Is English easier to pick -up than an foriegn language?

billionbucks25

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    I think I almost learned perfectly fluent english by the time is was in preschool but learning Urdu or French is difficult. If I learnt Urdu(a language) first, would English still be a breeze to pick up.

    I also had a friend who lived in Quebec uptil grade 7 and he spoke perfect french and english.
     
    Compared to some of the other languages that I know, English is an incredibly easy language to pick up.
     
    My german teacher says that once you are around twelve you lose your natural ability to learn a language.
     
    Darkai said:
    My german teacher says that once you are around twelve you lose your natural ability to learn a language.
    Click to expand...

    I really don't believe that.

    Although younger people are a lot more open minded, which is why it is a lot easier for them to learn it.

    I think when you get older, you can still learn the language, but it is just harder.
     
    I'm not sure how this applies but I have been told that English is one of the hardest languages to master and as a result many anglophones are discourages from learning another language because english was so difficult
     
    I would say English is easy to pick up on then the other languages, since English is the international language of trade, and most people wouldn't get around without knowing atleast a little bit of English.
     
    English is one of the easiest language to pick up, and Japanese/Chinese are one of the hardest ones
     
    I've actually heard English is one of the hardest languages, because of all the werid rules, pronunciation/spelling and idioms.

    I'm learning Spanish, and you can tell how to pronounce a word just by looking at it. Would someone who doesn't know English know how to say "measure," or "fruit?"
     
    I've heard English, by grammar and writing, is one of the most difficult (because we have all these inane rules...but I'm one to talk, I use oxford commas religiously :P)

    But I can safely say, especially when you're younger (because yes, it's true when you're little it's easier to start pronouncing/learning another language: every teacher in my school district though teaching french or spanish to elementary students would have been a good idea) it's easier to learn another language.

    English also, I can tell, is easy to pick up speech-wise.
     
    I've heard mixed things on this...Some say it's very hard to pick up, some say it's not. Of course, I'm not a very good judge...I've been speaking it all my life, so the concept of english being difficult to speak is very foreign to me.
     
    YES!!!

    I'm taking Spanish class in high-school, so I can understand the Spanish Pokémon hacks. xD
    Unfortunately, I can never remember what I've learned. ;-;

    It really stinks.
     
    As infants, deficiencies aside, we are all born with the same ability to remember and mimmick sounds we hear around us. An infant's mind is like an empty canvas that will quickly be painted with all sorts of twists and tricks of the tongue.
    When we are this young, we are all able to learn any language equally. As we grow, our minds grow as well and in order to hold the massive amounts of sounds we hear often, some other not so familiar sounds are quickly forgotten. While a native English speaker remembers the sound "th" pretty darn quickly, a native Spanish speaker may have more proclivity towards "nyo".

    As our minds develop and try to expand upon more knowledge, the ability to recognize and quickly process sounds that are not native to us are lost very rapidly. We remember sounds we have heard over and over and can quickly stream them together to form thoughts and words, however sounds that are foriegn to our ears force our minds to slow down and process the incoming information more slowly. Because our minds at a younger age are rapidly learning things, we inadvertently learn to ignore these sounds.

    This explains why it is easier to pick up on another language while we are young versus when we are older. This also explains how one can grow up learning two different languages fluently.
    (Learning to differenciate between the two languages is a skill learned later by the child, however.

    Sorry, I often study linguistics and the psychology of such on the human brain. It is actually quite interesting to see just why our brains don't like to try and process strings of sounds that we don't recognize. xD

    Now, I've heard English is harder to completely master as a foreign language. Mostly due to the many lingual influences that created English, the pronunciation of many words may not seem to follow any sort of universal rule or system. It may seem random to those that are not native to the language. That, mixed with our wide abundance of sharp and loose sounds as well as our sometimes crazy grammatical rules, makes English a pretty tough little cookie to crack. xD
     
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    Well, it depends really. I speak four languages and English is one of them. I was taught English when I was three years old. Maybe, yes. English is easier to speak then Japanese! o_O
     
    well this is really a hard question to answer, it really depends if you are a fast learner or not since english is one of the hardest languages to learn due to the grammar, spelling and pretty much just everything, though I guess you could say learning english would be helpful if you visit another country
     
    To me English was really much easier to learn than any other langage
    (French{born langage} German and a bit Italian)
     
    Young children had their more active LADs to help them.

    It truly depends. Language is caught, not taught. If you live with English speakers, you will be one.
     
    I'd probably say English is one of the hardest languages to learn. We have so many different words that mean the same thing. I know there must be other languages with the same issue, but we have got to be one of the worst. Think about it; how many different words can you come up with that (basically) mean the same things as 'sad'? Thank God for thesaurus', I guess. o.o;;
     
    I feel as though English is a much harder language to learn. As Ritsuki has said, there are a lot more words for the same meaning, which makes a lot of people go, "WHUT? O-O;"
    We have more uses for the same word and some of the same sounding word has a different spelling. It's just freaking hard. XD;
     
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