After lurking this sub for the longest time now, I'm so glad English is my native language. There are so many nuances that exist that I can't tell you why they're wrong, I can just tell you it's wrong. I'm currently learning Spanish, and it's quite a bit easier than I thought.
I’m a native English speaker and still struggle with it hehe
😛
But you don’t use these words daily, weekly or monthly so it’s ok not to know it.
Op a flock of crows (bird) is a murder of crows
At least they don’t really need to learn those special collective nouns. Most native speakers don’t really know them or they do as more of a joke than an actual thing you need to know. There are only a few collective nouns like “flock”, “pack”, etc that are really necessary
It’s the same for every language. I was learning English and Japanese when I was at school. By learning new languages I noticed how much my own language doesn’t actually make sense sometimes
On the other hand I am so glad I am a native Chinese speaker
We teach English here since we're like 3 years old so picking up English isn't that difficult but the same isn't true the other way around
Chinese knowledge also carried me in japanese learning
My Hispanic linguistics professor started off pretty much every class session of ours telling my classmates and me that we should count our lucky stars that English is our first Language. I think about it all the time. English is such a fucking weird language.
There's two general language families combining and competing for how things are spelled and conjugated.
Basic words are Germanic and grammar follows Germanic trends. These are all of the simple words that are used to build sentences, and many basic or very old language concepts. You essentially cannot speak English without using some Germanic words incidentally. Things like "the" "this" "these" "is" "in" "are" "am" "and" "to" are all Germanic. These words are conjugated in Germanic ways.
More complex words, scientific concepts, luxury items in antiquity and /or the " fancier" synonym to existing Germanic concepts would be French and Latin loan words. Say words for the meat, rather than the animal.
Eg:
Germanic-cow | romance - beef
Germanic-pig | romance - pork
These don't conjugate like the Germanic words would, and can follow different spelling/pronunciation rules depending when and where they come from. These words look familiar if you speak any of Latin's descendants, but they have specific English endings that defines how a broad term or idea is used specifically. Some latin route words are common enough to be turned into prefixes to add meaning to existing words. An example would be "mal-" to mean bad or harmful from the latin "malus/malum"
Non-germanic words aren't *required* to speak grammatically correct English, although it does sound *very wierd* when 100% removed at this point in history. This 100% Germanic English "linguistic purism" exercise is called Anglish, and you can find text written in it if you like, but some terms can be hard for native readers to fully grasp at speed, so be careful **its not modern English**. However, strong "patriotic" English speakers, when examined, often use the (common) Germanic variants of words where available. People like Winston Churchill was infamous for this but almost any politician does it to a noticeable degree, once you know to look. These words often feel more relatable to people because they're less complex, or at least feel that way to a Germanic language speaker, particularly when latin is very scientific and verbose in comparison.
Edit: differentiated and specified "conjugation" from "grammar", cleaned thing up.
>Basic words and grammar follow Germanic grammar trends. These are all simple words that are used to build sentences, and many basic or very old language concepts. You essentially cannot speak English without using some Germanic words incidentally. Things like "the" "this" "these" "is" "in" "are" "am" "and" "to" are all Germanic. These words are conjugated in Germanic ways and generally don't follow romance language logic at all, because they pre-date it.
Also words that pluralize with -en (e.g. children and oxen) are showing their Germanic roots (e.g. Kind/Kindern and Ochse/Ochsen), and man/men is an example of another type of Germanic pluralization (e.g. der Mann/die Männer).
This is pretty much a non-sequitur, as the overwhelming majority of the nouns cited in the OP are Germanic in origin, with the exceptions of
* Moose, which comes from neither French nor Latin but from an Algonquin language
* Pan, which is of Latin origin but was borrowed into *Proto-Germanic* some 2000 years ago
* Boot, which was borrowed from French (but which in turn ultimately comes from Frankish, which was also a Germanic language)
Sorry, but that's just not correct. I know it sounds right, but it isn't.
English grammar is almost completely Germanic (a few exceptions are used in law, like court martial or attorney general). Words of Latin origin usually follow standard English grammar rules.
As a language learner I like to include conjugation in with grammar as its pretty integral.
Anyways, I specified that I mean the conjugation of non Germanic loan words is the part that breaks existing Germanic conjugation trends/patterns. They're exceptions to grammar rules, which is what OP was talking about
It doesn't though. the vast majority of inherited Germanic words follows the usual pattern, which is that the plural is marked with an "s". You know, words like "word" for example.
Only verbs conjugate. All other words decline.
And in any case, most of your other I formation is wrong. The words that “break” the common English grammar rules (which are one set of Germanic rules) are usually following other, largely forgotten, Germanic language rules. All of the ones in the OP are Germanic.
This comes from a delightful little poem [attributed to someone called Richard Krogh](http://www.cupola.com/html/wordplay/english1.htm) in case anyone is interested
It always gives me Seussian vibes.
Yup! English is also pretty easy for beginners. We don’t gender nouns, don’t gender or number adjectives, and barely conjugate verbs. You can start building sentences pretty quickly. It has its challenges but whenever I hear “English is the hardest language” I just assume this person only speaks English that it is their first foreign language.
Eh it makes up for that in phrasal verbs.
All languages are hard. Period. But English is a lot more inconsistent in its rules than most given its history, and it’s relatively recently combination with another language under very strange circumstances (words added as is, without nativatization or changing the grammar)
Honestly, we need to stop with the “English is the hardest language to learn” thing not only because it’s inaccurate, but also because it’s *highly* dependent on your native language. And the sentiment kinda ignores the fact that native English speakers can also learn different languages, some of which we’ll find harder than others.
Edit: I also overwhelmingly see this statement from native speakers. People I know who speak English as a second language say it’s really not as hard as people (usually natives) make it seem.
I don’t think English is uniquely difficult. And you’re correct that difficulty in learning it is dependent on your native language.
I also have no real statistics on how non native speakers rate English’s difficulty.
What I can say is though is English *is* uniquely inconsistent in its grammar, spelling, and pronunciation due to the whole French thing. All languages have exceptions for sure, but English has a lot more of them than you’d see in most languages.
How that puts on English on the difficulty scale is difficult to say for sure even scientifically due to the difficulty in separating out folks opinion on the matter to other factors like how different the native language is.
There are also some pretty unique features to English. English is heavy on the collocations, English has a ton of vowels and a few unique consonant sounds, and the phrasal verbs are another common pain point. How those compare to any languages unique features is even more difficult to say for sure.
Sorry I’m getting back late. Anyway, yes, but inconsistent grammar does not = hardest. For example, I find the basic past tense in French very hard. I also find it extremely difficult to remember the genders of all words. For a native English speaker, that is objectively difficult. I’m sure it’s the same way for French people learning English, but they can’t say that it’s objectively harder than having to memorize s gender for every single word.
Edit: The other things you mentioned are hard and I won’t deny or go against that.
we don't need a time machine, just some person or organization with the necessary clout to convince the majority of english speakers to go along. of course, inventing a time machine would probably be easier.
No organization exists like that. Even outside the traditional Anglo sphere, countries like India and the Philippines have their own unique native dialect.
And trying to change word’s spelling to necessarily reflect their pronunciation is going to require picking a dialect to favor, which is an inherently political choice.
If enough people agree to turn off our autocorrect/spellcheck and not correct each other on spelling and within a year all of the annoying spellings that are hard to remember would be ironed out, which to imo is one of the only realistic scenarios I can imagine reforms to stick in the modern day
Trying to get Americans alone to agree on another American spelling reform would be a feat harder than climbing Mount Everest, let alone trying to get the entire English-speaking world to agree to new spelling and whose pronunciation would be used. It would also be extremely costly, and we all know governments don’t like spending money on things that actually make sense.
we don't even need to consider recent political regressions. it's been the case more or less continuously since 1776 that americans will not agree to a british effort and brits will not agree to an american effort.
There’s a [great bit](https://youtu.be/QWzYaZDK6Is?si=ApCWO5HY5zvrhCYz) from a comedian named Brian Regan about the ox/box/moose/goose plurals. I highly recommend!
sorry, but that one cartoon cat thinks that "meeses" is an acceptable plural for "mouse", so using "meese" as a plural for "moose" would simply be too confusing.
I came in here ready to discuss an issue, and was met with Dr. Seuss!
English borrows a lot of vocabulary and structure from other languages. This causes the rules to seem contradictory, and leads to inconsistencies in pronunciation and spelling.
It's a fusion of a Germanic Language with a Romance Language (thanks to the Norman invasion), using an alphabet that was not only not designed for the language, it wasn't designed for the languages that preceeded it.
there’ll always be exceptions to set rules, just is what it is. the thing with english is you can get away with using the wrong plural for certain words (would only do so if you know the actual plural, for the sake of accuracy). like “oxes” for example, i don’t think a lot of people are aware of the *actual* plural so they may say use oxes themselves
It's because America is the melting pot, so to speak. It's been the destination of many immigrants for so long. Over time, things like language blend together. You get a little if this a little of that, and before you know it, we have some of EVERYTHING... ALL MIXED UP. I find that concept beautiful. I'm proud of the "melting pot" concept. I wish more people would stop claiming ownership of a country their lineage also immigrated to after it was violently stolen and see the richness of every culture. And the beauty of everything combined.
While I do agree that English is very easy to learn compared to any other foreign languages, that doesn't mean it's not hard. English isn't very consistent with it's plural forms, unlike languages such as Russian (my first language), and it can be hard having to memorize a separate ending for every word.
Anything that you don't know and have to learn is difficult in a way.
By it not being hard at all, I mean (obviously) in comparison to other languages. There's no need to get offended here. These are objectively true, quantifiable things. I posted some examples of that in my other reply.
I've spent my whole life perfecting my command of the English language. By stating (the literal fact) that it's not as hard as many other languages, I am in a way diminishing my own effort and achievement. It's not a "viewpoint of an educator" at all. I'm just not afraid to say things as they are, even though I'm technically sawing the branch I'm sitting on.
Basic spoken English is relatively simple. Written English has bizarrely arbitrary phonetics. Informal English is *brutal.*
Case in point: In 2005, there was a McDonald's web banner ad campaign that attempted to use current slang. The ad writers misunderstood the meaning of the phrase "I'd hit that." so the banner featured a young man expressing his desire to have sexual relations with a double cheeseburger.
There are languages (eg. Polish) that have like 10+ different endings for **nouns themselves** depending on the case, number etc. For comparison, English nouns never change, except for plural (and arguably the 's genitive if you want to make that count). The same goes for adjectives and adverbs, which also don't change at all in English.
In German you have like 15 different article variations depending on the case and gender of the noun.
In some languages (like Chinese) some words literally differ by a small variation in the single TONE. Such two words can mean completely different things.
There are languages that have much more flexible word order. This makes it much harder to learn as well, as opposed to English in which it's pretty rigid (though of course some variation is possible).
These are all just examples, there's much more complexity in these languages obviously that is not found in English.
The poem in the OP is a funny little thing, but minute differences between how some words are pluralized are nothing compared to how cases and inflection works in other languages. English speakers literally cannot comprehend how much difficulty is present in the grammar of some languages.
I don't think there's a single resource/site that lists "all the reasons why English is so much easier to learn than most languages". This is obvious to anyone who has any basic knowledge of the structure of languages.
See, me personally, I think that we should have a more complicated pluralization scheme in English. I get that it's nice just sticking -s or -es onto the end of words (ignoring the numerous irregularities/holdovers from older forms of the language), but I think it would be cool if we had more interesting plurals like they did in Latin or Greek
Our language is a lawless amalgamation of millions of obscure phares and dialects from around the world. There is no understanding. Only acceptance of the madness.
From someone who is not native English and tried to learn many other languages--all languages have exception and difficult parts, but English is really amongst the easy ones. --Sincerely, someone who has French as first language and failed French so hard but aced English.
Nah, at least it doesn't have gendered words or what we call in Serbia padeži. Padeži are basically different ways to write/say words depending on the context in the sentence. And there are a ton of unwritten rules for them.
\- Oxen uses one of the old plural suffixes
\- Geese went though a sound shift called I-mutation, which happened to most Germanic languages (\*gansiz→\*gansi→\*gōsi→\*gø̄si→gœ̄s→gēs→geese), while moose is a loanword
\- Men also went through I-mutation because it also got the \*-iz suffix, while pan got \*-ōn, and would later get the -es suffix in Middle English
\- Same reason as moose
\- Same reason as pans, but booth got -ôz
\- Same reason as oxen, although brethren isn't exactly the plural of brother anymore
\- Feminine nouns declined differently than masculine ones, and the sh in she is because of an irregular sound shift
I remember my 5th grade English teacher handing out part of a poem (link below) for us to read when some of the boys in my grade were complaining about having to take English classes because they “already knew English” and it “isn’t that hard anyway.”
As a native speaker, it’s a really sensorially satisfying poem to read out loud, but I can’t imagine the crisis I’d have about English pronunciation and spelling “rules” if I was learning the language because this poem really emphasizes how random and illogical it all seems from the surface.
The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité:
https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/chaos.html
Base grammar and syntax is pretty easy, what makes it hard for me it ghat it's a very irregular language. Pronunciation is no better, every time I read a new word I have to look for a voice sample to learn how it is pronounced.
English just took all the weirdest parts of other languages and smushed them together. There are different ways words get pluralized due to some originating from French, Latin, German, and Greek, which all have different systems of pluralism, thus we have ways words get pluralized from all of them, iirc. Not an expert, just yapping and could be totally wrong in every way.
A long and confusing history that involve Germanic languages and Romance languages having an affair and a love child. The Romans added Latin to the original Pict Gallic (and other) languages. The Vikings brought over their languages. French was the official language of England for a long time due to their invasion so a lot of English is French. Then the printing press from the continent got involved and solidified the spelling. Next came the Great Vowel Shift and other pronunciation changes which moved the sounds but not the spelling. You should read 'The Chaos' -a poem by Gerard Nolst Trenité. It covers the strange pronunciation of English.
After lurking this sub for the longest time now, I'm so glad English is my native language. There are so many nuances that exist that I can't tell you why they're wrong, I can just tell you it's wrong. I'm currently learning Spanish, and it's quite a bit easier than I thought.
I’m a native English speaker and still struggle with it hehe 😛 But you don’t use these words daily, weekly or monthly so it’s ok not to know it. Op a flock of crows (bird) is a murder of crows
At least they don’t really need to learn those special collective nouns. Most native speakers don’t really know them or they do as more of a joke than an actual thing you need to know. There are only a few collective nouns like “flock”, “pack”, etc that are really necessary
We tend to work around it, I don’t know in modern English or chat people would understand a lot of it now. We talk internet
It’s the same for every language. I was learning English and Japanese when I was at school. By learning new languages I noticed how much my own language doesn’t actually make sense sometimes
Ikr I'm learning Japanese and it feels so much more simple than English
\*simpler
I'm pretty sure both are grammatically correct. Simple is one of those words you can use both for, but simpler is more concise and more common.
On the other hand I am so glad I am a native Chinese speaker We teach English here since we're like 3 years old so picking up English isn't that difficult but the same isn't true the other way around Chinese knowledge also carried me in japanese learning
Fair enough
I'm tryna learn German but man this shit is hard af compared to English
I tried learning Norwegian, just to find out I was learning bokmål which is a written, not necessarily spoken language..
And I’m thankful I learned it at a young age. 😭😭😭. *It’s so inconsistenttt*
My Hispanic linguistics professor started off pretty much every class session of ours telling my classmates and me that we should count our lucky stars that English is our first Language. I think about it all the time. English is such a fucking weird language.
It really is.
There's two general language families combining and competing for how things are spelled and conjugated. Basic words are Germanic and grammar follows Germanic trends. These are all of the simple words that are used to build sentences, and many basic or very old language concepts. You essentially cannot speak English without using some Germanic words incidentally. Things like "the" "this" "these" "is" "in" "are" "am" "and" "to" are all Germanic. These words are conjugated in Germanic ways. More complex words, scientific concepts, luxury items in antiquity and /or the " fancier" synonym to existing Germanic concepts would be French and Latin loan words. Say words for the meat, rather than the animal. Eg: Germanic-cow | romance - beef Germanic-pig | romance - pork These don't conjugate like the Germanic words would, and can follow different spelling/pronunciation rules depending when and where they come from. These words look familiar if you speak any of Latin's descendants, but they have specific English endings that defines how a broad term or idea is used specifically. Some latin route words are common enough to be turned into prefixes to add meaning to existing words. An example would be "mal-" to mean bad or harmful from the latin "malus/malum" Non-germanic words aren't *required* to speak grammatically correct English, although it does sound *very wierd* when 100% removed at this point in history. This 100% Germanic English "linguistic purism" exercise is called Anglish, and you can find text written in it if you like, but some terms can be hard for native readers to fully grasp at speed, so be careful **its not modern English**. However, strong "patriotic" English speakers, when examined, often use the (common) Germanic variants of words where available. People like Winston Churchill was infamous for this but almost any politician does it to a noticeable degree, once you know to look. These words often feel more relatable to people because they're less complex, or at least feel that way to a Germanic language speaker, particularly when latin is very scientific and verbose in comparison. Edit: differentiated and specified "conjugation" from "grammar", cleaned thing up.
>Basic words and grammar follow Germanic grammar trends. These are all simple words that are used to build sentences, and many basic or very old language concepts. You essentially cannot speak English without using some Germanic words incidentally. Things like "the" "this" "these" "is" "in" "are" "am" "and" "to" are all Germanic. These words are conjugated in Germanic ways and generally don't follow romance language logic at all, because they pre-date it. Also words that pluralize with -en (e.g. children and oxen) are showing their Germanic roots (e.g. Kind/Kindern and Ochse/Ochsen), and man/men is an example of another type of Germanic pluralization (e.g. der Mann/die Männer).
This is pretty much a non-sequitur, as the overwhelming majority of the nouns cited in the OP are Germanic in origin, with the exceptions of * Moose, which comes from neither French nor Latin but from an Algonquin language * Pan, which is of Latin origin but was borrowed into *Proto-Germanic* some 2000 years ago * Boot, which was borrowed from French (but which in turn ultimately comes from Frankish, which was also a Germanic language)
Sorry, but that's just not correct. I know it sounds right, but it isn't. English grammar is almost completely Germanic (a few exceptions are used in law, like court martial or attorney general). Words of Latin origin usually follow standard English grammar rules.
As a language learner I like to include conjugation in with grammar as its pretty integral. Anyways, I specified that I mean the conjugation of non Germanic loan words is the part that breaks existing Germanic conjugation trends/patterns. They're exceptions to grammar rules, which is what OP was talking about
It doesn't though. the vast majority of inherited Germanic words follows the usual pattern, which is that the plural is marked with an "s". You know, words like "word" for example.
Only verbs conjugate. All other words decline. And in any case, most of your other I formation is wrong. The words that “break” the common English grammar rules (which are one set of Germanic rules) are usually following other, largely forgotten, Germanic language rules. All of the ones in the OP are Germanic.
Moose’s etymology is Algonquin, though.
And regular. The irregular words in that paragraph are goose and mouse, which are Germanic.
Oh I thought you were saying all of the words were Germanic.
This comes from a delightful little poem [attributed to someone called Richard Krogh](http://www.cupola.com/html/wordplay/english1.htm) in case anyone is interested It always gives me Seussian vibes.
I’m also a fan of the poem “The Chaos” by Gerard Nolst Trenité: https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/chaos.html
As I've said before, sorry learners. We weren't consulted on these decisions either. 🤷♂️
tbh it's not that hard when you have enough practice. There are many languages that are way more difficult to learn
Yup! English is also pretty easy for beginners. We don’t gender nouns, don’t gender or number adjectives, and barely conjugate verbs. You can start building sentences pretty quickly. It has its challenges but whenever I hear “English is the hardest language” I just assume this person only speaks English that it is their first foreign language.
Eh it makes up for that in phrasal verbs. All languages are hard. Period. But English is a lot more inconsistent in its rules than most given its history, and it’s relatively recently combination with another language under very strange circumstances (words added as is, without nativatization or changing the grammar)
Honestly, we need to stop with the “English is the hardest language to learn” thing not only because it’s inaccurate, but also because it’s *highly* dependent on your native language. And the sentiment kinda ignores the fact that native English speakers can also learn different languages, some of which we’ll find harder than others. Edit: I also overwhelmingly see this statement from native speakers. People I know who speak English as a second language say it’s really not as hard as people (usually natives) make it seem.
I don’t think English is uniquely difficult. And you’re correct that difficulty in learning it is dependent on your native language. I also have no real statistics on how non native speakers rate English’s difficulty. What I can say is though is English *is* uniquely inconsistent in its grammar, spelling, and pronunciation due to the whole French thing. All languages have exceptions for sure, but English has a lot more of them than you’d see in most languages. How that puts on English on the difficulty scale is difficult to say for sure even scientifically due to the difficulty in separating out folks opinion on the matter to other factors like how different the native language is. There are also some pretty unique features to English. English is heavy on the collocations, English has a ton of vowels and a few unique consonant sounds, and the phrasal verbs are another common pain point. How those compare to any languages unique features is even more difficult to say for sure.
Sorry I’m getting back late. Anyway, yes, but inconsistent grammar does not = hardest. For example, I find the basic past tense in French very hard. I also find it extremely difficult to remember the genders of all words. For a native English speaker, that is objectively difficult. I’m sure it’s the same way for French people learning English, but they can’t say that it’s objectively harder than having to memorize s gender for every single word. Edit: The other things you mentioned are hard and I won’t deny or go against that.
It's better than memorizing a unique plural for every word like in German
If only we had a time machine, we could go back and set more simplified spelling rules.
we don't need a time machine, just some person or organization with the necessary clout to convince the majority of english speakers to go along. of course, inventing a time machine would probably be easier.
No organization exists like that. Even outside the traditional Anglo sphere, countries like India and the Philippines have their own unique native dialect. And trying to change word’s spelling to necessarily reflect their pronunciation is going to require picking a dialect to favor, which is an inherently political choice. If enough people agree to turn off our autocorrect/spellcheck and not correct each other on spelling and within a year all of the annoying spellings that are hard to remember would be ironed out, which to imo is one of the only realistic scenarios I can imagine reforms to stick in the modern day
> inventing a time machine would probably be easier.
Trying to get Americans alone to agree on another American spelling reform would be a feat harder than climbing Mount Everest, let alone trying to get the entire English-speaking world to agree to new spelling and whose pronunciation would be used. It would also be extremely costly, and we all know governments don’t like spending money on things that actually make sense.
we don't even need to consider recent political regressions. it's been the case more or less continuously since 1776 that americans will not agree to a british effort and brits will not agree to an american effort.
There’s a [great bit](https://youtu.be/QWzYaZDK6Is?si=ApCWO5HY5zvrhCYz) from a comedian named Brian Regan about the ox/box/moose/goose plurals. I highly recommend!
Yeah, isn’t it almost word for word this post? lol
As a native speaker, I definitely agree that the plural of moose should be meese. :-D
sorry, but that one cartoon cat thinks that "meeses" is an acceptable plural for "mouse", so using "meese" as a plural for "moose" would simply be too confusing.
No the plural of mouse should be moieces and it should be pronounced the exact same as "meese". That's how we do it in english.
Should we do a petition for it ✋.
I need to read what I just read again...
I came in here ready to discuss an issue, and was met with Dr. Seuss! English borrows a lot of vocabulary and structure from other languages. This causes the rules to seem contradictory, and leads to inconsistencies in pronunciation and spelling.
It's a fusion of a Germanic Language with a Romance Language (thanks to the Norman invasion), using an alphabet that was not only not designed for the language, it wasn't designed for the languages that preceeded it.
I guess you could say William the Bastard really bastardized the English language.
Someone once said, “English isn’t one language, it’s three languages wearing a trench coat” and I couldn’t agree more
My favorite term is "Franken-languagr".
there’ll always be exceptions to set rules, just is what it is. the thing with english is you can get away with using the wrong plural for certain words (would only do so if you know the actual plural, for the sake of accuracy). like “oxes” for example, i don’t think a lot of people are aware of the *actual* plural so they may say use oxes themselves
Mary me because I know accept, except, and expect, aspect are different.
lol I do 😂❤
Not all fowl are geese. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fowl
Did you write this? It’s fantastic, great poem!
This should be a poem (made me laugh lmao)
It's because America is the melting pot, so to speak. It's been the destination of many immigrants for so long. Over time, things like language blend together. You get a little if this a little of that, and before you know it, we have some of EVERYTHING... ALL MIXED UP. I find that concept beautiful. I'm proud of the "melting pot" concept. I wish more people would stop claiming ownership of a country their lineage also immigrated to after it was violently stolen and see the richness of every culture. And the beauty of everything combined.
It's not hard at all. English is one of the easier languages out there to learn as a foreign language by many objective metrics.
While I do agree that English is very easy to learn compared to any other foreign languages, that doesn't mean it's not hard. English isn't very consistent with it's plural forms, unlike languages such as Russian (my first language), and it can be hard having to memorize a separate ending for every word.
I get that this can be your viewpoint as an educator but I'm not sure "It's not hard at all" is particularly useful in this setting.
Anything that you don't know and have to learn is difficult in a way. By it not being hard at all, I mean (obviously) in comparison to other languages. There's no need to get offended here. These are objectively true, quantifiable things. I posted some examples of that in my other reply. I've spent my whole life perfecting my command of the English language. By stating (the literal fact) that it's not as hard as many other languages, I am in a way diminishing my own effort and achievement. It's not a "viewpoint of an educator" at all. I'm just not afraid to say things as they are, even though I'm technically sawing the branch I'm sitting on.
Basic spoken English is relatively simple. Written English has bizarrely arbitrary phonetics. Informal English is *brutal.* Case in point: In 2005, there was a McDonald's web banner ad campaign that attempted to use current slang. The ad writers misunderstood the meaning of the phrase "I'd hit that." so the banner featured a young man expressing his desire to have sexual relations with a double cheeseburger.
I’ve heard this and am willing to believe it. But do you by any chance have a link to these metrics?
There are languages (eg. Polish) that have like 10+ different endings for **nouns themselves** depending on the case, number etc. For comparison, English nouns never change, except for plural (and arguably the 's genitive if you want to make that count). The same goes for adjectives and adverbs, which also don't change at all in English. In German you have like 15 different article variations depending on the case and gender of the noun. In some languages (like Chinese) some words literally differ by a small variation in the single TONE. Such two words can mean completely different things. There are languages that have much more flexible word order. This makes it much harder to learn as well, as opposed to English in which it's pretty rigid (though of course some variation is possible). These are all just examples, there's much more complexity in these languages obviously that is not found in English. The poem in the OP is a funny little thing, but minute differences between how some words are pluralized are nothing compared to how cases and inflection works in other languages. English speakers literally cannot comprehend how much difficulty is present in the grammar of some languages. I don't think there's a single resource/site that lists "all the reasons why English is so much easier to learn than most languages". This is obvious to anyone who has any basic knowledge of the structure of languages.
See, me personally, I think that we should have a more complicated pluralization scheme in English. I get that it's nice just sticking -s or -es onto the end of words (ignoring the numerous irregularities/holdovers from older forms of the language), but I think it would be cool if we had more interesting plurals like they did in Latin or Greek
Lol read "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenite https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
The man who whistled while he wheeled wheels while wielding whistles was whittling.
Something that helps to memorize definitions, rules, and exceptions is to learn the etymology of the words you're wondering about
The differences in plurals comes from Germanic where how the plural is formed was based on the linguistic category of the word.
Our language is a lawless amalgamation of millions of obscure phares and dialects from around the world. There is no understanding. Only acceptance of the madness.
Well, yeah, but pretty much every language has this. This doesn’t make English uniquely difficult. All languages have irregulars.
Пиздите на русском, а то я нихуя не выкупаю
I don't know if this is original content or not, but it was beautiful haha! Edited to add, twas not original. Still great though!
From someone who is not native English and tried to learn many other languages--all languages have exception and difficult parts, but English is really amongst the easy ones. --Sincerely, someone who has French as first language and failed French so hard but aced English.
As someone whose mother tongue is a tonal language and who is studying a 3rd language that has genders, English is nothing to compare lol
INDEEEDDDD. I learn english since elementary school until I'm studying undergraduate, my English is still bad 🙂🙂
Nah, at least it doesn't have gendered words or what we call in Serbia padeži. Padeži are basically different ways to write/say words depending on the context in the sentence. And there are a ton of unwritten rules for them.
\- Oxen uses one of the old plural suffixes \- Geese went though a sound shift called I-mutation, which happened to most Germanic languages (\*gansiz→\*gansi→\*gōsi→\*gø̄si→gœ̄s→gēs→geese), while moose is a loanword \- Men also went through I-mutation because it also got the \*-iz suffix, while pan got \*-ōn, and would later get the -es suffix in Middle English \- Same reason as moose \- Same reason as pans, but booth got -ôz \- Same reason as oxen, although brethren isn't exactly the plural of brother anymore \- Feminine nouns declined differently than masculine ones, and the sh in she is because of an irregular sound shift
I remember my 5th grade English teacher handing out part of a poem (link below) for us to read when some of the boys in my grade were complaining about having to take English classes because they “already knew English” and it “isn’t that hard anyway.” As a native speaker, it’s a really sensorially satisfying poem to read out loud, but I can’t imagine the crisis I’d have about English pronunciation and spelling “rules” if I was learning the language because this poem really emphasizes how random and illogical it all seems from the surface. The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité: https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/chaos.html
How i learned English English is so hard 😭
It’s a Germanic thing, you wouldn’t get it.
Base grammar and syntax is pretty easy, what makes it hard for me it ghat it's a very irregular language. Pronunciation is no better, every time I read a new word I have to look for a voice sample to learn how it is pronounced.
English is a Mashup of various languages. It really makes no sense and I can't imagine learning it as a non native speaker.
Rhyming couplets are decidedly easier when it's a whole poem comparing single-plural pairs, arent they?
English just took all the weirdest parts of other languages and smushed them together. There are different ways words get pluralized due to some originating from French, Latin, German, and Greek, which all have different systems of pluralism, thus we have ways words get pluralized from all of them, iirc. Not an expert, just yapping and could be totally wrong in every way.
A long and confusing history that involve Germanic languages and Romance languages having an affair and a love child. The Romans added Latin to the original Pict Gallic (and other) languages. The Vikings brought over their languages. French was the official language of England for a long time due to their invasion so a lot of English is French. Then the printing press from the continent got involved and solidified the spelling. Next came the Great Vowel Shift and other pronunciation changes which moved the sounds but not the spelling. You should read 'The Chaos' -a poem by Gerard Nolst Trenité. It covers the strange pronunciation of English.
Blame the French for invading england and smashing their language into ours