Who agrees that English is probably the hardest language to learn.?

Question

When you think about it, it's really confusing!! No masculine or feminine form, slang, yada yada!!

Yahoo! Answers staff note: This is the real Jorja-An Fox. Look here for more detail: http://360.yahoo.com/profile-ysqbeqk7dLQGWn3BSJZxaQ--

Answer 1

Some people answering the question of English being hard are coming from the perspective of growing up with it LOL! You can't do that. You have to put yourself in anothers shoes where English isn't your first language.

I think English is probably the hardest language to learn. But then it would depend on the individual so the actual real answer will depend on the individual you are asking.

If you grew up with Chinese, English would be VERY hard I think. However, if you grew up with Spanish, there are similar words and English might not be as difficult as Chinese would be.

I find that English is actually the backwards language compared to most. For example; in English, if you say, "Bills house" in Spanish it would be "house of Bill." Now, you'll get those ethnocentric people who would say that Spanish is backwards, but I think it is English that is backwards.

How about those silent letters? How is someone just learning the language supposed to spell House? Sound it out LOL! hows? howc? howce?

And then you have the C making more than one sound and others like CH and G.

In 1987, however, the Ojibwe language was put into the Guinness Book of World Records as the most complex language.

Answer 2

I'm studying Spanish, Italian and German proper now and I do admit to me they sound greater since they are new and fascinating. Maybe non English audio system could believe the identical as you do. I can relate to how handy you are discovering German handy to pronounce I do too. It's quite often since like German, English is a Germanic language so there are lots of similarities. For me it additionally the truth that I have German household so I now and again listen my Grossmutter and Oma talk it. When I learn a phrase I say it founded on intuition or I say it how I believe my German household participants might say it. Luckily this has labored for me plenty (no longer at all times even though) BQ: I handiest talk English fluently however I'm studying Spanish, Italian and German proper now as I stated.

Answer 3

I've heard that English is the second most difficult of the major world languages to learn, and Chinese is the hardest. This makes sense because Chinese has several "tonal" elements to it--the same syllable said with a different intonation means something entirely different. A Chinese friend gave me a demonstration of this once--of the seven different pitches I could hear the difference on 4 of them. When you consider that one of the syllables meant "God" and one meant "dog," not getting the pitch correctly could make a huge difference!

And these difficulties are just to learn to speak Chinese--writing a language with thousands of characters is so much harder than languages using the 26 letter alphabet used for English, and the majority of the European languages.

Having said all this, I tried to learn Irish once (some people call it Gaelic) and found it incredibly difficult. Spanish and French were much easier, in my opinion.

When I did a websearch, "Basque" came up several times as the most difficult language to learn (language of Northern Spain.)

Answer 4

Actually i totally disagree with you. I have traveled abroad to many countries. English is among the easiest languages to learn. Because there are no masculine or feminine words. I have tried to learn many languages. But in learning any language there are some that are harder then others for different people to learn. Such as an english speaking person the hardest language to learn would be russian. But a russian could learn english quite easily.
this truely is an opionated question and i could go on for hours debating this topic but i shall not.

Answer 5

I am bilingual, and I speak English, Spanish, and some French and Portuguese. I would say that Spanish is more difficult to learn. When I began to learn to write and speak Spanish (I was 8 yrs old at the time) I cried tears of blood because of all the grammatical rules. And If you travel to Latin America or Spain, even if Spanish is spoken, it can be difficult to understand because of the different accents, regionalisms and idiomatic expressions. But I also think that learning a new language is very rewarding.

Answer 6

English is not at all harder now a days...! A decade ago to learn English, you had to attend costly English classes or purchase course material like tapes and books. Now you can learn English for free from the comfort of your home using the Internet. The BBC and the British Council offer a number of on line courses, which teach written and spoken English. You can also improve your English by watching television programs and reading English newspapers. For more information, visit http://tinyurl.com/qnzpt

Answer 7

No, it's easier than learning 8 forms of a single verb as in French. Every language has it's own slang.

Answer 8

I agree and most people who speak English are too stupid to understand that it is hard. I speak English as my first language and I'm studying German also.. I think that's hard too, because the words are so long and the way they speak is different.. like backwards from how English people say it

Answer 9

I dont know. Im sure it may be one of the harder languages since there are alot of exceptions to the rules in English, but Im sure there are harder ones. We have a 26 letter alphabet, but some languages are ridiculously more complex.

Answer 10

i think any language is hard to learn if u dont know it , i speak english & spanish is hard for me to learn cos i cant roll my tongue & theyre are too many rules, like im used to a cat making the sound meow but in spanish the sound they make is different..and since they have the fem/masculine i usually use the wrong words but for someone who speaks spanish english is very hard to learn so it just depends how quick & easily someone can pick up the language...