Twenty-one Reasons Why English Is Hard to Learn

But it's still far more beautiful than any other language... I would use Esperanto to communicate, but English is still superior for writing.

I'm surprised I haven't seen any comments pointing out the others spelling of 'a lot'.
But no, you home right in to 'egoistical'.

Hi all,
I would like to share a new method to learn English, listen to English and read English.... do not translate.

1. Never Study A Single English Word
That’s right, do not memorize words. Native speakers do not learn English by remembering single words. Native speakers learn phrases.

2. Never Study Grammar
Right now. Stop. Put away your grammar books and textbooks. Grammar rules teach you to think about English, you want to speak automatically– without thinking!

3. Learn With Your Ears, Not Your Eyes
Spend most of your study time listening- that is the key to great speaking.

4. Slow, Deep Learning Is Best
Its not enough to know a definition. Its not enough to remember for a test. You must put the word deep into your brain. To speak English easily, you must repeat each lesson many times.

5. Use Point Of View Mini-Stories
You must learn grammar by listening to real English. The best way is to listen to the same story… told in different times (points of view): Past, Perfect, Present, Future. How do you do this? Easy! Find a story or article in the present tense. Then ask your native speaker tutor to write it again in the Past, with Perfect tenses, and in the Future. Finally, ask him to read and record these stories for you.

6. Only Use Real English Lessons & Materials
How do you learn Real English? It’s easy. Stop using textbooks. Instead, listen only to real English movies, TV shows, audio books, audio articles, stories, and talk radio shows. Use real English materials.

7. Listen and Answer Mini-Stories (not Listen and Repeat)
Because the teacher constantly and quickly asks easy questions, you don’t have time to think about grammar. You just immediately shout a couple of words– which teaches you to respond faster, and faster, and faster.

The 2 Big Secrets to Confident English Speaking
Click here to view more details

since i am a native speaker of english its fairly easy for me. but the hardest parts about english is just how large the vocabulary is. alot of different words and combonations of words to express the same thing. also it is a language that focuses heavily on enunciating properly aswell as how much stress you put on a certain word in a sentence. such as the sentences "I didnt take her money" and "I didnt take her money" can mean to different things depending on hom much stress you put on a certain word in the sentence. aswell as all the exceptions to rules and all the silent letters and how things look like they will rhyme and sound similar but dont. very confusing to master, but it doesnt have any of that male and female stuff which you always have to remember in spanish class.

From what I have heard... the difficult aspect of English is the number of words compared to other languages. Also the number of "exceptions to the rule".

Love this! *says the English major*

I take it you already know
of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
on hiccough, thorough, laugh and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
to learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word,
that looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead -- it's said like bed not bead --
and for goodness' sake don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt)

A moth is not the moth in mother,
nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there,
nor dear and fear for bear and pear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose --
just look them up -- and goose and choose,
and cork and work and card and ward,
and font and front and word and sword,
and do and go and thwart and cart --
come, come I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Man alive.
I'd mastered it when I was five.

Try this one: The complex architect had a complex complex.

The greatest difficulty in the English language lies in just how massive it is. It is widely believed to have the largest lexicon with numbers varying from 500,000 to one million words. One of the other things is learning how to properly pronounce and enunciate the words. Do a google search for English pronunciation poem, and you'll find the NATO piece. Once you've mastered that learn Portuguese in Portugal, then go to Brazil and have a conversation about the sound that the letter ç makes. Or learn the nine distinct versions of the German language that exist in Austria. By the time you get into western Tirol you will start wondering how a country so small can butcher its own language so much

sorry to anyone who is convinced english is easy but sorry, it isn't...and I don't say that out of some pride that drives me to say that it's PARTICULARLY difficult - on the contrary - english is no easier or more difficult than any other language is to learn. I am learning mandarin chinese now, and am constantly hearing chinese bang on about how their language is vastly more complicated than english - which is wrong. all languages have their easy parts and hard parts. they all have strange dialects, idioms and querks. english is the most accessible language around the world and so is often perceived as simple, but it isn't. each and every language has it's hard parts and easy parts. i've studied french, spanish, mandarin, japanese and korean and I have learned one thing - LEARNING FOREIGN LANGUAGES IS A BLOODY TOUGH THING TO DO! we should all be glad we have our mother tongue at least, haha

Wait one minute minute! If they're saying that their words are confusing over there, then I bet real eyes realize real lies as well.

That doesn't really make any sense. But that's my 2 cents.

Whether English is hard depends a lot on your mother tongue in my opinion.

I'm Dutch and have learned English, German, French, Latin and Ancient Greek and I must say that English is by far the most easy language to learn. At least up to the point of being able to have a decent English conversation. Mastering English is whole other issue but that can probably be said about every language.

As a kid I was told that Dutch is a rather difficult language to learn due to the many exceptions on grammar rules making it rather unsystematic. However, people tend to think themselves as more important then others and it could very well be that this could lead to the 'my language is difficult" mentality.

My point is that someone from the Netherlands will propbably think that English is easy and French is difficult while Someone from Spain would perceive this the other way around.

That being said, this is rather a useless discussion. I've already spent to much time on this. I wish everyone a nice day :D

cheers

The thing is, the pronunciation of the majority of those homonyms can be determined by looking at the sentence. Is desert a noun (preceded by an article or similar word type)? Then it's DES-ert. Is it a verb? De-SERT. English really isn't that hard. Especially without the complication of giving words a sex (masculine/feminine/neutral) that many other languages do.

Ok, now figure out how often words that are spelled the same are used in the same sentence. "The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert?" Where is that written or used practically anywhere? It just isn't a logical thing to say.

There are plenty of words in other languages, such as Spanish, that are spelled the same but have different meanings. Ponerse means to put on, but ponerse plus an adjective means to try on. Also, sentarse (to sit down) and sentirse (to feel) become the same after conjugation.

I could force two of those same words in the same sentence and of course it would be confusing. But when they are used in proper context they are not.

"They were too close to the door to close it?" When the hell would that be a problem? Last I checked the closer I am to the door, the less dependent I am on finding some object to extend the reach of my arm. I tried throwing a book from my bed to close a door once. THAT is difficulty, my friends.

That's actually only one reason... homonyms.

God you people are annoying. This was supposed to be entertaining and lighthearted. Get your own blogs, there's no need to take up half the page with your stupid comments. Better yet, get a life.

I think I would argue that English is an easy language to gain useful facility with, perhaps faster than most languages, but that it is one of the hardest to achieve fluency in.

Most languages I've looked at appear more intimidating at first, but they kind of "bottom out" in complexity at a certain point.

Part of why English is hard to master is that it's really 3 or more languages mashed together. This results in odd quirks such as frequently having *completely* different words for the animal in the field and its meat on the table (beef/cow, pork/pig, veal/calf, deer/venison, etc.).

The challenge with fluency in *understanding* spoken English is that there are almost always dozens of different, completely valid, but subtly different, ways of saying almost the same thing. The use of idiom is profound; there are more *commonly used* irregular verbs than almost any language, etc. Heck, that semicolon I just stuck in there is one of these subtleties between two sentences and a single compound sentence, though in written English rather than spoken, where the distinction is made mostly through tone of voice.

The point is, it's easy to get to a facile level of understanding of English. It's getting beyond that that is maddeningly frustrating for foreigners.

It's extraordinarily rare to find someone that didn't grow up speaking English who can speak it without sounding -- odd -- to a native speaker, choosing phrasings and sentence structures that are ineffably "wrong" somehow; not in pronunciation, really, because English pronunciation (if not spelling) isn't that complex, but in syntax and semantics.

This is true to a degree in other languages as well -- certainly in principle -- but in practice most other languages rarely lead their speakers into the bizarre and quirky corners of the language... something that English speakers do naturally almost without thinking about it.

If you draw the parse trees of *typical* sentences in various languages, most will limit themselves to sentence complexities of no more than 3-4 syntactic levels. In commonly spoken English, it's not especially rare to see parse trees that are dozens of levels deep.

A degenerate case is the word buffalo. Any spoken string of 2 or more instances of this word is a valid English sentence, though admittedly such oddities exist in many languages. Even a native speaker is likely to scratch their head when presented with "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo", but when parsed out into more descriptive language it becomes commonplace: "Bison from Buffalo, whom other Buffalo Bison are known to stymie, in turn frustrate yet a another set of New York State herd animals."

I will spare you a demonstration of a perfectly natural-sounding English sentence that is hundreds or even thousands of words long.

And don't get me started on spelling ;-).

English is easy, even small children learn it...

@ben: all languages are easier to learn when you are a kid, it's easier to retain the knowledge then. it's why we learn the basic rules of everything when we are children, you retain the basics so you can apply it to everything else. i have many friends who came to the U.S. when they were kids and picked it up within a year while watching television. when a child is immersed in a different culture they tend to pick it up quickly because they notice everything. how do you think you learn your first language? no on specifically taught you everything you just saw a lot of people referring to things with a certain word and you would refer to it that way too. it's why most people have similar accents and voices to their parents, because that's who you observed to learn the basics. you learning english so easily has nothing to do with how easy the language is, but everything to do with how young you were.

fully supporting the statement that children ARE impressionable.

Let me start by saying I speak english as my first language. I've taken German and latin and can confidently say I am pretty good at both (not spoken latin, duh). I can only imagine that romance languages take after latin, so I'll say they are tough. All the endings, declensions, conjugations, etc. are hard and boring to learn. German is soooooo much easier for an english speaker to learn. Yeah, german sentences are shorter and they do have words that mean different things (essen for example). I think this only makes it easier though. Instead of saying "close the door" it is "make the door closed". After learning rese, nese, mrmn, srsr you don't need to worry about any endings really. The way verbs work is so logical and even the adjectives and adverbs function accordingly. (Machen, machte, gemacht) The capitalization of all nouns, words transferring easily from verb to noun etc (Essen is eat. What do you eat? Food, essen. Easy! Bauen, to build. Bauer, someone who builds/builds soil, farmer. Bebaude, a building.)

I'm gonna end my rant here. I just think the intricacies of German make it great and easy. The only reason I am not fluent is that I don't have a large German vocabulary. I apologize if it is difficult to follow my thinking.

Can we not just appreciate this for what it is: an amusing and well-thought-out list of words that have double meanings? The title of the piece is tongue in cheek and not, I believe, meant to indicate the true reason why English is or isn't a hard language to master. Well done to the previous posters who know so much about linguistics (I found your comments very educational if a bit lengthy) but to those who are turning this into a racial debate...get a grip!!

I love the way that at the beginning of this page I thought "How fun! I love musing over the random idiosyncrasies in life that we usually take for granted," and how by the end - between the (largely) baseless over-analysis and the self-important posturing - I thought, "I should pluck out my eyes because I haven't the pluck to read any further."

Thumbs down.

@Griggity: 18 is correct.

regular 1 syllable adjectives simply at -er in comparative form. Numb is no exception.

http://www.answers.com/topic/numb
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/numb

to see an exception look up the word stupid:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/stupid
He couldn't be stupider. (she couldn't be more attractive)

regular 2 syllable adjectives add more+ in the comparative.

both of these rules are superseded by adj. ending in y -> ier. no matter the length.

I would like to point out a problem with #18.
"After a number of injections my jaw got number."

It should read:
"After a number of injections my jaw got MORE numb."

I would like to point out first that any language that you are exposed to everyday it. But, I also believe that English would be easier to learn as a Second language compared to other languges. THis is because verb "conjugations" are 100000000 times easier than other languages (French, Polish, German, etc,etc). Adjectives don't change at all in English and pronouns/possessives are extremely standard. There are also no masculine/feminine/neutral nouns, which makes it so much EASIER. SInce nouns, verbs, and adjectives are what we use the most, the concrete rules in ENglish allow for learners to easily grasp the concept. THis is much simpler than remembering verb/adjective changes, thus easier to learn. The only difficult part I find about English is the overwhelming amount of words in the dictionary. Many languages do not have such extensive vocabularies, making it easy to grasp definitions.

I'm not very good at English, I learnt Chinese/Korean first. These were also simple in a sense too, as they do not require verbs/adjectives to be conjugated. These languages are hard in the sense that speaking does not require pronouns, and a whole bunch of words sound exactly the same, but depending on what they are =combined with, they mean completely different things.

Stop there!
It's funny ha ha, that's all. Some of you are som far up your own arses (not asses) that you know what you've had for lunch.

Americans are self centred and a bit dim, so what, most of the ones you meet are bearable, loud, but bearable.

So relax, sit back and let the Yanks destroy our beautiful language.

Does anyone know of a fresh spellchecker poem--that is, a poem that could pass computer spell check but is ridiculous. I'm a teacher sick of the poem "Aye halve a spelling check her. It came with my pea see..." Thanks.

Languages are not difficult because of words with different meanings!
English is a highly analytic language (compared to all other west-germanic languages), but still mildly synthetic nowadays (often called "rather isolating/analytic"), though it stems from indo-german, which was highly synthetic. So modernisation, which sadly begins to get a grasp on other germanic languages, for english meant "losing word flection".

Thus english _IS_ incredibly simple, because it is not very synthetic and not very analytic. It's the simple things of both worlds combined. Try to learn chinese (which is highly analytic and melodic, thus very hard to learn) or Finnish (highly synthetic). Or even Mohawk (sp?), which is, like most native american languages, polysynthetic.

German is in between. German is rather synthetic. That means most word classes yield to flection (Nouns, verbs,..), but some don't. These are adverbs (heute/today, ..) and adjectives (beautiful/schoen and such). I will not plunge into detail here, as english has those so you should understand.

I will give one example to illustrate the difference.
Consider the following english sentence, translated to german.

If it was not raining, Paul would be at the cinema.
Regnete es nicht, waere Paul im Kino.

In english, if, was, would, be, at and the denote the grammatical structure (if + 3rd form for conditional, ..). They are morphemes. In german, this information is fused into the words (flection). "Waere", "im", "regnete" are forms of "ist", "in" and "das" and "regnen". The words include grammatical information (thus synthetic/fusional). But there are morphemes (nicht/not, im is one morpheme, es, ..). Thus only rather synthetical.

English IS easy. That's not necessarily bad, even though I do not like it. I think poetry suffers if a language is analytic. I think that analytic languages are boring and sound repetitive. And in general sentences are longer. (Compare my 2 examples)

But that's a matter of opinion. On the pro side: English is easy, thus many people learn to speak english. English is strict in word order. Thus it is easy to understand the meaning behind a sentence just by analyzing the word order.

English is NOT one of the most complex languages of the world, it is one of the most simple. (German is not one of the most complex, but it is more complex). One could argue if analytic or synthetic is harder (I'd say synthetic and it's sub branches). But english is neither analytic nor synthetic. And emotion is neither a distinctive feature of english nor a special feature of any language group. Every language can be used to talk of emotion. Every language has different forms for different emotional meanings. And slang is not a feature of english, either.

Study the subject of language at least a bit before talking gibberish.

Ben Wrote: English is not actually very hard to learn. Anybody that had to learn English as a second language knows this. I myself started learning it in 5th Grade and was capable of speaking fluently by a year later and I am by no means a linguistic genius. Every language has instances such as those shown above and most have far more then english. In German, for example, Essen is a verb meaning to eat, but it is also a noun meaning food, and a name. This is just one of hundreds. I have recently started learning french in an effort to expand my horizons and allready I have found many such problems. I suspect that it is the same with most other languages. The myth that English is a very hard language to learn was put into being by egoistical Americain that have to be the best at everything. Or maybe it was just an effort to explain President Bush’s incapability to go through a speech without reinventing the English language. I have been fighting hard to stop this myth from being spread, so for with limited success

I must diagree here. The difficulty of American English (or English in general) has nothing to do with our current administration, or 'egotistical Americans'. Just as Essen means different things, so do alot of english words, as pointed out in this aritcle. Id bet there are just as many in English as you claim are in German. Some are pronounced differently, but spelled the same, and others sound the same, but are spelled differently. You cant say honestly that English is a breeze to learn, because it is one of the most complex languages in the world. The other concept in English is emotion. There is emotional weight to words in english, but no gender realtion. There are words for everything, in any light. A concept in American English that is probably harder to grasp is slang. Slang is a function of American pop culture, and can be difficult to intrepret.

I am not trying to offend, but I think you have underestimated the simplicity of the english language.

did you think that maybe it was just a typo. he only missed one letter, it happens. dont be a dik. see, missed keys happen

Egoistical?
learn english

This exercise hurt my brain; it makes you really think about what you are saying, especially since most words are spelled exactly the same, but are pronounced differently and/or have different meanings. Good job coming up with these.

English is not actually very hard to learn. Anybody that had to learn English as a second language knows this. I myself started learning it in 5th Grade and was capable of speaking fluently by a year later and I am by no means a linguistic genius. Every language has instances such as those shown above and most have far more then english. In German, for example, Essen is a verb meaning to eat, but it is also a noun meaning food, and a name. This is just one of hundreds. I have recently started learning french in an effort to expand my horizons and allready I have found many such problems. I suspect that it is the same with most other languages. The myth that English is a very hard language to learn was put into being by egoistical Americain that have to be the best at everything. Or maybe it was just an effort to explain President Bush's incapability to go through a speech without reinventing the English language. I have been fighting hard to stop this myth from being spread, so for with limited success.

I've got a better example.

I tried to be clever and read them aloud to myself without mistakes. I made several, and English is my primary language.
I'm such a loser.

I read them all, it was a good read.