Topic: Is English really the hardest language? 'Cause I don't believe it.

[DAaaMan64]

I don't buy that crap, teachers always say it (my personal first red flag).  I always hear this dumb argument:

Their
There
They're

First of all, it isn't THAT complicated, people screw it up now and are still considered to speak English.

I mean look, German has 6 variations of the English word "the" as well as French.  Every object has a gender and like the word "the", depending on the gender it changes the verb!

Japanese has 3 alphabets and like Chinese you read up and to the left! Completely opposite of the natural direction.

I mean come on, just LOOK at Russian and it looks hard!

Not to mention other crazy languages like Icelandic.

[Bill Aurion]

It has to do with tenses, I believe...(Past, Present, Future, Present Progressive, Conditional, blah, blah, the list is pretty big...)  We have a lot more than other languages...

Chinese is the second hardest language, and Japanese isn't as difficult as it may seem (Both katakana and hiragana are ridiculously easy to learn)...

[animecyberrat]

I speak English just fine, Spanish was what drove me nuts.

[ShyGuy]

We also seem to have a lot of double negatives and ironic statements as part of our conversational English.

[IceCold]

Broken English is easy to learn but it's difficult to master the nuances, the idioms, the figures of speech etc.

[animecyberrat]

I don't think they mean American English, I think when they say that they mean British English cuz that's hard to understand even if you think you know what they are trying to say.

[bustin98]

I did a quick Google and one place claims Hungarian is the hardest for English speaking people to learn, followed by Chinese.

I watched a tv program that was testing a guy with photographic memory or something. They took him to a Nordic country (don't remember which one) to learn the language in a week. That particular one was choosen because of the supposed difficulty in learning it. In the end he did rather well.

[Sundoulos]

Here's a quote from WiseGeek:

...the British Foreign Office conducted a language study recently and concluded that the most difficult language to learn is Basque, spoken in parts of Spain and France, followed closely by Hungarian, which has 35 cases or noun forms. On the other hand, German and Russian languages use a punctuation system said to be among the most difficult ones in the world. Languages that use characters may seem hard to read and write to users of the Roman alphabet, but they are not always that difficult. Experts agree that Chinese and Korean can be learned rather easily by speakers of Western languages; Vietnamese and Japanese, however, are much more complex.

While many native speakers see to forget this, English is actually quite difficult to learn because of pronunciation issues and irregular verbs; in English, many words are spelled the same but sound different depending on the meaning. This makes the English language hard to understand even for people whose native tongue is a related language.

Most of my international friends from college indicated that tenses and contractions were the two worst stumbling blocks in English.   

In my searches, Chinese consistently topped the lists, but those references were mostly anecdotal rather than a rigorous survey. 

[ShyGuy]

We should ask Stevey, since English wasn't his first language.

[Darkheart]

Coming from a family of a bunch of italian immigrants my family would tell you the language was fairly easy to learn.  People also forget that its much easier to learn a language when you are FORCED to instead of trying to learn through a book or class.

[Crimm]

As a language Chinese isn't that bad.  The issue is it's somewhat amorphous.  There are no tenses, and the sentence structure is a bit less rigid than we're used to.  There is a single word for comparisons.  There is no "good" "better" "best" there is simply "good thing A" > "good thing B" where > is that comparison term.

In many ways it's the opposite of Japanese, which feels the need to use super-rigid strucutres and uses multiple situational conjugations.

[RABicle]

Isn't there like, serveral inflections on the same word in Chinese or some bullshit like that? Like Mah can be Ma Maa Ma-ah and Mah and they all mean different things? **** that ****.

I don't think they mean American English, I think when they say that they mean British English cuz that's hard to understand even if you think you know what they are trying to say.

I dunno mate, it seemed to be pretty difficult for you to reach a communicable standard of international English on these forums. </cheapshot>

[KDR_11k]

English is nowhere near the hardest. Was pretty easy to learn for me but then again it's very close to my native language. Maybe the "hardest language" thing is just something language teachers make up to feel better about their dead-end career, I know we've been told the same (that German was one of the hardest languages out there).

Their/there/they're is no problem for anyone except native speakers (and those who get confused by them). That only confuses someone who thinks phonetically and I think most people learning a foreign language think graphically.

[UltimatePartyBear]

English is nowhere near the hardest. Was pretty easy to learn for me but then again it's very close to my native language.

Isn't German the closest relative English has?  I wouldn't expect it to be very difficult for you to learn unless the similarities tended to make you conflate the grammars or something.

From what I've heard, the hardest thing about English is that it has several times more sounds than it does letters to represent them, but I don't know how other languages compare, so that could be a total crock for all I know.

[mantidor]

English is nowhere near the hardest. Was pretty easy to learn for me but then again it's very close to my native language. Maybe the "hardest language" thing is just something language teachers make up to feel better about their dead-end career, I know we've been told the same (that German was one of the hardest languages out there).

QFT.

As far as I know, romance languages (spanish, french, italian etc) have more tenses than english, conjugations specially and also irregular verbs that are a nightmare. English is a bit archaic, like japanese, both have no genre (male "cat" and female "cat" are the same word) as opposed to most other languages, articles are simple (just "the, a, an" in english, and japanese doesn't even has one), however english has an odd writting and words aren't pronounced the way they are written.

In truth ALL languages are hard, english has the advantage of being the latin of our era so everyone ends up exposed to it one way or another. Personally english and japanese were easy to learn, but I can't mantain a japanese conversation or read an article, the lack of exposure to it has harm my knowledge, I hope to make the time to start practicing again.

[bustin98]

As far as I know, romance languages (spanish, french, italian etc) have more tenses than english, conjugations specially and also irregular verbs that are a nightmare. English is a bit archaic, like japanese, both have no genre (male "cat" and female "cat" are the same word) as opposed to most other languages, articles are simple (just "the, a, an" in english, and japanese doesn't even has one), however english has an odd writting and words aren't pronounced the way they are written.

The difficult part about female and male words is when the subject of the word has no inherent gender to begin with. Yes, cat can mean either male or female, but that's for when you are being lasy/non-specific/uncertain. A male cat is a tom. A female cat is a queen. Every 'thing' that has a gender has a word that correctly describes it. Just like 'man', 'woman', and 'person'. Who the hell cares if 'the' is male or female?

Yes, I know saying 'My queen just had kittens' sounds absurd compared to 'My cat just had kittens', but it is a correct statement.

[Ian Sane]

Everyone I know whom English was not their first language says that it's remarkably easy to learn the basics.  The problems come about from reading English which is tricky because in written form it's full of inconsistencies.  Hell most native English speakers can't spell worth sh!t.  Plus unlike a lot of other languages there is no offical standard.  French for example has L'Académie française which is like an organization that standardizes the French language.  Meanwhile English just bebops and scats however it wants with all sorts of slang and loan words and such.  I imagine that can trip people up.  Hell in my last sentence I just used "trip" in a non-literal way without even thinking.

There are some things I've noticed with other languages that really confuse me that English doesn't have.  Being Canadian I had to learn French in school and having masculine and femine verbs for genderless objects confused the crap out of me.  There's no way to guess what's what.  You just have to memorize what inanimate objects the French consider to be girls.

Another things is the speed that the language is spoken.  My Mom is Portuguese but I don't speak the language.  When I'm with relatives speaking in Portuguese I can't even pick out words because it's so damn fast.  There are a lot of Chinese and Indian immigrants around the Vancouver area and those languages are even worse for that.  It's just a blur.  In comparison English is in slow motion.  My Portuguese relatives that do speak English learned it from watching English language TV shows and movies.  However if I watch the Cantonese news here in Vancouver I can't even pick out the different sounds.  Maybe the speed thing is an illusion though.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

1337

[bustin98]

W3 n33d @ 7hr3@d wh3r3 175 n07h1ng bu7 '1337' 7@lk.

[animecyberrat]

W3 n33d @ 7hr3@d wh3r3 175 n07h1ng bu7 '1337' 7@lk.

I actually understood that. I need a life.

[Dirk Temporo]

Japanese has 3 alphabets and like Chinese you read up and to the left! Completely opposite of the natural direction.

And we wonder why the rest of the world hates America.

[DAaaMan64]

Japanese has 3 alphabets and like Chinese you read up and to the left! Completely opposite of the natural direction.

And we wonder why the rest of the world hates America.

Explanation?

[ShyGuy]

Left to right is the natural direction to write for a right handed person. So naturally their eyes get trained to track that way in reading as well.

[KDR_11k]

Japanese has 3 alphabets and like Chinese you read up and to the left! Completely opposite of the natural direction.

And we wonder why the rest of the world hates America.

Explanation?

You read left-to-right line-wise (lines from top to bottom) or top-to-bottom column-wise (columns from right to left), never bottom to top. The directions are 90° apart.

[DAaaMan64]

Japanese has 3 alphabets and like Chinese you read up and to the left! Completely opposite of the natural direction.

And we wonder why the rest of the world hates America.

Explanation?

You read left-to-right line-wise (lines from top to bottom) or top-to-bottom column-wise (columns from right to left), never bottom to top. The directions are 90° apart.

Ya I understand that, I SAID that, but why does that make everyone hate America?