English is the hardest language to learn

It's true, what someone had said before, about French being more difficult at first while Spanish is easy... and then later on French starts to become easier as Spanish gets harder (as you delve into the Subjunctive, certain idioms, longer grammatical structures, and verb morphology).

I don't know where this idea of 'Spanish is easy' came from... I've found that most people who say that are the ones that end up going around saying things like "Yo es el mejor". Please... if you're going to say that, at least have a basic fundamental understanding of the Spanish grammar, and realize that whatever you learned in high school is just the tip of the iceberg, because REAL Spanish is a lot more in depth than most people know.

Neither French nor Spanish are 'easy'.

<<Neither French nor Spanish are 'easy'.>>

They are compared to most other languages for a native English speaker.

I have a fair grasp of Spanish grammar... I don't think Spanish is all that hard, but I do roll my eyes when people say it is TOO easy. People who think it's "too easy" and don't speak a second language fluently probably haven't studied it enough. Basic comprehension isn't difficult. Learning to speak it and write it like a native is definitely a challenge.

- Kef

<<Neither French nor Spanish are 'easy'.>>

<They are compared to most other languages for a native English speaker.>


The more I think about, I guess you're right. I guess I was trying to make the point of what furrykef said.

I think that english is not hard languege. Why am i thinking such? There are many hard languages to learn, to compare to english, in the world. Forexample russian(the russian grammar is just a 'kriepkii oreh') also chiness..

<<I think that english is not hard languege. Why am i thinking such? There are many hard languages to learn, to compare to english, in the world. Forexample russian(the russian grammar is just a 'kriepkii oreh') also chiness..>>

If English is so easy, why does your grammar suck?

If you want to Know which is/are the easiest language, you need to make the question to a neutral person.

For instance, people that speak as native language Hungarian or Japanese, unrelated languages. Anyway, the answer will be English and Spanish.

Sven, the trouble is, the definition of "neutral" is subjective. Neutral to whom?

If you're going by grammar alone, then English is certainly not the easiest. It may be easier than some other European languages, but it is nowhere not as straightforward as Chinese or Indonesian. (And Swedish and Afrikaans are probably not more difficult than English.)

As for pronunciation, English is more difficult that many languages (Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Finnish, Indonesian, etc.).

And orthography? Other than Japanese and Chinese, English is one of the worst. German, Spanish, Italian, Finnish, Swahili, Korean, Indonesian, etc., are much more regular. Even French, with all its complexity, is more regular than English.

For the average European (or anyone else) looking at a European-based language, yes, English seems easier. And since exposure to English is so widespread, this idea is reinforced. But I doubt that it is the "absolute" easiest language in the world. A lot have people have put Indonesian in that category. (Or Esperanto, if you want to consider constructed languages.)

>>And orthography? Other than Japanese and Chinese, English is one of the worst. German, Spanish, Italian, Finnish, Swahili, Korean, Indonesian, etc., are much more regular. Even French, with all its complexity, is more regular than English.<<

Tibetan orthography is almost certainly worse than English orthography in this regard, and pre-WW2 Danish orthography was practically as bad as English orthography as well.

>>For the average European (or anyone else) looking at a European-based language, yes, English seems easier. And since exposure to English is so widespread, this idea is reinforced. But I doubt that it is the "absolute" easiest language in the world. A lot have people have put Indonesian in that category. (Or Esperanto, if you want to consider constructed languages.)<<

To put it in few words, English is easy if your native language is a Germanic language. If your native language is not a Germanic language, good luck... (I am particularly speaking of people like Romance speakers here, as English vowel phonology is greatly more complex than that of most Romance languages whereas it is quite manageable by Germanic language standards and English phonology in general is not atypical of that of a Germanic language all things considered).

>>To put it in few words, English is easy if your native language is a Germanic language<<

But even then, is it? The Germans, especially, seem to have great trouble ironing out problems with the tenses. They also often make mistakes with sentence constructions where there is an indirect object. At first sight German is more complicated in this respect, as you have to learn the dative case. However, once you have learnt it, the construction is (almost always) the same. English, by contrast, has a somewhat chaotic 'system', sometimes using the word 'to' and sometimes word order to express this concept. For instance:

'I gave the book to him' or 'I gave him the book' are both correct.

However

'I suggested the idea to him' is correct, while 'I suggested him the idea' is not.

And there are many examples of this.

Also, why do we only say

'I told him the truth' and not 'I told the truth to him'.

The complexities of English are sometimes just more subtle.

The thing is that English does have more complex tense and aspect usage than most other Germanic languages, as well as mixing up dative constructions and prepositional constructions more than Germanic languages that preserve the dative case.

Travis

Exactly, but for some reason learners of English don't seem to think getting these things right matters too much, or that their existence means that English is not quite as straightforward as it seems at first,while they feel that getting genders, verb conjugations and cases right in other languages is very important and makes them exceedingly difficult.

I'd be interested to know if the Germanic languages that don't have the dative case also have such a chaotic way of constructing sentences that have an indirect object.