Over the years I have heard many people say that, despite being so widely spoken around the world, English is the hardest language to learn. These people usually base this position on what they perceive to be an over abundance of homophones/homonyms, non-phonetic spelling/excessive spelling irregularities/the absence of any consistent grammatical or spelling conventions, a supposedly large vocabulary of words, and a myriad of too many influences that further undermine consistency (Latin, Greek, etc).
What do you dopers think is the hardest language to master? How do you quantify the difficulty of a language? And if English is not a profoundly difficult language why do so many English speakers believe that is is?
I speak French and am learning German and personally I don’t find these languages to be lacking in complexity compared to English, but that’s just my opinion.
Probably for the same reason that so many native Korean speakers believe that Korean is the hardest language to learn/most scientfic language ever: they were indoctrinated into that belief.
Personally, I believe that all natural languages are of equal difficulty to learn.
Actually, I’d always heard it claimed that learning the written form was fairly difficult ( but not as hard as, say, Chinese ) but that is was easy to learn to speak. “English is so easy to learn to speak that the English can do it!”
The most difficult to learn and speak fluently, perhaps. Basic English, as spoken by hundreds of millions of people around the world as a second language, is a doddle.
BTW, to remove any ambiguity, that basic English phrase above does not refer to Basic English, the simple English developed by Charles Kay Ogden.
And Broken English is truly the World’s Second Language.
Seriously, though, English can’t be that hard to learn the basics of. All international air-traffic control is done in a subset of English. (That is, when a French pilot lands at a Russian airport he swallows his Gallic pride and speaks English. The real magic is that the guy in the tower is also speaking English.)
Someone in my Spanish class who was from another country claimed that learning Spanish was easier than learning English. My (bilingual) Spanish teacher had thought it would be the opposite.
They were both referring to the proper grammatical forms, however. Specifically, my Spanish teacher thought that learning to conjugate Spanish verbs would be harder than English ones.
Hehehe. I like this.
Spanish is pretty easy, especially written Spanish. If you can say it, you can write it (for the most part - there is a silent “h” and b/v sound the same as do s/z), and if you can read it, you can pronounce it correctly, whether you are familiar with the words or not.
As always though, it depends how far removed your native language is from the one you are studying. Going from one Romance language to another you will already have a ton of cognates. Even going from English to a Romance language, there are so many longer words with Latinate origins you can usually take a guess at a word you’ve never used or seen before and you will probably be right. You don’t have this if your native language is say, Chinese.
Hum, I always thought the conventional wisdom was that English is one of the easiest languages to learn, hence its wide spread around the globe…
Yeah, to me English shares a difficulty with, say, Chinese, in that in either of them knowing the written form doesn’t give you complete information about the spoken form and viceversa. But the other big difficulties of English appear only once you want to go beyond a certain level and/or amount of vocabulary.
Any language with better phonetic correspondence than English is going to be easier to read and write, that’s sort of what “phonetic correspondence” means.
My own first language is Spanish and I never thought it was specially difficult to learn, I’ve heard many foreign students of it complain about it being difficult but their own languages were as difficult for me. I’d expect people to have difficulty in Spanish with ser vs estar, with the more complex and less usual verbal forms (Indicative Simple Present is easy, Subjunctive Complex Present not so much among other things because it doesn’t get reinforced as much by daily usage) and with genders, specially if the student hasn’t learned previously other languages with similar structures. The first and third are much less of a problem with English; the second causes ESL students a lot of headaches in the form of Phrasal Verbs.
“English is an easy language to speak badly”, is the way I’ve heard it, meaning that the foothills of English, so to speak, are gentler than those of other languages - simple verb conjugation that is very regular, at least in present tense forms, no grammatical gender, virtually no case inflection. That does gloss over some things that are difficult right from the start for speakers of many languages - the prosody (syllable stress patterns), the heavy use of diphthongs, the consonant clusters, the “th” sounds, the articles.
When you get beyond the beginner’s stage there’s the phrasal verbs as mentioned above, the large lexicon with many synonyms with subtly different meanings or contexts in which they are appropriate, all the idioms. Verb tenses, while grammatically simple, are quite complicated in English. There are many slightly different ways of talking about past and future events, which have to be mastered:
We will play tennis
We are playing tennis (tonight)
We are going to play tennis
We play tennis next Tuesday and attend the annual dinner on Wednesday
One of the things that keeps me from gaining a respectable fluency in French is the lack of a “neutral” pronoun for inanimate objects- ie, a French equivalent of “It”.
In English, you’d talk of “a table” or “that chair” or “the road”, but in French the pronouns are either masculine or feminine depending on the object in question.
Which objects are masculine and which are feminine? It seems entirely arbitrary…
I think this study has shown up here before. I was very surprised to learn that:
‘Fifty-six native French speakers, asked to assign the gender of 93 masculine words, uniformly agreed on only 17 of them. Asked to assign the gender of 50 feminine words, they uniformly agreed only 1 of them. Some of the words had been anecdotally identified as tricky cases, but others were plain old common nouns.’
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005411.html
About that “large lexicon of many synonyms with subtly different meanings” that Ximenean mentioned…
I regularly encounter moments where I choose from several equally suitable options for a noun, each with a slightly different flavor. When I ask my wife about the equivalent in Portuguese, she offers one or two words. My first instinct is to say that English has more options in most cases. After a little reflection, however, I remember how difficult it is to come up with a long list of synonyms when the tables are turned—I usually only come up with the most common word and perhaps one synonym.
A brief foray into proper literature in Portuguese was all I needed to recognize just how many different words there are that I have never heard of (and my wife rarely uses), just like we have in English. Indeed, it was quite challenging to slog through books by authors such as Machado de Assis that are likely read by children in middle school. Very humbling.
But the fact still remains, whenever I am asking for different Portuguese variations on a word, I am often left wanting, even by the heavy dictionary I procured for precisely this purpose.
My thoughts?
[ul][]There probably are more subtle choices available to the average English speaker than to a speaker of another language.[]At least in the case of Portuguese, I imagine that many Brazilians just haven’t developed a very rich vocabulary. If I had been asking graduate students in Rio for synonyms, they might have provided a more balanced response.[/ul]
Trust me, you’re not alone. In all of French culture, the stereotypical “Englishman speaking French” uses masculine pronouns for feminine nouns, and vice versa. I blame Jane Birkin.
And in case you thought it would be easier to go from one genderized language to another, I had similar troubles with German back in high school - that is to say, I tripped on genders that were not the same as the ones I was used to in French. Of course a table is feminine ! Die Tisch. Makes sense. Wuh, It’s der Tisch ? What the hell’s the matter with you people ?!
Does anyone have any actual scientific data on the difficulty of languages? I don’t believe that there is any showing that any language is more difficult to learn as a child as one’s first spoken language. Indeed, I think that it would be impossible for a language to be particularly difficult to learn as a child. The first thing you need to know is that all languages are changing. They are constantly simplifying in some aspects and getting more complicated in other respects. Constantly being learned as a first language puts stress on spoken languages, so if a language were particularly difficult, it would quickly simplify. It’s a little different with written languages. Because they are learned a little later in life, some can be somewhat more difficult than others to learn as children (although not hugely more difficult).
It is possible to quantify how difficult it is to learn language A as an adult when one grew up speaking language B. Indeed, various bodies make this sort of quantification. Various American governmental bodies who have to teach their workers to speak foreign languages can say that it takes longer to learn certain languages than other languages for a native English speaker. That doesn’t mean these languages are more difficult for a child learning his native language. It means that some languages are more difficult to learn for a native English speaker to learn as an adult.
As to why some native English speakers believe that English is the hardest language to learn - well, people believe lots of ridiculous things. When an urban legend is started about the supposed difficulty of language learning, it’s hard to stop it. There isn’t a readily available sort on the difficulty of language learning, so people are going to believe any nonsense they’ve been told.
I’ve always thought that the difficulty of learning a new language is down to how much it differs from your previous one. For example a native speaker of Spanish would have a much easier time learning English or Japanese because all the sounds that are used in either language are used in Spanish, however a native speaker of English or Japanese would have greater difficulty learning the other or learning Spanish since they’d need to learn how to prnounce completly new sounds (a rolling R, “ruh” and “Ell” for example).
Well, and imagine learning a TONAL language, like Chinese, whereby what sounds like the same word to you can, depending on inflection, be two, three, or ever four completely unrelated words.
Japanese yes, but there are plenty of sounds in English not used in Spanish.
the vowel sounds in “caught,” “push,” “but,” “horse,” etc.
the schwa sound
the soft “th” sound as in “father”
the j in “judge”
Spanish speakers learning English tend to conflate the vowel sounds in “list” and “least”
…just to name a few
I agree with this, unless you’re trying to learn a second language as an adult. Then, because your brain has been conditioned to expect certain features of a language, languages that have different features than your native language can be harder.
And since writing systems are not natural languages, they can be of greater or lesser difficulty depending on how they are designed. Take for instance the Roman system where there were no marks to indicate word breaks. That’s a lot harder to use than our system of putting a space between words. And some languages use better or worse phonetic systems. English writing uses a lot of non-phonetic spellings due to a lack of spelling reform as the language has shifted–weird stuff like knight, enough, action. But phonetic spelling is hard because different dialects pronounce words differently. It would be a pain to have the word for an object with four wheels and an engine to be spelled “car” in America and “ca” in England.