t.”