english...

y does english have to be so weird. there are so many things in it that don't make sense. a couple of them are like "good" and "food". spelled nearly the same, but sound completely different. same with "donkey" and "monkey" . (though it's might be kinda hard to get my point without hearing it". also, if you take the "ph" from paragraph, the "e" from women, and the "ti" from concentration, and pronounce them all together, you say "fish". spelled "pheti" but sounds like fish. also i heard that it's the hardest language to learn in the entire world (is that true?)

instead of asking why english is weird for having two words with different meanings that sound similiar, how about you ask why japanese is weird for having two words with different meanings that sound EXACTLY THE SAME

ie. in japanese, the word for 4 is also the word for death....
hmm...or was it blood? well something like that

It depends I suppose, if you learn it when you are younger it isn't too hard but if you learn it when you are older, like high school age, it is harder. An example is when I took German classes. Despite the fact the classroom was full of a bunch of idiots who thought it was funny to disrupt the class the entire time every day, it was a lot harder since it was completely different from what I am used to.

i guess japenese is kinda the same as chinese. but even though chinese has words that have several meanings (just only different by those weird things they put over them to pronounce different "~" "/" "-" "\"), i still think that it's easier to speak than english. way easier

English is a much simpler written language than any oriental language. In English, there's a phonics system that allows you to simply guess the spelling of a word based on its sound, whereas in Chinese or something, you either know how to write it or you don't, period. It just pisses me off when people complain about English being confusing. It's not. In Chinese, there's about 10 "syllables" (still don't know what you call those in English) for each possible sound, and they're all spelled totally different. That's why Chinese is so goddamn hard and why I gave up on writing it. I still speak perfectly since I agree that the sounds are much easier to pronounce than English because the mouth movements are very basic.

and PS, Japanese pronounciations are totally different from Chinese, although it certainly helps to learn Japanese if you can pronounce Chinese.

I agree, English isn't that difficult compared to some of the other languages. But it's definately a lot harder than Korean or Spanish.

english is by far one of the easiest languages to learn. theres only 26 alphabets, and its easy to sound out words like BOC said. i've never taken spanish or german or korean, but most languages i've come across are alot harder to learn then english. plusthe fact that english is an international language, so everyone speaks a little bit, not matter how bad, which makes it easier to learn.

Quote:

---

Originally posted by: a_odessey
also i heard that it's the hardest language to learn in the entire world (is that true?)

---

Whoever you heard that from is an illiterate dumbass. I'm not sure about Korean since a couple people mentioned it, but English imo is probably the easiest language I've come across. Things like "f" and "ph" can be confusing at first, but just like any other language, you can better distinguish between the two through experience. If you still don't see the difference, here's a general rule of thumbs:

"f" usually starts a word, such as "fork"
"ph" usually ends a word, such as "graph"

After using English for a long time, you start to get a feel for the spelling as you write. Writing "phork" just doesn't SEEM right.

English is dirived from french and latin, and also a hoard of other languages, but French and latin are the biggest. So there you have it.

Quote:

---

Originally posted by: Lefty
English is dirived from french and latin, and also a hoard of other languages, but French and latin are the biggest. So there you have it.

---

Hehe, close but not quite. English is an Indo-European language, which is the same language family as French and Latin, but consider them to be more like cousins. English belongs to the Germanic branch of the family, so it is most closely related to German, think of these as being siblings. The problem with English is that when Britain was conquered by the Normans in 1066, the society there suddenly became controlled by French-speaking overlords. This resulted in quite a few French words finding their way into the English language. Also, there was this thing called the Great Vowel Shift which I'm not going to try to explain, but just take my word that it confused things more. Add to this that English is really good at adopting foreign words, and voila, you have the English language as we know it today.

Really though, it's not that hard. I'm trying to learn Russian at the moment, and the grammar is infinitely more complicated. There's like 10 b'zillion endings for every word, depending on what grammatical function it has in the sentence, as well as the gender of the word. Slavic languages are also in the Indo-European language family, but tend to be harder to learn than Germanic ones.

^wow...language expert

Actually, English orginally came from German (eg: mutter --> mother).
And I agree that English is a much easier language to learn than some Asian languages. At least you can spell things out based on the sound. Plus, there are no masculine, feminine and neuter nouns.

The learnability is the fundamental difference between an phonetic alphabet and a pictographic one.

Renowned educator John Taylor Gatto has a pretty interesting analysis of this in his book "The Underground History of American Education". Rather than belaboring his points, I'm just going to link to it (by the way, the rest of the book is also online there, and is a good read if you like this sort of thing).

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3k.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3n.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3o.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3p.htm

(edit: added more links to relevant pages. Recommend the whole chapter, or at least pages 10 to the end)

hmm......i had no idea my language is considered complicated......
i kinda like the idea though [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-smile.gif[/img]

I knew i forgot german origin, but I was talking about the more current incanation of the language which was after the normans closer to 1100's, it was still more german-latin than english before french was force feed into it, close though. But german from the original population, latin from the roman occupation and french form the norman invastion are the core. But yeah English is the bastared child of European languages. And on how the language is to learn you have to remember we have exceptions and nuances to the language that don't exist anywhere else.

like what, lefty?
If you ask me, German seems roughly the same structure as english, except there you have to associate gender with every single noun in existence.....is my chair male, female, or neuter? How can i tell? [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-confused.gif[/img]

Not the hardest, but I did hear that english is one of the hardest. I think it was cause all of the screwed up rules that we have that sometime defy themselves. Like how we have alot of silent letters makes it hard to read sometimes. As for people like BOC above who as usual are rude, I wouldn't say you're an illiterate dumbass.

To be honest though - this includes myself - I really don't think any natural english speaker, or even someone who grew up around the language has any right to comment. If you grow up around something, you mimic and adapt to it, where as when you are learning something, without constantly being around it, it is much harder. This is probably a reason why some can also pick up english quicker then other languages. Someone said above it is an international language, you can hear some of it almost everywhere, which means it's easier to adapt to and mimic.

Go to this website and skip the first 3 paragraphs is you want. Here. It talks about how imitation is the key to learning a language.

This website tells why english is hard to read in an European perspective. Here.

Since I did kind of show an example for speaking, and reading, here's one for pronunciation. This is something my french teacher showed us. We could obviously say it with ease, but he then explained how for a french person to say that, it takes ALOT of practice, and is probably much harder for them then for any of us to say a french poem. This is also a fun little word twister on how our words can defy themselves in the same sentence. Here.

Now I don't think english is the hardest language, but I think it is up there. I have heard cantonese is the hardest in many people's opinion. I really don't think anyone can say which is hardest and which is easiest unless you come from the same background or culture, and who knows, maybe to different backgrounds and cultures, there is different languages that are harder.

Thas what I mean we lack the gender specifics of other languages. Also how we use certain words that sound the same but mean diffrent things like "their car is there." or "to and too" I totaly agree that german is the foundation that english is built off of but the latin and french changed it furthur from the germnaic origin to the more modern form that it is today, and thats where we lost gender specific stuff.

part of learning to a language even takes place before a person is born. Every language has a natural vibration pattern to it in the way its spoken, and an unborn child can obtain that pattern from the mother and synchronize with it......helping it to learn that language easier in the first years after birth

Quote:

---

Originally posted by: joker-kun
To be honest though - this includes myself - I really don't think any natural english speaker, or even someone who grew up around the language has any right to comment. If you grow up around something, you mimic and adapt to it, where as when you are learning something, without constantly being around it, it is much harder. This is probably a reason why some can also pick up english quicker then other languages. Someone said above it is an international language, you can hear some of it almost everywhere, which means it's easier to adapt to and mimic.

---

I've always looked at difficulty this way:
Tell an 8-year-old kid that's pretty literate in his native language to suddenly go to a whole different society and learn their language. Give him one year and see how much he progresses.

I learned a great deal of English in my first year in Canada. Now, if I imagine myself being born in Canada and going to China when I was 8, I would've made very little progress.

Quote:

---

Tell an 8-year-old kid that's pretty literate in his native language to suddenly go to a whole different society and learn their language. Give him one year and see how much he progresses.

---

that doesn't make sense. i was exposed to another language (chinese, manderin) when i was 1.but the time when i made real progress was when i was 4. at that time i had already pretty much been able to speak english fluently. after coming back from china for 1 month, i could already speak half the language. after going there every 2 years or so for 1 month each time, at the age of 8 i could already speak it fluently. for pretty much everybody here, it would be over probably 100 times harder to learn a language than if you were in you toddler age. because my mom (a doctor with 2 medical degrees (one in china, one in america)) said something like when your a toddler your language learning thing is going at full speed or something. so it's easiest to learn a language at a young age. even though i probably told you way too much just to get a point, i hope you get the picture.

I also heard English is a hard language to learn. The only reason we're good at English is because we use it everyday. When my Latin teacher told me Latin is much easier than English, I didn't believe her. If you think about it, Latin is easier. The grammar isn't as complicated as English grammar. Once you know the vocabulary and the basic grammar, it isn't that hard to read Latin. There are a lot of tiny details to English that you won't know unless you use it everyday, like idioms among other things.

Quote:

---

Originally posted by: a_odessey
that doesn't make sense. i was exposed to another language (chinese, manderin) when i was 1.but the time when i made real progress was when i was 4. at that time i had already pretty much been able to speak english fluently. after coming back from china for 1 month, i could already speak half the language. after going there every 2 years or so for 1 month each time, at the age of 8 i could already speak it fluently. for pretty much everybody here, it would be over probably 100 times harder to learn a language than if you were in you toddler age. because my mom (a doctor with 2 medical degrees (one in china, one in america)) said something like when your a toddler your language learning thing is going at full speed or something. so it's easiest to learn a language at a young age. even though i probably told you way too much just to get a point, i hope you get the picture.

---

Yeah I know what you're talking about, but it's not totally about "going at full speed". I think a great analogy for this is painting. Think about a canvas and a paintbrush. At first you got a blank canvas and you can paint anything you want on it. Once you're done, it's really hard to change the picture since paint is pretty hard to get off. Language works in the same way. When you're a toddler, your mind is still developing and obtaining all sorts of new stuff. Once that settles down, it's hard to change what's already been in there and used 24/7. If I told you right now that you're adopted, you'd have a really hard time believing it since you lived all your life believing something different. (no offense buddy, just using an example)

its irrelevant......
Regardless of the language, it's alot easier for elementary school kids to adapt to a new one than it is for adults

interestingly, the learning curve difference in languages applies principally to the learning of the written language. Spoken languages all have pretty much the same level of complexity. Even "creoles" (spoken languages that develop in isolation) have comparable levels of complexity to any other spoken language.

Also interestingly (despite the fact that I've completely lost where I heard this from, so could be completely wrong), I remember something about Japanese high school students being unable to read more than a very basic set of kanji.

Yeah, young children are pretty much preprogrammed for language acquisition, and that preprogramming pretty much guarantees they'll learn the basics of whatever language they're exposed to (disregarding speech disorders, learning disabilities, and severe retardation or brain damage).

If you want to give your kids a fighting chance in the multilingual world of tomorrow, raise them multilingual, and get them really interested in reading and intellectual pursuits at a very young age.

My first language is spanish but since I was five years old I've been going to a bilingual school which all the classes are in english apart from Spanish, Hispanic and Puertorican history. I've become so accostumed to the english language that I can't speak the cult spanish language (well actually, none of my generation can. It happens. Inventing new words and such). It also ticks me off when I can remeber a word in english but can't remember it in spanish.

Another thing its good to be able to speak the spanish language first cause it derives from latin. So does portugese, german, italian etc. Which means I can understand not all of it but a little and it makes it easier to learn those languages. Something I don't think the english only speakers can do.

Well I guess english or swedish or any other western type languge could be considered difficult to japanese or chinese speaking cause they are so different to eachother. But if you think english is wierd you should try as suggested japanese or thai. Thai is wierd [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-smile.gif[/img] like 5 words spelled the exact same way but depending on where you put pitch or pronounciation (however that is spelled) it means 5 different things. And can become pretty wierd if you say the wrong thing.

Think all languages have their wierd sides for an outsider trying to learn or understand, especially the grammar and pronounciations of things. But as allready said children exposed to dialekts and languages can pick them up pretty fast if they have someone arround them that can explain what the stuff means [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-smile.gif[/img]. I was born in Norway and picked up Swedish when I moved here allthough its almost the same but different in just a month or so, and my dad had english and american friends arround often so that helped alot in speaking english pretty early in life.