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

Erm, I guess.

English is my second language, but I kinda picked it up well.
 
I am English and I think learning English is WAY easier than most languages as:

*We don't have masculine or feminine nouns.
*We don't have any accents on words, like circonflexes, aigus, graves, umlauts, cedillas, etc. Apart from borrowed words.
*When conjucating a verb in English it only changes in third person i.e: I have, you have, he has.

I'm sure English have aspects that are hard but compared to most languages it's easier!
 
I'm Swedish, and here we have English around us every day. We hardly ever dub English movies or tv-shows, commercials are in English or the things have English names, all our games are in English, and so on and so forth. In seventh grade, we're supposed to be able to discuss serious things in English in school, and write long stories or essays in the language.

I've never had much problem with English, but that's probably because of this; we have it all around us when we grow up, here in Sweden. Mush more so nowadays than when I was little, actually :/

AND, I've heard German is a technically easier language, because the words and idiomatic thingys are more "natural" than the English... if that made any sense ( I still can't always express myself perfectly in English xD )
 
There is a scala on which languages are on a certain level of learning, depending on some features or criteria. English is one of the easiest to learn, because of the missing genders of a word (Spanish has two (male and female) and German even has three (male, female, neutral)), then, there a nothing really like casus (Latin has 5 casus, German 4 and finnish 19).
All in one, English is easier than for example German, French, Japanese or Chinese.
 
From what I've heard in school, English may very well be the hardest language to learn. It is so different from other languages in many regards. For one thing, every "rule" in English has an exception(ie. "I before E except after C" works for piece, but not neighbour. XD). And this rule itself has an exception, in that "Q must always be followed by U" is the only English rule that stands 100% of the time (Iraq isn't English, folks, XD).

Another thing that I've noticed is silent sounds(ie. the words "know," "gnaw," etc), and different letters sounding the same way(ie. "F" & "PH," "EE" & "EA," "K" and hard "C").

So unless you grow up speaking it, English can be quite a challenge for some. Although those who speak the other Germanic languages(French, Italian, German, etc) should have an easier time than most.
 
Alakazam17 said:
From what I've heard in school, English may very well be the hardest language to learn. It is so different from other languages in many regards. For one thing, every "rule" in English has an exception(ie. "I before E except after C" works for piece, but not neighbour. XD). And this rule itself has an exception, in that "Q must always be followed by U" is the only English rule that stands 100% of the time (Iraq isn't English, folks, XD).

Another thing that I've noticed is silent sounds(ie. the words "know," "gnaw," etc), and different letters sounding the same way(ie. "F" & "PH," "EE" & "EA," "K" and hard "C").

So unless you grow up speaking it, English can be quite a challenge for some. Although those who speak the other Germanic languages(French, Italian, German, etc) should have an easier time than most.
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Well, English is different, but in the way that it is easier. These letters with the same sound exist in almost all languages. Only a few don't have it (Spanish or Esperanto). You also mentioned just orthography, but grammar is more important. orthography must be learnt by everyone, also by native speaker.
 
English is supposedly one of the hardest languages to learn.
I know a bit of French which wasn't hard at all to learn because their language shares many of the same grammar rules that English does.

Right now I'm learning Hebrew independently through the Rosetta Stone program, and I'm having trouble remembering all the grammar rules.

Furanty said:
That are not many forms. In German does any job have a female form. (Koch - Köchin, Archeologe - Archeologin, Lehrer - Lehrerin, Chef - Chefin and so on.)
Click to expand...
French dives deeper, even using the words un and une to signify masculinity and femininity.
 
English is very easy to pick up because it is spoken around the world AND there are no dialects or super-fast words. When I was a child, I found it easier to speak English than Italian so spoke it around the house more often than my parents.
 
I'd say English is harder than most languages to learn, simply because we have so many rules and then we go and break the standard rules. For example, I know it's impossible for French people to say "squirrel." They just can't roll it off their tongues. There are so many grammatical things that don't make sense to a lot of people, even native speakers of English.
 
This was an example used by a belgian pen pal of mine:

Spanish words for "the"- El, la, las, los, and more
English words for "the"- The

Of course being English myself I have no grasp of how much harder it would be to learn this language over another. But according to the afformentioned Belgian, English is simpler in that it has a single set of pronouns rather than hordes of prefixes and suffixes. Of the french and spanish I know, this is a valid arguament since I had extreme problems learning all of the different word endings, being as specific as ownership and whether or not the verb was premanent ect.
 
I believe it is one of the hardest languages to learn due to the amount of rules and exceptions. Also, there are many words which mean the same thing. Since I grew up with the English language, I caught up pretty quickly. Although, I can imagine myself as a foreign speaker and try to learn English. I take Spanish at school, and it seems much more easier to learn by a foreign speaker rather then a foreign speaker learning English.
 
English has a whole bunch of weird rules and irregularities, but...

As Gofre said, there are so many different words in other languages for "the" and other articles. Plus, there's something you've got to do in other languages called conjugating which is rarely used in English other than simply saying things like running, ran, and runs over "run". And there's irregularities in any language.

I'm not sure how to answer this, to be honest.
 
Yeah, apparently people like to say that English is really difficult, but I think it's just a matter of the fact that we don't even speak our own language correctly. We have so many slang words that just jumble up the mix, putting 'like' where it doesn't belong, and then saying things like "Get on the car" instead of "Get in the car", which both generally mean the same thing to us, y'know?

But I learned English as my second language, and from the little that I can remember, it wasn't a difficult transition. The most important thing about learning any language is to be able to hear it on a regular basis, and it's not so hard if you have people who can tell you right or wrong. [/shruggg] But it becomes a problem when we're just starting to learn slang. I remember I couldn't figure out what "Fart" meant for the longest time. xD;

Actually though, I'd say it depends on which language you're transitioning from, really. Like, from French or Spanish, or a romance language, perhaps it wouldn't be as difficult...?
 
wobbadude1 said:
I am English and I think learning English is WAY easier than most languages as:

*We don't have any accents on words, like circonflexes, aigus, graves, umlauts, cedillas, etc. Apart from borrowed words.
Click to expand...

Actually, the proper way to spell coordinator is cöordinator or coördinator. I forgot, but most spell it coordinator these days. It's a rule about two "o"s seperated by a syllable. A famous magazine in New York magazine still spells it that way.
 
I would hate to have to learn English as a second language. Just by looking at the grammatical structures that I'm learning about in German, I can tell that English is simply much more difficult to learn when older. English has more rules than almost any other language, and the only thing it has more of than rules are exceptions. Don't get me started on number of words. The English vocabulary is basically all of the Germanic words and all of the romance words mixed together.

Rachellder said:
English is very easy to pick up because it is spoken around the world AND there are no dialects or super-fast words.
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English actually has several dialects. There are significant differences between British and American English: colour vs. color, civilisation vs. civilization, etc.

That brings me to another issue: arbitrary spelling! English spelling is about as far away from being phonetic as is feasible. Did anyone here know that "fish" could at one time be spelled as "ghoti"? I'm serious: gh as in rough, o as in women, and ti as in nation. There are so many different ways to pronounce the same combinations of letters that English spelling has to be memorized more than actually learned and understood.

I'd say the only way that English is simpler than any other language is in the lack of noun genders. And, no, I'm not talking about words like "waitress." For those who don't know, in languages such as German and Spanish, nouns like "chair" and "window" have genders. Aside from that one aspect, English is definitely more complicated. It may not be as hard anymore to learn basic conversational English because of its widespread international usage, but it is definitely one of the hardest languages to learn how to write in.
 
Virtual Chatot said:
English is supposedly one of the hardest languages to learn.
I know a bit of French which wasn't hard at all to learn because their language shares many of the same grammar rules that English does.

Right now I'm learning Hebrew independently through the Rosetta Stone program, and I'm having trouble remembering all the grammar rules.


French dives deeper, even using the words un and une to signify masculinity and femininity.
Click to expand...

Yes French is much harder than English,although its my born language its still much harder to use than English,the Grammar is harder,there is more words,it is just much harder to learn than English,heck,french is much harder than English at my school.
 
.Oblivion said:
Yes French is much harder than English,although its my born language its still much harder to use than English,the Grammar is harder,there is more words,it is just much harder to learn than English,heck,french is much harder than English at my school.
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Wrong. English has far more words than French, it's not even close.
 
School growing up taught both Russian and English at the same time. In my family we would speak English in the home and Russian everywhere else, so I've lived with both languages my whole life, but I must say that I personally found Russian easier to learn. The rules of the Russian language are more set in stone, there aren't so many exceptions to the rules like there is in English.
 
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