Well, technically you DID learn English, you just happened to learn it the easy way.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

my spanish teacher tells us this all the time! We have so many slangs and words that have no real meanings.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

well i wasn't born in a purely english speaking country...but i lived in the US since i was two...its not so bad if you move here at a young age..

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Why would you have to learn it? Most people don't.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Well, you don't really *have* to do anything, but English has become the standard of international communication so it's highly beneficial.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

I had to learn it, take it i was 6-9 maybe more but its actually much harder once your older

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Dude no, English is like one of the most simple languages!

by Anonymous 13 years ago

It's actually really complicated. We have a bunch of homonyms, homophones, complicated grammar rules and exceptions, and all of that is without slang. It is very hard for non-native speakers to learn the language (at an older age) because it's so complicated.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Do you really think other languages have no rules? Other languages have all that you listed, plus grammatical gender and a bunch of other stuff. I'm bi/trilingual and I know that English is the simplest of all languages I have known and learned. You lot of English speakers are the idiots so stfu and stop downing my completely truthful comment.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

"You lot of English speakers are the idiots..." Wanna stop generalizing? Kaythanksbye.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Oic, just skip the big part where I totally proved you lot of idiotic English speakers wrong, and go to the one little part where I was rude. That works as well.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Why are you so mad? I didn't insult you in my comment, I just made a point. I'm aware that other languages have rules. What I was saying was that the rules for English are screwy, with a ton of exceptions. No need to get your panties in a twist. And that website you showed me? It's a blog. Blogs do not count as reliable web sources, so nice try.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

You idiot, the blog used actual facts for its deductions. You cannot just say that one language has 7 genders and 7 cases by making it up. They truly researched each language and I double checked that they were correct. Even if they were off by 1-2 things, overall it was all correct. Listing rules of a language can in no way ever be an opinion. I wasn't even mad, more appalled at how many people down-voted my comment while it was absolutely true. EVERY language has many rules and exceptions, and English just happens to have one of the least numbers of rules. You DID insult me in my comment, implying that I do not know English in comparison to other languages. I wouldn't dare make such a statement if I was plainly an English-speaker from birth. I called you all stupid because you haven't listed ONE comparison to English to prove how it is difficult, and saying it has a lot of rules proves nothing if you're only speaking of English.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

"Oh gee, this banana has a thick peel and it's longer in height than in width. That makes it pretty hard to peel. I sure am glad I've peeled bananas from an early age so I've a lot of practice by now, otherwise if it was my first time it would be so very difficult for me to peel it, much harder than any other fruit WHICH I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT." -- what you lot are saying right now.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

1. That was a terrible analogy. 2. I never once insulted you in my first comment. You need to chill and take a Midol or something, because you are seriously overreacting. Just because people downvoted your comment doesn't mean you need to call me a moron or an idiot. 3. I listed at least three reasons why English is hard to learn. So calm down, clean the sand out of your vagina, and learn how to not take offense to people disagreeing with you.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

This is pointless. You, madam, are never going to learn to read more than 2 letters out of a paragraph, so it's physically impossible to convince you anything truthful. I'd already explained why I am not angry and why I called you lot idiots (you, of course, skipped completely over that) and you listed not reasons why English is hard to learn, but some descriptions of this thing called "language". You listed nothing that describes English specifically. Good day, and have fun still thinking you are right and not just a big butt trumpet.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

http://claritaslux.com/blog/the-hardest-language-to-learn/ moron. English barely has any rules, compared to other languages.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

cough through though bough tough explain how those all follow an easy rule and then compare to other languages.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

I said nothing about the rules being easy, just the language. Every language has rules, and most have more than English. Those words you listed use the digraph "gh" and the two uses - fff and silent. I don't think you meant the "ou" one explained as well, but I'll do it just in case - same exact thing but different digraph. This time it's ou and silent o. In Russian, there are more than the English ways to conjugate a verb. Mind, this is only one language and only one difference. In English to be able to: I can you can she can he can they can etc. can = the only word for every pronoun in present tense. In Russian to be able to: I могу you можешь(formal можете) he может she может they могут and so forth in present tense, differing from every verb. I´m learning Spanish right now, and even that language has more rules than English, even though it is so similar. Many of the rules are similar to Russian, and my English classmate...

by Anonymous 13 years ago

what i meant is very simple: why does "ough" make a different sound in all those words? in spanish almost all letters have one sound. same with welsh, like my username. looks complicated but isn't. english just doesn't do that.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Russian has 33 letters, and they all, too, have only one sound each. That's why every English word is spelled with so many Russian letters - they are letters of sound, while English has combinations of letters to make a sound. It's pointless really, to spell things "cough" while they could so easily be "kof". It's just that it would take so much effort to change it all, that they leave everything the way it is. Same reason America hasn't switched to the metric system.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

and thus, english is harder. QED

by Anonymous 13 years ago

If you're talking about the Alphabet, sure, but we were talking about the entire language weren't we? Having the most random alphabet but using the most simple grammar rules does not qualify a language as complicated. Besides, the English alphabet is nothing but a normal alphabet, squished together. Nearly every letter is made of two sounds - ay gee aych ah-y kay etc.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

You wouldn't think that if you'd ever tried to explain English to a non-native speaker.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

I'm a fucking non-native English speaker.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Agreed, but lots of languages are actually a lot more confusing. And whenever I'm in another country, I actually wish I had grown up bilingual; I think there are a lot of advantages to that.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

@856730 (duckshirt): English is actually the second hardest language to learn behind chinese. Though some people like to it is the first; they lie don't believe them.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

I've heard many opinions contrary to that, though. First, it obviously depends on what language you're coming from - if your native language is a European one like Spanish, German, Dutch, etc, English will obviously be easier because it shares a lot of similar-sounding words and the same alphabet, whereas learning Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Khmer, etc... will be a lot harder. Also, there are also parts of English that are much easier than other languages, even compared to European ones. For example, most of them have multiple gendered nouns where you have to remember which article to use and which adjective ending to go with (la montaña pequeña, el campo pequeño), and most of them require you to conjugate verbs based on the subject (Ik spreek, je spreekt), neither of which we ever have to worry about. And the sentence structure of German is actually a bit more complex than English. cont'd...

by Anonymous 13 years ago

I think it's mostly English teachers who claim that English is so hard to learn when they're teaching all the complex rules of English, but I'm not sure if they're really serious or they're just reminding you how tricky any natural language can be. I heard a guy who was a Spanish speaker who learned both English and Italian, and English came much easier to him. I think the hardest part of English would be the pronunciation, because most languages have very regular rules for how to pronounce a word. But it's still fairly regular that you can guess the spelling.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Of course there are going to to be many opinions that vary, and like you said it depends on your first language too. I really havee never heard an english teacher tell me that. I have seen the stats in web articles and a few of my textsbooks. Enlgish has so many exceptions to every rule and then we have idioms, homophones, and other thiings that can lead to confusion. Those things I believe lead to it gaining the title of seecond hardest language. I'm sorry for the spellimg mistakes, my computer is lagging.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

I know exactly what you mean OP! I started out in a French emersion school untill gr. 5, we had just started to learn the fundamentals of English when we moved and I had to go to an English school, it was so hard to make the transfer >.>

by Anonymous 13 years ago

I wouldn't say confusing to learn. Because in my country at least (Norway), English is taught to kids from the age of..what, 7/8? It just depends on how important you think grammar is.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

I came here at age 11 & knew no English at ALL ! I learned it with less that a year . It is so easy for me as was it for my brothers .

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Well English is pretty tough, once you look at the grammar point of view, it gets very complicated. But at the very least, English does have the Latin Alphabet which is the most used writing system. Imagine if you knew, per say Arabic. It would be very difficult learning how to write in English because there's a completely different alphabet.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

I'm from Brazil, and although no language is easy to learn, I think that English isn't that hard. I speak German, Spanish, Portuguese, English, and a little bit of Japanese. I personally think Spanish and Portuguese are the hardest of those I mentioned. Also, it helps that everywhere you look, you find stuff written in English, so you're always practicing. What I really mean is, I don't think English is a hard language to learn.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

I'm from the Netherlands, and I don't think English is very hard to learn. The grammar is much easier than it is in French or German.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Maybe English is a hard language, but I just think it's really easy because you hear it so often. Shows on tv, songs on the radio, computer games.. I was basically fluent before I got my first English lesson.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Ah, this post isn't really very accurate. You can't imagine it because you're a native English speaker, but its actually one of the easiest languages to learn. Most people I know actually prefer to learn French first because the transition from French > English is easier than English > French. And either way, most Latin-based languages are easiest because there are so many similarities between them. I speak Arabic and English fluently and I know for a fact Arabic is far, far more difficult than English. We learned both alphabets in Kindergarten and just progressed from there with two A Level languages. Its not really that difficult, but English is SO much easier, and its not even my native language.

by Anonymous 13 years ago