Why do European countries all have to learn the English language when it's one of the hardest to learn?

Question

I was told the English language is one of the hardest to learn so why do the foreign countries want to learn our language?

Answer 1

Because Americans are generally too lazy to learn another language. ( I know this doesn't represent ALL Americans - I speak another language as well) Generally Americans think that everyone in the world should do as we do.
Also, those of you who say English is easy forget that for every rule we have, there are about a billion exeptions - look at the word "rough" - say it outloud. Now say, "cough", "though". Why is it not the same in all cases? English is hard to learn. And if you're really wanting to get to the basics, why is the gh an f sound? Along with so many other combos...

Answer 2

Chinese is the most spoken native language, but English is the most widely used 2nd. language in the world! So, now with international business English is basic and to research information on the web is also very important, for there are more sites in English that in any other language.

Now, you say English is one of the hardest languages? I don't think so! I'm a native Spanish speaker and I speak English and French. I've found out English is the easiest one!

French and Spanish have hard verb tenses conjugations, all nouns have a gender (including animals and objects!) and adjectives have to agree with the gender and number!

And there are languages as Chinese and Hebrew that have a special writting system... Believe me, English is very easy!!!

Answer 3

Yes lots of things are in English today, the Internet, Movies, etc.
Also English is considered as the International Language. And BTW English is not the hardest language, its actually REALLY EASY compared to some European languages

P.S. I'm European that lives in the US ;) so trust me i know

Answer 4

English is one of the easiest languages to learn. I am not sure who would say it's so hard to learn English...They should try learning Russian or one of the Arabic languages or may be Korean. As for europeans - English has a lot of words that sound similar to european languages and that's why it's easier to learn.

Answer 5

Well as a student of linguistics, English has become the lingua franca around the world. Therefore given the power that it has not only in the political, business or capitalistic world. English is depicted by everybody else around the world as a language that needs to be learned in order to succeed. Back in the days (1800's) European languages were more predominant. In this era this is not the case. Hope this helps

Answer 6

English is NOT the hardest language. Have you tried to learn Slavic languages like Polish or Russian? Or even German?

English is easy. There are a lot of English speakers. It seemed like the obvious choice in my opinion.

Answer 7

Determining which language is harder than another depends on the language of the learner and the language being learned. For a Russian, Polish would be easier to learn than English. But Polish would be more difficult for a Dutch speaker than English.
I know Estonian, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Spanish and Russian. Of these, Russian was the hardest for me and Spanish the easiest. As for a globally difficult language for any speaker of another language, I would pick Arabic due to the lack of a standard spoken form. MSA, Modern Standard Arabic, is a written form of Arabic used in the media and official documents; however, it is not normally spoken. You have to pick one of the many dialects to study if you want to learn to speak Arabic. This difference between the written and spoken language is called "diglossia". So, in a sense, to learn Arabic you have two forms to learn.

Answer 8

English language is the primary International language. For every nation their own language is easy and learning other foreign languages is hard. But to tell you the truth, English is my second language too, my first language is Farsi. And I tell you learning English is way easier than learning Farsi or Spanish or French or Arabic and etc. I have tried to learn Spanish, I couldn't do it, same for Greek. Its easy to learn English because it has the simplest grammar.. But I should mention that learning new languages is hard no matter how easy the language is.

Answer 9

English is the second most spoken language in the world followed by Chinese the main reason to learn English is computers

Answer 10

It's not the hardest, but people in Europe can speak 4 and 5 different languages. I think the hardest is perhaps Russian.