What English words and rules of grammar are most confusing for people learning ESL?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Are you specifically referring to only grammar and lexicon? Because you mention other things in the OP, like pronunciation and orthography, as well as usage. For example:
[QUOTE=Sampiro]
I’d always assumed the lack of formal/informal and the lack of gender in English would be a welcome simplification to those learning it, but apparently it’s confusing.
[/quote]
This is something much more complex than grammar. Moreover, English does NOT lack formal/informal distinctions, it just doesn’t involve pronouns. In fact, the ways that English speakers mark register is rather complex and difficult to master (shifting tenses, modals, ect.). But if you’re just asking in general, I’d agree with:

My masters is in teaching ESL/applied linguistics, and I’d agree that this is probably what generalizes most to speakers of all other languages. Article use and specific pronunciations generally challenge speakers of specific language groups. However, phrasals pose to ALL L1 speakers especially difficult and idomatic grammatical (syntactic and collocative, i.e, separable vs. not separable, transitive or not) restrictions, but probably more challenging are the semantic dimensions.

Take, for example, knock off.

The base verb, knock, has a fairly straightforward meaning, but the phrasal knock off takes on a wide array of meanings, which have differing grammatical restrictions, depending on the meaning:

As a transitive:

*The mob knocked off Greasy Higgins shortly thereafter.
The mob knocked Greasy Higgins off shortly thereafter.
The mob knocked him off shortly thereafter.
*
However:
*The mob knocked off him shortly thereafter.

[* = not grammatical to native speakers]
Another meaning distinct meaning, which is also separable and transitive:

*They knocked $50 off from the price.
They knocked off $50 from the price.
*

Or:

The factory in Hebei Province knocked off the pirate DVDs in two weeks.
The factory in Hebei Province knocked the pirate DVDs off in two weeks.
The factory in Hebei Province knocked them off in two weeks.

BUT
*The factory in Hebei Province knocked off them in two weeks.

It also has transitive vs. transitive restriction:

*It’s late. Let’s knock off now. (intransitive)
It’s late. Why don’t we knock off work now. (transitive)
*
BUT:
**Yeah. Let’s knock it off now.
*Yeah. Let’s knock off it now.
*

This particular phrasal also plays a part in an important colloquial idiom in English:

*Hey! Knock that nonsense off, right now!
Hey! Knock off that nonsense, right now!
Hey! Knock it off, right now!
*
BUT:
**Hey! Knock off it, right now!
*

Phrasals are extremely important in conversational English, and in that way, they can mark informality when used in lieu of standard verb equivalents (knock off instead of reduce, quit, produce quickly, or kill.)

To complicate matters, it can be easy to confuse different phrasals:

*knock out
knock around
knock over
knock up
*
..and of course, all of these can in theory be used as nouns:

*The coat was a cheap knock-off from China.
That chick’s a real knock-out!
*

Of course, phrasals can be avoided simply by choosing the standard verb equivalent: (using instead reduce, quit, produce quickly, or kill. etc.)

With that in mind, I’d say the one thing that challenges all learners the most form ALL language backgrounds is the correct use of prepositions, in particular as they collocate with specific verbs. Working with international graduate students at UCLA I found that no matter how good their English was in other aspects, the use of prepositions was the last thing they mastered, simply because prepositions are so idiomatic.

42

Yeah, I know all that, although I used more layman’s terms (saying “the=defined set” can be confusing if folks think of “defined set” as necessarily plural, for example). He was asking about whether there was any shade of meaning between the two phrases in my post; while I usually think that the addition or subtraction of a word changes meaning, however minor the change, I was unable to come up with any difference whatsoever, much less a functional difference.

43

Not quite an answer to your question, but related and interesting:

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,102926,00.html#ixzz1DcLmaTAV

44

As a Finn, I don’t get “borrow” and “lend” - why two different words? Whether you are borrowing or lending is basically always clear in the context and it is really hard to learn a word that doesn’t have a corresponding word in your own first language. Somehow it feels even harder when you disagree with the need for the word.

Also as others have already noted, spelling and pronouncing words is a pain. In my case it’s mostly pronouncing them that I find hard since I’ve learned my English mostly from books and online and my vocabulary has countless words I’ve never spoken aloud. Even if I know it is wrong, I nevertheless have an irresistible urge to pronounce the “k” in “knight” for example. :smiley:

When I was learning English over 20 years ago, learning how to use a/the was hard for me as well, as was “to”, “from”, “on” etc, but those I’m mostly getting right these days. Borrow and lend can still go die in a fire though.

45

I have a friend from Germany who speaks English so well that many people think she’s American when they first meet her. She has almost no accent, although she regularly travels back to Germany and speaks German frequently (so, she’s not becoming Americanized, at least linguistically). However, she has one tell-tale grammatical idiosyncrasy that I’ve never heard out of a native English speaker.

She would say “I talked with him seven **month **ago,” leaving the “s” off. I find this fascinating, since outside of this particular construction, her English is perfect.

46

This is so funny to me. “Borrow” and “lend” have opposite meanings, so your argument that they are essentially the same thing is so weird in my mind. Sure, if you only had one word for both, it would be clear from context which is which, but the same would be true for “give/take” and “dark/light” and “drop/pick up”. I mean, why have different words at all? We could all just gesture and it would be clear from context.

I’m sure Bulgarian speakers would mock my despair over the need for two sets of indirect object pronouns, though. The word for “him” in “I saw him” and “I told him” is different. When do you use one versus the other? I don’t know and I don’t care. What kind of asshole language would come up with that kind of bullshit? :mad:

47

Y = boundary between the two vowels in the diptong in viejo.

What boundary? :confused:

As for J, I know it’s between a Spanish J and CH, but apparently I just can’t do it.

Mind you, I also pronounce the Spanish LL exactly as the Spanish Y.

I only had one ESL teacher who paid any attention to phonetics, or maybe one who could put things in terms of phonetics. Having someone repeat “yale, jail” and asking “don’t you hear the difference?”… “well, yes, what I don’t hear is when you tell me that I don’t say it different! I AM saying it different!” and no recording equipment or ability to explain how to pronounce it more-different was nothing but a source of frustration. One of the teachers who did this was from Kansas and we had to ask her repeatedly to refrain from using double negatives, since we would get marked down for using one in an exam - that didn’t help much when it came to establishing her as any kind of authority.

Eventually I learned to say that someone had “studied in Yale” and someone else “gone to prison”. There, no confusion.

48

I’d say something corresponding to ‘you may not touch the live wire’ or ‘Do not touch the live wire’.

49

That’s probably not a grammatical issue, though - we use the plural of month in that construction too. My guess would be that the [θs] combination is particularly hard to pronounce if you have learned English as a second language. I for one tend to sloppily elide the ‘th’ in that case i.e. month=[mʌnθ], months=[mʌns] - your friend seems to drop the ‘s’ instead. One of these sounds needs to be sacrificed to avoid spraining my tongue.

50

Wow. That description is not very good at all. The English J is just the voiced form of the Spanish CH. It’s the same as the difference between C and G (before A, O, or U). English has a lot of those.

You close your teeth and put the tip of your tongue on the alveolar ridge (that bump in your mouth just on top of the back of your top gums), just like you would to say CH. You add the pressure behind the tongue, and release it, but, unlike with CH, you activate your voice while doing so, like an even harder version of the English D. (CH would would use a hard T that point). As long as air also comes out from between your teeth, you are saying the English J.

51

NETA: Oops. I forgot that, in phonetics, the term alveolar also refers to that part behind the gums. The tongue in my example above just has to be somewhere between the back of the alveolar ridge and the teeth, and so can actually be on the back of the gums, and can even touch the back of the teeth as long as it actually touches the gums, too.

52

Yeh, it’s like for CH but vibrating like a J does. It’s been mchsbscarryone… 26 years since I studied phonetics, ok? And I would never have related C and G at all… are those yours or mine?

53

I wasn’t saying anything bad about you. I thought that was the description your (bad) teacher gave you.

I actually picked C and G because I didn’t think there was any difference in the Spanish or English versions. If there is, then it’s a poor example. There are several such voiced/unvoiced pairs in English: C(K)/G, T/D, CH/J, P/B, F/V, QU/GU, WH/W, TH/TH*, and SH/ZH**. I guess that’s why I think making a voiced version of CH should be easy.

I share your frustration. I can’t aspirate a voiced consonant. You know, like how a person of Indian descent says the GH in ghost.

*TH as in thin vs. TH as in that. Some actually use DH for the later, under the same logic as ZH below.
**ZH is never spelled that way in actual words. It’s the sound the S makes in measure. ZH is just used as an analogy with SH, since Z is the voiced version of S.

54

Spanish doesn’t even have a C phoneme, it has K, Z and S. A written C is pronounced as Z or K for some accents depending on the vowel, S or K for others: in any case, since those written letters have better phonetic correspondence than C*, we don’t represent any of the possible C sounds as “phonetic C” - or at least we didn’t back in my 9th grade. I’m guessing you’re talking about the Z and G (which is “soft”, where the Spanish J is “hard”).

In any case, we’re hijacking the heck out of this thread and I doubt it will help my pronunciation at all. Sorry guys!

  • there’s accents where S is pronounced like Z, others which throw in an SH, and others where final S can become a Spanish J - fun fun! But those didn’t come up in my class, since we all spoke a “Z or K” dialect.
55

Those word pairs you gave aren’t clear from the context – you can say “It’s smurf outside” and there’s no way to know if it is dark or light, giving and taking are different acts as are dropping and picking up. It’s just language defines our world and when you learn something it ends up being a part of the tools you think with, and when some foreign guy comes and tells you that even one of your tools of thinking is silly it is impossible to agree. :wink:

When you know several languages, you start to see how one language does something better and another is better at something else. Finnish is hardly the best language in the world, but I still think having just one word for borrowing/lending is the way to go. Of course, that’s me indoctrinated to think like that by my own first language.

56

Dropping the “s” in this manner is a particular feature of several dialects in the North of England. Did she learn to speak English in America, the UK, or Germany?

I serve as the resident English proof reader for a department full of Italians. Italians often mistake “in” and “on”. Further, Italians writing English tend to create paragraphs that look like spaghetti to my English eyes. They will refer to something mentioned three sentences back as “it” in the current sentence, causing all sort of confusion. I asked my Italian boss about his habit of doing this, and he told me that it’s perfectly safe to do this in Italian, as the word endings usually imply what is being talked about unambiguously.

57

So what’s the Finnish translation for Shakespeare’s “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”? Something like “Be neither a borrower/lender from nor a borrower/lender to”?

58

I wouldn’t use the terms ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ when describing letters, because they seem to describe a variety of things. I’d use ‘voiced’ and ‘unvoiced’, or whatever they are actually describing.

59

“Äl’ ota lainaa, äläkä myös anna” (Paavo Cajander’s translation, 1879) – I guess that’d translate back to something like “Never take a loan, nor give one”. There’s far trickier things to translate than this, like Asimov’s endlessly long monologue about his awesomeness in making up a word that means both he and she in one of his scifi books, when there’s already just one Finnish word for both.

60

Speakers of some American English dialects actually do use the same word (“borrow”) for both concepts. In parts of the US it’s common to hear people say things like “Can you borrow me a dollar?” I’ve only encountered this in the upper Midwest, and it’s possible it’s due to the influence of Northern European immigrants.