One factor in difficultly is obviously similarity. One reason French is a 1 and Korean a 4 from English POV is that French and English are practically the same language if you compare to how different Korean is from either French or English.
An English speaker learning Chinese, Japanese or Korean is faced with a small % of words in those languages recently borrowed from English but otherwise no relationship in vocabulary. Same for speakers of those languages learning English. However a Korean speaker learning German would have that same issue plus more complicated verb/grammar stuff than English. OTOH Korean has a relatively high number of commonly used words, several times as many as English by some counts*. That doesn’t affect Koreans trying to learn English, but affects speakers of any language without a lot of words in common trying to learn Korean. However, a lot of both Korean and Japanese words are of Chinese origin, so that’s a factor making it easier among those three, though grammar is different and morphological tonality (tone changes meaning) in Chinese but not the other two as a rule.
Probably hard to generalize how that ranking (assuming we accept it) would look as a matrix of each of the listed language v all others. But in general I guess similarity, including shared vocabulary among otherwise ‘unrelated’ languages would be a major factor, more than stuff like how much to remember in verb conjugation.
I also agree learning Chinese characters is a big task which you must do to be at all literate in Chinese and you can be only very minimally literate in Japanese if you don’t (limited to kiddy books). In theory you don’t need to know Chinese characters to learn Korean but a non native speaker looking to seriously learn it is better off if they do IMO.
*obviously there is no single definition of ‘number of words in common use’. The number of words in a big English dictionary isn’t necessarily less but counts weighting by use seem to say, and it’s clear IMO, you have to know more words to function in Korean and OTOH there are loads more homonyms among those different words.
Cool podcast, Jonathan Chance. At least once each minute, the narrator is indirectly reminding us of a recent US regional English development: the “pen-pin merger.” (Without looking it up, I’m guessing he’s from Georgia or the Carolinas).
I’m no linguist, but have heard it said that English is easy to grasp the rudiments of the language, but difficult to master because of its mass of irregularities. It also has one of the largest vocabularies of any language.
We don’t. But American TV and film certainly likes to portray us in such a way. I can assure you the vast majority are nothing near the US perception of the English.
“Brough”? I will have to look that up. I am guessing that it is pronounced “bro” but I am probably wrong.
Have you ever seen that poem that starts off with “Dearest creature in creation”? It is a brilliant display of irregular English spelling. Not even a native speaker can get through it pronouncing everything correctly.
In English, the rules are simple. The numerous exceptions make it difficult. e.g.: What’s the plural of “mouse”, “goose”? What’s the past tense of “lose”, “go”? How does one pronounce “bass drum”, “bass fishing”, “indict”, “pneumonia”.
For native English speakers, English is by far the simplest language
But I spend the majority of my time with people who speak English as a foreign language, and they often ask me about this or that grammatical or spelling idiosyncrasy. I find myself saying “I don’t make the rules…” a lot.
I believe that he (he being Kevin Stroud, the presenter of the History of English podcast) is from North Carolina.
I’m a regular listener of that podcast, which is very good and very entertaining, but you’re quite right. Stoud’s slight southern accent does sometimes make his pronunciations kind of interesting. At least to this midwesterner.
In my experience English is extremely easy to learn (I learned with some couple of years of formal learning and then by playing games and reading books in english, my wife learned the same way except without the formal learning (only some ver basic classes in high school) and my son learned it just by osmosis it seems), but extremely hard to pronounce, at least coming from Spanish which is far more phonetical.
I agree–context is everything in English, especially verbal; take mean/mien (two different words), or even mean-- is it verb (what do you mean), adjective (you’re so mean), or noun (what is the mean income). Or how one letter creates different meanings–loath (reluctance) becomes loathe (hate)
LOL. Simple. The language with 8 different ways of saying any one particular thing, of which 5 versions are commonly used, 6 are technically incorrect, 3 are pronounced the same but written differently, 2 are only used in the written form and 2 only verbally. Oh, and 3 mean completely different things depending on which country’s version of english you are using.
One of my favorite factoids that makes you go “whoa…”
Originally the past tense of “go” was simply “goed”. “Went” was the past tense of a different verb with a similar meaning, “wend”. Bend/bent, send/sent, wend/went.
(Without looking it up, I’m guessing he’s from Georgia or the Carolinas).