+407 It's annoying when people complain in class about learning a new language, saying it's much too hard for them, when really, they already know English, which has more rules and exceptions than any other tongue out there, amirite?

by Anonymous 14 years ago

For me english is by far one of the toughest language to learn. Then maybe mandarin or arabic. English is not similar to the other widely spoken languages like french or spanish.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

Exactly. I'm a native English speaker, and there are times when even I struggle with spellings and pronunciations. I take Italian in school and find it much, much easier to pick up and understand. The people in my classes clearly just don't try, because it's all the same rules applied to everything.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

i've learned french and english as a kid and i can assure you that learning french was way easier. Actually examination failures for french are almost non existent where i live while for english its not even comparable. people don't realise the difficulty of english because its so widespread. Its always the lack of interest and motivation that makes languages seeme difficult. Right now i'm learning spanish and its pretty easy (though french helps here).

by Anonymous 14 years ago

*Nods* That's a perfect example of what I tried to say. I think it's amazing that we live in a world where most people have the tools to become bilingual, but most are just too lazy to really put in the effort and reap the rewards. It's a really great and helpful thing, knowing more than one language, and the fact that it's being taken for granted shocks me.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

i totally agree.. Knowing several languages can be a great asset! And the more languages you know the easier it becomes to learn other ones. Along with the learning of a language you somehow to get to know of a different culture. By the way spanish would be my 6th language :)

by Anonymous 14 years ago

Sixth? O_O Damn. That's really impressive.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

This might sound stupid.. But in other countries can you take English as a language?.. Actually I know it's a stupid question...

by Anonymous 14 years ago

Nvm.u don't have to answer. Figured it out

by Anonymous 14 years ago

haha..yeah! I've got a romance language-french, a germanic-english, an oriental- hindi, a creole-native and a hispanic- spanish..

by Anonymous 14 years ago

Do you travel a lot that you'd need to use all those?

by Anonymous 14 years ago

Well i don't travel..actually i've never been abroad but later in my life i plan to travel a lot :) i've got two native languages, most of my studies are in english and most of the media are in french.. Here almost everybody is bilingual and a lesser number of people are trilingual at least :)

by Anonymous 14 years ago

I take it you're from Europe? When I visited most people I came across knew multiple languages, and I was slightly envious of that. I think in countries other than the US a higher importance is placed on learning a foreign language, no?

by Anonymous 14 years ago

actually i'm very far from europe.. I'm from mauritius and that's found somewhere in the indian ocean. Geographically i'm an african but the country is extremely diversified culturally and ethnically! For me there is not a big interest for other languages in the US mainly because the country is so vast.. except at the states near the frontiers where other languages are adopted. I mean wherever you'll travel on land there will be english speakers, so there's no real need for another language unless you plan on having intercontinental trips! But that's my point of view :) and yeah i'm adding you as a friend :)

by Anonymous 14 years ago

I speak both French and English fluently and I have to say, French is harder. There isn't just past, present and future tenses. There's a whole list of tenses and so many rules. I graduated from a French high school and I still don't know a lot.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

I take Italian, which is similar since both are closely derived from Latin, so I know what you mean when you say there are many tenses. I think Italian has 16? Yeah. But it's easier because it's the same rules, like a template, used for everything, and that makes it easier for me. *Nods*

by Anonymous 14 years ago

I've started taking basic french and I have to agree with you. It's pretty tough. English comes more naturally.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

They learned English by being entirely emerged in it since birth. Of course a class they only take a couple of times a week is going to be harder.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

I'd say Russian is the most difficult language. There are a TON of grammar rules.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

I've heard Hungarian is the hardest because there is no other language like it on the planet.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

except Finnish. What with them being Fino-Ugric languages.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

If you live in a country that speaks English, English is easier to learn, if you live in a country that speaks French, then same thing happens. If you are learning a language that you don't frequently use, then it's harder... no matter what language it is

by Anonymous 14 years ago

Japanese is a lot of fun to learn, and much easier than english.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

My first language is German and I'm learning English and French as foreign languages - I definitely have to say that English is the easiest one of them. There is only one article, nearly no words have to be capitalized and you never have to adapt anything to the gender and there are only few pronouns etc. ... French is a lot harder to learn, just think of all the different tenses, and I think German would be even harder to learn as a foreign language - even I as a native speaker think that the spelling and grammar are incomparably difficult.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

I'm a native English speaker and I'm learning German. I don't know a lot, but the spelling is a pain in the ass and I have a hard time with pronunciation. And I hate different articles and genders. And theres a word that translates to "Excuse me" that I had to learn for a test. It was huge (it started with an E) and I couldn't even pronounce it. Words like that scare me.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

I guess it all just depends on what you're used to (native language).

by Anonymous 14 years ago

I totally agree with you. English is the easiest language I've learned. I am a native German and I speak Englisch, French and Spanish, and it was so easy to pick up English!!

by Anonymous 14 years ago

English is one of the hardest language to become as proficient as a native speaker but it's fairly easy to learn to the point of fluency as it has less rules than most other languages. For instance there are no masculine or feminine tenses like there are in many other languages like French, and it doesn't have a plural version of you or many pronouns in general.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

German was really hard to learn. The sentences weren't phrased as: "I went to the beach", translated, it was more "I beach went to". Really hard to get the hang of. Chinese took a lot of effort to learn, and so many years. It has over 80000 characters in the language. So I don't think English is the hardest language to learn, Chinese definitely is.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

English may be easier when it comes to masculine/feminine words (or lack there of), but with spelling it can get really confusing. For every rule there is going to be multiple exceptions (like I before E except after C) and pronunciation can be a bitch too. Not to mention, there's no standard for the tenses. In Italian, all verbs are conjugated based on their infinitive. It's like a template. There are irregular verbs, but it isn't hard to memorize those. With English, everything's different. (i.e. if the teacher taught, why doesn't the preacher praught?) I can see why many people disagreed, but honestly I'm finding Italian easier to pick up than a language I've been exposed to since birth.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

Not to mention people in other countries learn two and three different languages (including English)and you don't hear them complaining.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

Exactly. I live in America, and everyone is so snotty (for lack of a better term) about learning other languages. It really annoys me, haha.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

Yeah that annoys me too, yet those people are the ones who expect everyone else to learn English in order to be allowed to even come to this country. It's pretty sad. We should accept them with open arms and willingness to help because being around a bunch of people who you can barely understand and treat you like crap for it has to be a nightmare.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

That was pretty much my point for this post. I really can't stand the people who question why we have to take a foreign language in school.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

I don't entirely agree with you that English is the most difficult. I'm fluent in both English and Icelandic, having spoken both since I learned to speak, and I find English a lot easier to learn than Icelandic. Yeah, there are parts that are difficult, but of all the languages I've learned, English is one of the easier ones. Of course, this is my opinion. I think that it would differ a lot depending on who you ask and where you are in the world.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

this is bull, English is one of the simplest. it has one word for like 9 different definitions, so you barely even need to learn any words. you? you the single reader, you the group, you of whom i am speaking, you to whom i give something, you the respected adult, you the idiotic child, you because of whom this happened, and on, and on, and on...

by Anonymous 14 years ago

I took French for two years, and even though I've spoken English since birth, I think English is a lot easier. Conjugating the words and remembering whether the word was feminine or masculine were what I mainly struggled with, but also remembering what accent goes where. Not to mention that in French it's more of a general translation to English. Like in English you would say "I'm going to math class." Where as in French, you would say what means "I am going to the class of math." It just gets confusing since the words aren't in the same order, so it's harder to figure out what you want to say.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

There's a girl in my school who just moved to the US from China. She spoke no English whatsoever as of about a month ago. I feel so bad for her because English must be really hard to learn!

by Anonymous 14 years ago

We've been indoctrinated with the English language. Any other language is a perplexed tongue for us, regardless if the English language is the hardest.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

I took ancient Greek, Latin, French, German, English and Dutch classes. English is by far the easiest of those...

by Anonymous 14 years ago

French is my first language and I speak English fluently, but French is still a lot harder to learn because of the grammar In English there is only 3 differents ways to conjugate a verb, in French it's about 40 FOR ONE VERB

by Anonymous 14 years ago

There is no such thing as a hard or easy language. Each has its easy parts and hard parts, and it's more about the person and teacher than the language.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

This post was mainly about the unwillingness of people in America to learn a new language. The way I see it, if they were able to successfully learn English, which is not an easy task, they can probably learn any language if they really tried.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

To get into a good college you need at least two (preferably three) years of a foreign language. The real problem is we're separate from a lot of countries. There aren't a lot of people to speak french with. In Europe you can drive to a country that speaks another language. We have mexico, but few people want to go there, and it's still far from a lot.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

Well I guess I can't really judge if English is hard or not, because it's my main language, but right now I'm doing really well in Spanish. (: The only difficult thing I find about it is conjugating things, like instead of saying "I'm going, you're going, they're going", you say "yo vengo, tu viene, nosotros vienen." Or something like that. Hahaha.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

I hate that! It's so confusing.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

(+Me): haha i know right?! Where I used to live, they didn't really teach us spanish grammar, and where I just moved everyone knows it, so I just know tu means you, yo means i, and nosotros means we... or maybe it means they... xD

by Anonymous 14 years ago

I'm having troble in my french class. I mean, one thing we have that's simple is having the words be the same for guys and girls. we also have a lot of slang, which other languages don't, so we see it as tedious.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

(+Me): other languages have slang as well, you just don't learn that in class

by Anonymous 14 years ago

True, but my french teacher is telling us we can't shorten sort of things (Like you need to say eight o'Clock, not eight) I know other languages have slang, but from what I understand we have more.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

I dislike how classes put a lot of emphasis on writing/reading a language, rather than speaking and listening. Languages are for COMMUNICATING.

by Anonymous 14 years ago

Disagree, you barely conjugate verbs in english you just change the pronoun. And there is no gender to the words

by Anonymous 14 years ago

English is technically really easy, but practically very complicated. I love learning languages, I just can't understand why Americans find it so boring

by Anonymous 14 years ago