Oh, and the R/L and TH/DH/T/D questions? Only thems what grew up well after WWII might have a problem with them (parse THAT one, linguists!). And the younger ones are probably accustomed to making adjustments for Spanish pronounciations and constructions. We can figure out what you mean, often because that cliche about how the “US is a Melting Pot” works better linguistically than racially, but mostly because you can generally construct a sentence in English that not only makes sense, but has a grammatical name.
[Bender] . . . what . . . [/Bender]
As well, when a Thai cutie looks at you and says “I am amazing” or better yet “I am exciting.” 
(That could help explain why so many guys get into trouble over them.)
Well, maybe, but the ones who have asked me were clearly looking for a literal osmosis, something like a pill they could swallow and Bing! know English. Many Thais honestly seem to think it should work that way with foreigners and the Thai language, explain something quickly and only once and then you’ve got it, because Thai is, after all, so easy, or so they think.
I’d used y’all in the previous sentence…
I used to be a primary school EFL teacher in Bulgaria. Because my kids were young and not very advanced learners, some of the more complex stuff mentioned in this thread didn’t apply to them. That said, these were the issues that cropped up the most:
-
Spelling. That is to say, the differences between spelling and pronunciation. Bulgarian is written phonetically (which doesn’t prevent me from making spelling errors from time to time, d’oh) and my students found the often large gaps between how a word is written and how it is pronounced baffling. My counterpart - the Bulgarian English teacher I worked with - was often really impatient with the kids on this, which I found frustrating. (Native English speakers have trouble with this! I still realize from time to time that I’ve been mispronouncing words I’ve only read and never heard spoken!) I once got a round of applause from my seventh graders for saying straight out that reading and writing in English is much harder than it is in Bulgarian.
-
Present simple v. present continuous. Bulgarian only has one present tense and now matter how many times we went over the difference between the two, to the point that they all knew the definition of when to use one and when to use the other, they screwed it up in practice constantly. I just have my fingers crossed that when they get to higher levels of education, the exercises we did on this will eventually pay off.
-
The lack of a gender. I always thought this would make things EASIER, but my kids had a hard time with it. They would write stuff like “My house is big. She is blue.” ALL THE TIME. It didn’t help that at one point I realized that my counterpart was giving a completely different explanation of gendering in English than I was. I had tried to explain that all objects in English were neutrally gendered (Bulgarian has a third neuter gender) and she was telling them that English doesn’t have gender at all. She was more accurate, I guess, but I thought it would be easier for them to understand it my way. Anyway, together, we confused the kids. Good job, us.
-
When to use “a” and “an”. My counterpart couldn’t figure this out, either. She totally taught the kids to say stuff like “this is chair”. sigh
It’s funny, I was having a meeting with a colleague today about that very term. He wanted to call a device that “knocks off” an unwanted section of a plastic, stamp-molded product, a “knock off” machine.
As to the OP, I have no idea what the hardest thing is, but I have some guesses:
-
Getting used to different accents, from Birmingham to New Orleans and everything in between, or around.
-
Irregular grammar rules.
-
Lexicon - too many synonyms or near synonyms.
-
Depending on their own native language, pronunciation (“I like everything on the menu expect salmon”).
-
Idioms - even first-language English speakers sometimes have to ask for clarification.
Or even, I believe, “I’m going to look for a small informal restaurant”
I’m with you on that one, as are all my teachers. In Spanish, the neutral gender is extremely rare, but it exists. Learning that “about anything that gets a gender in Spanish but doesn’t have genitals will be an ‘it’” was relatively easy; I think that learning of stuff which does have genders as “exceptions in a genderless language” would have been harder.
No, German R is nothing like the English R. In standard German (Hochdeutsch), R is pronounced as the voiced uvular fricative [ʁ], except in a syllable coda where it is the vowel [ɐ]. In southern dialects, including the Bavarian dialect family, it’s a trilled [r]. English R, in rhotic dialects, is almost always realized as the liquid [ɹ]. These sounds are quite different from one another, having different places and manners of articulation. English speakers usually have a great deal of trouble pronouncing the German R, and German speakers likewise with the English R. About the only thing similar between R and L in both English and German is that they’re not allophones of one another as they are in, say, Japanese.
When I was studying abroad in Japan, out of my Japanese friends who spoke English, the one who was the most fluent was the guy who used to watch *Friends *all the time. It really is a matter of exposure–you can read all the books and take all the classes you want, but until you actually spend a lot of time listening to native speakers of the language you’re learning speaking in a natural way, you’re not going to approach their fluency.
The point made by ticker is that “I’ve been working since three months” is incorrect, and that this mistake is a noticeable feature of English spoken by French, Swedish and German speakers.
Ich habe drei Monate lang gearbeitet = I worked for three months
Ich arbeite seit drei Monaten = I have been working for three months
“since” would not be used in either case.
However, if the starting point (rather than the duration) is specified, you say “since”. For example, “I have been working since April”. So your teacher was correct!
Is this also Chinese, or just Japanese?
I do some work with English text produced by native speakers of Lithuanian and Russian. It seems to me that by far the most noticeable and frequent error is the misuse of “a” and “the”. These are competent professional translators, but they can not reliably make the correct selection between “”, “a”, and “the”.
This is not because they are stupid, but because the rules in practice are far more complex than suggested above. Saying that you use “the” to specify a particular known example, and “a” to indicate any example of that type, is a good starting point, but utterly fails to capture the real complexity.
In Thailand, the preferred accents for teachers are American and southern England, sometimes Aussie and Kiwi if the accent’s not too strong. But no matter how qualified they may be, it’s virtually impossible for English teachers from Ireland, Scotland and northern England to get hired here, because of their “undesirable” accent.
My favorite exposition on the oddities of English pronunciation is a long poem, The Chaos, by Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité (1870-1948). The longest version I’ve found (274 lines), appears here and here (the latter also includes a brief discussion of the poem’s publication history.)
Note: If two words are near each other and don’t look (sound) ironic, odds are you’re not using the same pronunciation as Trenité. For example, victuals is VITL’Z, dour is DO-er, plover is pluh-ver, Cowper is COO-per, Froude is FROOD, piquet is pik-ET (now a secondary pronunciation), conduit is CON-duht (now archaic), schedule is SHEH-dyool (British), and so forth.
While the point that Chronos was making in his first post was spot-on, he did use poor examples. Standard Mandarin has three distinctive sounds that more or less correspond to /r/ and /l/ in English, and are written using those letters in pinyin:
/l/ is pronounced like in English. For example, long (dragon):
http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Chinese/Language/Sound4c/4278zxw.wav
/r/ can either be retroflex frictative, a sound that doesn’t exist in English and might sound to some as in between /l/ and /r/. For example, rou (meat):
http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Chinese/Language/Sound4b/4394cpa.wav
/r/ can also indicate a sound that is very close to the English /r/, for in instance er (two):
http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Chinese/Language/Sound0a/183jz.wav
Of course, there’s some variation between dialects.
Japanese, on the other hand, has a single sound, usually romanized with the letter “r” that’s about halfway between an English /l/ and a short Spanish /r/. It’s used to replace both /l/ and /r/ in loan words.
http://japanese.about.com/library/media/audio/raion.wav
http://japanese.about.com/library/media/audio/meron.wav
http://japanese.about.com/library/media/audio/orenji.wav
http://japanese.about.com/library/media/audio/ragubii.wav
Many if not most Japanese adults cannot tell the difference between the English /l/ and /r/ sounds and will very often mix them up when speaking.
OK, this one, at least, is easy: If it starts with a vowel sound, us “an”, and for everything else, use “a”. Note that this is based on the sound, not the letter, so you have “a unicorn” (yooneekorn), but “an NSA agent” (en ess ay).
And I stand corrected on the L/R example, which I apparently completely botched. Is there any language that has the same R as English?
Sarcasm.
If you look at the example, though, it wasn’t a question of when to use “a” **versus **“an,” but when to use articles in general. The other instructor didn’t say, “This is an chair,” she said, “This is chair.”
My guess is that there are American accents they wouldn’t like, such as New Jersey or the many Southern accents.