What's the hardest part about learning English?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Thank you all for your contributions.

For the record, I’m an American who is a native speaker of English. However, I’ve run into some interesting problems learning Spanish (I’m not fluent, by the way), and was curious what those who had to learn English went through.

These are some Spanish difficulties I ran into:

  • ser vs. estar
  • when to use the subjunctive
  • imperfect vs. preterite
  • regional dialects, especially those that don’t say certain letters. Those who don’t pronounce “s” or “d” in certain contexts I find very hard to understand.
  • sound-wise, the only really difficult sound is a rolled R. Do those who have only rolled R’s in their native language have a lot of difficulty with the American* R?

That’s all I can think of at the moment.

*I think the British have the same R as Americans, but sometimes it sounds different, like when “very” sounds somewhat like “veddy” to me. Oh well.

22

Boy, that all sounds familiar! I’m pretty much in the same boat, at least with the first three. Apparently I have a very good Mexican accent, but that frickin subjunctive and preterite/imperfect just kill me. Just glad to see I’m not the only one.

I’ve always found interesting the Mexican pronunciations of English words. For example, in Spanish (at least in my experience) you don’t end words with a T or D or P sound. Also, if a word starts with S and a consonant, they put an E in front. This becomes interesting with the word Sprite, which they see as “Sprite” (like the soda) and pronounce as “Eh’-spry.”

The R thing is something else, few Mexicans I’ve talked to can get that top/back of the mouth R sound America is known for.

23

Interesting list.
There seem to be a couple of different categories of things in your list:

o Words that do not have one-to-one mapping:

(Exampels are English -> Portuguese)
“to be” -> “ser”, “estar”
“ear” -> “ouvido”, “orelha”
“do”, “make” -> “fazer”
“he”, “she”, “it” -> “ele”, “ela”
And many more!

o Unfamiliar verb forms: subjunctive, formal “you”/informal “you”, etc.

o Dialects: In Rio de Janeiro, “Você está bem?” (“Are you ok?”) would quite likely be spoken as “Cê tá bem?”

I’ll throw in a couple more:

o Gender: If you speak Spanish, you know the drill: most words are obvious, but then you encounter a word that doesn’t end in “o” or “a”, or worse, a word such as “mapa” that is deceptive.

o Pronunciation: Spanish doesn’t have this as bad – what you see is what you get. Portuguese (like English) has multiple sounds for each vowel, and the vowel sounds are not always indicated by accents. This causes me endless frustration (is “inveja” (envy) spoken with a closed “e”, like “late”, or an open “e”, like “let”?)

In general, it appears that there’s two great classes of language annoyances: Stuff that you can learn once and for all, and stuff that you have to learn anew for each and every word or expression

In the former category:

o New verb tenses
o New sounds
o Regional pronunciation (if you stay in one region :slight_smile: )

In the latter category:

o Gender
o Spelling (in English :()
o Idiomatic expressions
o Pronunciation

I personally do not have many problems with the learn-it-once category. If you speak a language long enough and have the dedication to study some arcane rules once in awhile, that stuff is learnable.
I get frustrated often by the never-ending toil involved in constantly learning each new case in the latter category.
It’s particularly discouraging when one realizes that most children have far more mastery in the second section than a nonnative speaker ever will. It seems that no matter how one tries, one can never exceed the language skill of a grade-school child. (not counting, of course, non-language-specific skills such as abstract thought and rhetoric).

24

Well, yes, that’s part of that “sense memory” about what speech is supposed to sound like: you’re conditioned since age 2 that [s]+[consonant] = the “s” sound is weakened and must be preceded by a vowel voicing, and the “default” is “e”. Similarly with the word endings – it just sounds, well, foreign to end in a “hard” consonant. This can be unlearned with little effort but the problem is that the speech then sounds affected and unnatural (“sspráitt”). Though we do have many words ending in “d” (Madrid, almud, ciudad, oíd, etc.), when pronouncing them according to the Academy standard, the pronunciation there is no longer the hard “D” but rather a soft “ð” sound like the English “th” in “that, then, there”.

25

Bumped.

Here’s a funny poem on just how weird the English language is about plural forms: Linguistic humor

26

Must be confusing for a foreign lumberjack …

  • “First chop that tree down”
  • “Ok, then what ?”
  • “Then chop it up.”
  • “?!?!?”
27

Yes, combinations of verb+preposition (I once knew the technical term for it, but can’t remember now) have always been my greatest hurdle in the English language. We have those constructions too in German (though of course we usually contract preposition and verb, like in aufmachen, abmachen, anmachen), but the prepositions often don’t match each other in the two languages or are ambiguous anyway. The “chop down”/“chop up” example exemplifies this very well. The German equivalents would be something like umhacken/zerhacken, and you see that the prepositions don’t match at all. That’s the case for thousands of verbs.

28

Always fun to read through a thread and realize well into it that the discussion took place close to 20 years ago.

I vote for the preposition mess, as well. Especially in the more figurative expressions (but not only there, see chop down / chop up), where there seems to be no logic as to what preposition to use, or what a given preposition makes the arbitrary word pairs to mean. (how’s that for mangled English).

You just have to know each individual case, and there are hundreds, or thousands of them.

29

FWIW, rōmaji is in widespread use in Japan; it’s common to see buildings with business names on them in romaji but not in kanji/hiragana. So the English alphabet would already be known to most Japanese folks, particularly younger ones.

30

First off, the spelling and the pronunciation do not match. After that the elaborate tense system can be a bit challenging.

31

Yes, but there’s still confusion between r and l. There was even a book title taken from a conversation with an English-speaking Japanese travel agent, that included the line

[Was that] “R as in London, or L as in Rome?”

32

that, and plenty of others. Japanese includes a whole array of consonant-vowel pairs, but it’s missing some that occur in English. Example, it has sa, se (as in “send”), su, so, but it doesn’t have see or si (as in sin). Likewise with z* sounds. Japanese also doesn’t include “th” or v" sounds, so “the” can come out sounding like “za”, and “very” can sound more like “belly”. Not long ago I watched a video by Nobita, who speaks English with a thick Japanese accent. At one point I heard him pronounce “positively” as “poe jee chee boo ree”.

33

I once attended a class on speaking English to non-native English speakers and a major point was to avoid idioms. They may understand the individual words, but the meaning of the phrase cannot be discerned in any logical manner. If you were to say, “kick the bucket” they have no way to determine it means “die,” and rather would interpret it literally. “Why did he kick a bucket???”

34

A real life example I read about was a Japanese company confused by a U.S. engineer saying the two groups were working “in parallel”, meaning they were working toward a common goal. However, since the definition for “parallel” lines are two that never meet, the Japanese took this to mean that the two groups were taking separate, uncoordinated approaches.

35

Got another one along these lines…

US engineer visits his fellow development team in Japan; they’re all working on a joint project. In a schedule discussion, a Japanese engineer says they’ll be having a day off next week (in order to vote in an election), as it’s “National erection day, and therefore, it’s a holiday.”

The US engineer quips “It should be a holiday!”

36

In case anyone is labouring under a misconception, romaji is a system of writing Japanese and has nothing to do with English, except that they both use Latin letters. So being able to read romaji (or pin yin in China) in no way confers a knowledge of the English language or of how to pronounce English words.

37

That seems like a bit too strong a statement, given the statement in Wikipedia that:

Hepburn romanization generally follows English phonology with Romance vowels. It is an intuitive method of showing Anglophones the pronunciation of a word in Japanese.

If it works one way (showing English speakers how to pronounce Japanese words), it should work the other way (learning which letter combinations in English correspond to the Japanese phonemes they already know), at least to an extent.

38

“Language”, in the case of English and many others, includes both speaking and reading/writing. When it comes to reading and writing English, A Japanese person who already has good (if imperfect/incomplete by English-language standards) familiarity with Latin letters has a nice head-start over someone who doesn’t.

39

Does English have a higher proportion of idioms in common use than other languages? I just assumed that it wasn’t language specific really and that all places and languages would have their share.

40

I think prepositions are a mess in every language, not just English. In Spanish, how do you differentiate between putting your finger in your nose or on your nose?

I have to imagine that pronunciation and spelling are really difficult, since it can seem pretty random – tough, though, thought, through – bizarre. But, to make up for it, we don’t have genders for nouns!