Title is question.
I’m a native speaker, but from all accounts the two hardest parts are the size of the vocabulary - many times the size of most languages - and the number of grammatical irregularities (exceptions to rules, such as pluralisation - you add ‘s’. Except when you add ‘es’. Or when the word stays the same. Or changes completely…).
Depends on what native language you’re coming from. A native Japanese speaker, for example, would have to learn an entirely new alphabet and several unusual sounds (“R” vs. “L”, etc.). Consonant clusters can be hard, too, if your native language doesn’t have anything approaching, say, “arthritis”.
Prepositions like “at”, “to”, “by”, “for”, can be confusing and have little logic. We wait “for” a train so we can go “by” train. One cannot confuse the “at” and “to” in the sentences “He came at church” and “He came to church” without completely changing their meanings.
From a German speaker’s perspective:
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pronounciation (some sounds, particularly th, and in general English pronounciation being incredibly irregular compared to German - cf. Shaw’s ghoti)
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false friends (“I’d like to become a beefsteak”)
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pronounciation
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some grammatical contructs e.g. those with “to do” (“I did not see X” rather than “I saw X not”), gerund, …
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which preposition to use
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more separate word roots to learn rather than more easily analysable compounds (glove = Handschuh - hand-shoe; seal = Seehund - sea dog)
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homonyms (delivery of a package/of a baby); differences in semantic mapping
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Did i mention pronounciation?
On the topic of non-native English speakers, I found this archive of pronunciations quite fun to play around with.
Recognise your own accent?
Pronunciation, for sure. For someone who is used to pronouncing every letter distinctly and only one way each , english is a nightmare to speak. It took me two years before I lost my fear of speaking in front of people. Kind of a drag when you’re in highschool! I still have a slight accent after 37 years, mostly with the th-sounds.
“a” vs. “the” is even more confusing. I’m sure people have spotted many mistakes in my posts.
I know a lot of non-English speakers have a lot of trouble with slang, regional differences, and so forth.
Example:
A Coca-Cola (or Coke) can be referred to as “soda” or “pop” or even “soda pop” depending on what part of the country you’re in.
Synonyms. Look in a thesaurus and count how many synonyms there are for “drunk”.
I can see how a foreigner would go nuts trying to figure it all out.
My wife constantly complains about the “little words”
on, in, up, down, out (among others)
In her language, there is a single word for “on” and “in”, so this always causes confusion. Additionally, we tend to use down and up as modifiers more often than we realize.
On the beach, in the house, on the bus, take it off, take it out, tear up, tear down, knock down, knock up (!), knock out, and so on.
Oh yes… There’s tons of verbs that beg for an object in English that don’t in other languages. I’m always happy to supply them for my wife and her sister when they need one. Example: Wife says “I don’t like.” I respond “it.”
This isn’t a personal attack on you, tschild, but I get so tired of seeing ghoti trotted out everything a linguistics discussion is brought up. It’s an artificial construction that in no way could occur in English naturally. There’s a very good article on the orthography of the English language and it’s rules (it makes more sense than people think) here.
The actual sound system of English (as opposed to the orthography, which isn’t part of the language, just a tool used by it) isn’t that terrible. There are some sounds, like the dental fricative “th”, which aren’t that common. We have a very vowel-rich language: beat, bite, bat, boat, bet, but, bit, and boot all share b-t, but the difference in the vowels changes the meanings completely. Coming from a language like Japanese, which only has five phonetic vowels, you might find the diphthongs in English to be quite daunting.
A number of languages use the same word for “make” and “do” and native speakers of those languages often have trouble working out which of the two they should use in English.
One big difficulty, I think, is the dozens of different ways there are to express the same thought. In the textbooks and language tapes, everyone uses only one or two variations of the standard small talk expressions, but in reality everyone’s got their own way of speaking, plus in conversations we often deliberately avoid using the same expression that someone else has just used. I’m sure if we started a thread on different ways to say “How are you?” we could probably come up with at least 50 that the average native English speaker would be able to recognize the meaning of.
Another problem is all the idioms, especially the ones using prepositions. They all tend to saound alike and knowing the meaning of one is often no help in guessing the meaning of a similar-looking one (get up, get in, get by, get over, etc.).
And then, as my sig shows, there’s the problem of words that can change their meaning unexpectedly depending on what other words you use with them. That example was a headline that was translated by a person in my office who lived in Australia for several years and spoke English extremely well.
Pronunciation and some idiomatic phrases.
I gave up having perfect pronunciation some time ago. As long as they understand me most of the time, I’m ok. Besides, I soon realized that regional accents used by native English speakers are hard to understand, and that if they didn’t speak with standard accent, then neither should I have to do so.
The article that you link to outlines
That does show there is a modicum of regularity in English pronounciation, but the crucial difference in attitudes seems to be (at least to me) what an accuracy of “over 85 %” means, practically.
Mispronouncing one word in six is good enough for the mere exchange of information, i.e. you will understand what the speaker says. It will, however, leave the speaker at a profound social disadvantage - the balance of power in a conversation which is any kind of negotiation (and a lot of conversations are that) will be definitely to the advantage of the native speaker.
Well, that’ll be the case with just about any language.
As someone said earlier, there is a distinction between the phonology of the spoken language and the ortographic phonics of the written language. Problem is, in the acquisition of your native language, the sequence was:
(1) Learn the everyday version of the spoken language by just hearing and repeating it in the form it is spoken by those around you
(2) Learn the basics of how to write and read in the language’s standard form
(3) Learn the actual grammatical rules of how to formally assemble and express meaning in the language
One of the problems learning a foreign language is that (a) You’re trying to do all 3 at the same time and (b) you already got conditioned by your native tongue as to what to expect.
In the process of (1), your cerebral speech/hearing centers and your organs of speech become “trained” to process certain sounds. This creates a combination of “sense memory” and “muscle memory” that can make it hard for you to properly tune in to different sounds.
Thus a Spanish speaker may have a difficulty, at first, figuring out that English can actually hear a difference between “sheep”, “ship”, and “chip”, or between “sheet”, “cheat” and “shit”; between “Yale” and “jail”, “eat” and “it”.
It also drills into your speech centers a particular syntactic pattern as the “normal” way of communicating – e.g. if you must always mention a subject; if there are definite articles; if there’s a gender. Then when you learn to read and write in step 2, if your language uses alphabetical writing, your brain gets trained to associate certain visual stimuli with the spoken/aural pattern you already learned, and this creates certain expectations of what it means.
Idiosyncratic ortography is to a larger or lesser extent a problem shared by many languages – for instance, every European language has to make do with what is really and extended character set of the Latin alphabet, often adapting it by sheer brute force. The sounds represented by “J”, “Ch”, “W”, or “G” may be the same, or different, or sometimes same and other times different, across English, French, German and Spanish.
The sounds in the first 6 examples above, represented by “ee”, 'ea", and “i”, would be classified simply as “i” in Spanish. The different pronunciations of English B/V or Y/J – the latter in written Spanish would be Ll/Y – in Spanish are considered dialect quirks and don’t really change the meaning of the words if you use one or the other when speaking.
So the difficulties in English start with:
(1) Very large amount of possible phonemes.
(2) Very large amount of words, both formal and colloquial, plus a stupendous amount of idioms. The latter was my biggest hurdle.
(3) Often idiosyncratic ortography. 15% IS a significant amount
(4) For speakers of some languages, the extensive use of auxiliary verbs (will, do, have, get), particles (___ up, ____ down, ____ in, etc.) and of the -ing form where we would just conjugate the verb root or use a noun/adjective form
(5) Instances of “borrowed” grammar, in which words brought in from languages other than English bring along their language-of-origin’s rules of pronunciation and pluralization.
Notice that some of these “difficulties” are derived from one of English’s greatest advantages, its open-source flexibility. In many other aspects English is much simpler (for instance, no need to conjugate 6 subjunctive tenses).
Excuse my ignorance, but could you clarify what you mean here?
It’s fun to play with that site, but I ought to point out that the British examples are very unreliable. I don’t doubt that the participants were telling the truth about their origins, but they don’t have characteristic accents from their locations at all. The Birmingham woman, for instance, has a neutral, educated accent that you could find almost anywhere in England.
I think it’s unfair to criticise the ghoti joke. Of course it’s an artificially extreme example, but it illustrates a real characteristic of English, which is that it has much more irregular pronunciation than many other languages. It shouldn’t surprise us that foreigners have trouble learning it.
tschild: If it’s any consolation to you, I had a good friend from university who had a German coworker. One time I met with a group of friends in a pub and, at first, my friend didn’t introduce me to the stranger sitting next to him, but we were all talking for a while until eventually the context of the conversation gave me a big clue… “Hey, this is Henning isn’t it?” “Oh yes, I should’ve said.” I had no idea from his accent that he wasn’t English.
For me, ‘a’ and ‘the’.
Sorry for leaving that information out. To become is a false friend for bekommen (to get). Other notable false friends are gift (poison), mist (dung), wand (wall), must not (nicht müssen, in German understood as negation rather than opposite of must), actual (aktuell=current, topical), chef (boss), gymnasium (higher secondary school), craft (Kraft=strength), undertaker (Unternehmer=entrepreneur), procurer (Prokurist = corporate officer authorised to act for the corporation) etc. - also there are a lot of words pronounced the same as German words - when I first heard eagle eye I understood “hedgehog egg”. On the whole the two languages’ being related aids learning, of course, but you fall into a lot of traps on the way.
I just get tired of it. In every single discussion about languages, someone has to trot out the old ghoti joke. It’s like the 1920s style death rays, it was worn out long ago. Someone needs to put ghoti down as an act of kindness.
Orthography is not part of a language, not like tenses and genders and cases and suffixes are. English could switch over to the Arabic script tomorrow, or adopt Chinese-style ideograms, and it’d still be the same language, just written in a different way. In fact, I think adopting something like Korean hangul might be a good idea, it’s been done before on a large scale (Turkish switched from the Arabic script to the Roman in the early 1900s) and, at the very least, it might finally kill off ghoti once and for all.