English is the hardest language to learn

Damian in London SW15   Tue Jul 10, 2007 8:14 pm GMT
Can you imagine living next door to Charley? What a nightmare she is. I assume it's a typical South London accent which she has as she comes from Lewisham apparently. As most of the time she's throwing mega hissy fit histrionics at top volume it's difficult to understand what she's screaming out (at least for a Scot like me) and she rants on at a rate of about 500 words per minute - I've never heard anyone speak as rapidly as she does. One thing I recognise for sure are all the glottal stops along the way.
SJ the Awesome   Tue Jul 10, 2007 9:57 pm GMT
I'm English, purely, but I'm learning Dutch...doesn't it make it easier that English has no masculine and feminine?
Travis   Tue Jul 10, 2007 10:23 pm GMT
Yes, but at the same time English does at least partially make for it by having a relatively irregular and dialect-dependent system of verb conjugation relative to the amount of actual conjugation that goes on with verbs in it. While its verb conjugation does not involve as many *forms* of any given verb as in German, for instance, English in practice has significant and often dialect-dependent verb conjugation variation, especially with strong verbs, and also has irregular weak verbs (weak verbs in English are not necessarily "regular", despite what people are taught in school). In this way it does not really differ a whole lot from other Germanic languages other than Afrikaans, but the variation in (especially strong) verb forms between dialects is rather high compared to other Germanic languages, and especially compared to the overall level of dialect variation in English.
Guest   Wed Jul 11, 2007 10:46 am GMT
I do sometimes wonder if Charley is real at all, or whether it is all an act based on the schoolgirl character invented by Catherine Tate whose catchphrase is 'Am I bovvered?'
Kyle   Mon Jul 16, 2007 3:02 am GMT
I am an American. I have seen many mistakes on the past fer pages I have read. One man claims that he is going to be an English teacher. Well, I feel bad for who ever his students are. He could not speak very well at all.
Guest   Mon Jul 16, 2007 6:10 am GMT
<I am an American. I have seen many mistakes on the past fer pages I have read.>
Type well before you give your expert advice.
Damian in London E14   Mon Jul 16, 2007 2:04 pm GMT
***I do sometimes wonder if Charley is real at all***

She's a real something and that's for sure! One typical British expression immediately comes to mind here: "A real pain in the arse", not to mention a violent assault on the lugholes....or "lug'oh'wls" as thy sigh dahn 'ere in Landun (my phonetic interpretation of Sarf Landun speak).

Oi loike vee Essex boy Brian though - he's weally cool - and from Basildon too, of all plices! :-)
Austrian boy   Mon Jul 16, 2007 5:04 pm GMT
Hi!
In my opinion, English is far away from being (one of) the most difficult language(s). Slavic (Russian, Serbian etc.) and Romance (French, Italian, Spanish etc.) languages as well as Asian ones (Chinese, Japanese etc.) are much more difficult to learn than English! However, this is just my point of my view!! My mother tongue is German - a Germanic language like English, therefore I have no difficulties in learning and using English grammar. But, we should all bear in mind that there are difficulties between a German speaking person learning English and a Chinese speaking one! One's mother tongue, feeling and passion for languages are the most important factors causing different levels of fluency and thus opinions about the difficulty of a specific language!
(Is "thus" correct in this context or not? Please correct me if necessary!)
Guest   Mon Jul 16, 2007 5:30 pm GMT
Austrianboy:

<<...Romance (French, Italian, Spanish etc.) languages ... much more difficult to learn than English!>>>

Are you out of your loving mind?

Romance languages--in particular Spanish--are downright EASY! At least, from the viewpoint of a native English speaker.
Travis   Mon Jul 16, 2007 5:32 pm GMT
>>Romance languages--in particular Spanish--are downright EASY! At least, from the viewpoint of a native English speaker.<<

I would not state that unqualified - in particular, Romance verb morphology is certainly no simpler than that of, say, German, for instance..
Guest   Mon Jul 16, 2007 5:46 pm GMT
I thought Romance verb morphology was considerbaly more complicated than German with many more conjugations and tenses. I speak German and have also learnt a bit of Spanish, and from what I have seen of Spanish, it certainly looks to be the case.
guest   Tue Jul 17, 2007 4:12 am GMT
spanish is hard because you have to add a lot of endings to each person doing the actions also you don't need to use the personal pronouns in spanish makin it more confusing! there are 9 tenses in english and 14 in spanish. there are 245 possibleendings for it or so i read somewhere!
Austrian boy   Tue Jul 17, 2007 7:09 am GMT
<<...Romance (French, Italian, Spanish etc.) languages ... much more difficult to learn than English!
Are you out of your loving mind? >>

(Beside English I am learning French as well! And this year I am going to attend an Italian course, so I know Romance languages quite well!) In my opinion Romance languages are quite easy to learn, but they are obviously more difficult than English! (especially grammar is much harder!)

I was comparing learning English with learning other languages, so if you are a native speaker of English, you cannot know the difference, can you? (I speak German, therefore English and Romance (as well as other) languages are completely "foreign" to me!)

But of course, everybody thinks about the difficulty of certain languages in a different way!
Guest   Tue Jul 17, 2007 12:18 pm GMT
>>(Beside English I am learning French as well! And this year I am going to attend an Italian course, so I know Romance languages quite well!) In my opinion Romance languages are quite easy to learn, but they are obviously more difficult than English! (especially grammar is much harder!)<<

What else is harder apart from the grammar?
Sausage   Tue Jul 17, 2007 1:52 pm GMT
>>Yes, you are not correct, because already I am now becoming English teacher and teached much people the fluent English like I am speaking myself. <<

God help to all us.