While it's true English has a ton of inconsistencies, complications etc. they tend to happen at a slightly higher level I think. There is a reasonably big subset of English that is quite easy.
French and German, not to mention Polish, are much harder to learn IMO, since the difficulties are up-front. Some examples:
- French conjugation of verbs is a whole world of its own
- German has noun cases, and you have to remember what verb comes with which cases
- Tenses in English are quite nicely organised into a Cartesian product of {past, present, future} x {simple, perfect, continuous}. It's fiddly to learn which one to use, but it's a plug-and-play use after that. By contrast, French has similar tenses, but spread around (not homomorphic to the nice Cartesian product, if you like). Plus, agreeing tenses ("sequence of tenses" apparently), OMG
- Nouns are non-gendered in English, and gendered in most European languages. Yes, a ship is a she, and referring to people or animals you use he/she etc. but in Polish and French, every word has a hidden, often undeducible gender you just have to know. Can't remember if German has rules for noun gender.
- English is very economical with words; nouns, derived verbs and adjectives are often the same word (e.g. "speed" the noun and "to speed", i.e. drive too fast). No such luck other side of the Channel. Similarly, "mouse"+"trap" -> "mousetrap". In French -> "piege a souris" ("trap for mouse").
- Comparing to Polish is a bit futile, but let's just mention nasty things English doesn't have: double numbers, in addition to singular and plural (one hen, two hens, ten hens will be "[one] kura", "[two] kury", "[ten] kur"), verb aspect (whether an action is completed or not), 7 noun cases, 22 conjugation groups, stem mutation on conjugation and inflection), nouns conjugate differently by gender, and of course genders have to be agreed between nouns and adjectives... just to name a few :)
http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/rules/future.htm comments that the future tense "is a very difficult aspect of English grammar", with several different forms:
- auxiliary verb will for predictions/statements of fact ("The sun will rise at 6.30 tomorrow")
- auxiliary verb going to for intentions ("We're going to buy a new car next month.")
- present continuous for arrangements; arrangement = a plan for the future that you have already thought about and discussed with someone else. ("I'm meeting my mother at the airport tomorrow")
- present simple for scheduled events ("The train departs in 10 minutes.")
That's in addition to the future continuous ("Don't call me after 10 o'clock. I'll be sleeping." and future perfect ("I hope my mother will have finished cooking dinner by the time I get home.")
Your Cartesian doesn't include negatives, where English uses the auxiliary verb do. (Compare "I do not know Spanish." with "I know not Spanish".)
* The sun will rise at 6.30 tomorrow
* We will buy a new car next month
* I will meet my mother at the airport tomorrow
* The train will depart in 10 minutes
All perfectly fine.
Here's an example where "will" cannot be substituted with "going to".
"If you sit down then the movie will start." <-- makes sense
"If you sit down then the movie is going to start." <-- ???
In the earlier list, that's "will" because it's a prediction or statement of fact.
Also, "The movie will start when you sit down" is probably better form all 'round.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_tense#English and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going-to_future are clear that there are differences between the uses of the different ways to express the future tense in English.
Quoting the latter link, "in some contexts the different constructions are interchangeable, while in others they carry somewhat different implications."
Do you disagree with that assessment? If so, why?
"Don't get close to the bomb, it will explode." implies the bomb will explode if someone gets close to it.
"Don't get close to the bomb, it's going to explode." implies it's going to explode (no matter what) and that people shouldn't be nearby.
Alas, they are not. You can have a perfect continuous, for instance: ‘I had been waiting’. Furthermore, the future doesn’t fit into the same paradigm as the other two tenses, both syntactically and semantically. I prefer to think of it as follows, at least in the realis case: {non-prospective, prospective} × {non-perfect, perfect} × {simple, continuous} × {past, present}. (The irrealis is more difficult, and overlaps somewhat with the realis.)
> Polish … double numbers
This is usually called the ‘dual’.
> … verb aspect (whether an action is completed or not)
English has this too (simple vs continuous is fundamentally an aspectual distinction), though not quite as pervasively as Polish or other Slavic languages.
It's all true, and I'm not pretending English is a trivial language. My point is, you can speak fairly good English with no knowledge of any of these complications. You simply cannot escape from fundamental complexities in all the European languages I know, that need to be navigated for even simple communication. It helps that the tenses are at least somewhat organised. This "Cartesian" model is much clearer to me than e.g. the French "bag of tenses".
Of course you can argue what's "basic communication". Something like "I go train Manchester tomorrow" is fairly unambigous, but very poor use of language. My impression and point is that it's much easier to speak simple, correct English than it is to speak simple, correct {French,German,Polish}.
Well, this is very dependent on exactly what you mean by ‘fairly good English’. I’d say that getting to this level is hardly trivial — I’ve seen many non-native speakers whose writing is nearly unreadable. Though then again, there are a fair number of native English speakers who also have terrible writing. As a monolingual speaker I can’t personally compare this aspect of English to other languages.
I'm thinking of things like .. in Slovak, spoon vs teaspoon is lyžiča vs lyžička. If you don't understand how they mutate the word endings - and as far as I can tell, memorise them all on a case-by-case basis, this is easily lost. small spoon, little spoon, tea spoon, there's not many ways in English for it not to be understood.
So my understanding is not so much that it's easy to learn, but the MVP of being able to communicate is a surprisingly small subset of the full language.
Isn't that just the diminutive? The English equivalent would be a "spoony." You might get looked at foony if you use that word to ask for a teaspoon, but if an English speaker understands what you mean, it's because they know their language well enough to guess the meaning based on a handful of words and the context.
Similarly, I'd expect a Slovak speaker to understand "lyžiča malé", "malinká lyžiča" and "čaju lyžiča", even though they probably sound horribly wrong. (BTW, my dictionary says it's spelled "lyžica".)
In Polish, a screw is "śrubka", and "śruba" is a big screw - also a ship's propeller. "Kowadło" is anvil, and "kowadełko" (small anvil) is the anvil bone in your ear. "Łyżka" is a tablespoon and "łyżeczka" is a teaspoon, not merely "smaller spoon". "Suka" is bitch (either pejorative or very technical term for female dog), "suczka" (little bitch) is what dog owners and breeders actually call female dogs. And so on. Diminutives of words can end up having quite different meanings to the original words.
Actually Polish does not have dual number, just singular and plural. What you are refering to is just different noun case - use plural genitive when numeral ends in 5,6,7,8,9 or multiple of 10.
Exactly. gettext PO-file translation comes to mind, the plural form rules (e.g. https://php-gettext.github.io/Languages/ )
> - Nouns are non-gendered in English, and gendered in most European languages. Yes, a ship is a she, and referring to people or animals you use he/she etc. but in Polish and French, every word has a hidden, often undeducible gender you just have to know. Can't remember if German has rules for noun gender.
French conjugation isn't as bad as its reputation suggests. Gender's what dissuaded me from trying to keep up with it, after getting pretty damn good in four fairly-rigorous semesters of French study in college. I never got a feel for guessing gender, because there are lots of rules and way too many exceptions to them. For that and other reasons it ends up being hard to drill French nouns out of context—and actually, drilling adjectives out of context isn't all that useful either, for similar reasons. You kinda have to study the whole thing at once to really internalize all the transformations words undergo due to gender, so using them correctly becomes quick & natural. So much for simple Anki decks and reclaiming otherwise-lost time to work on vocab.
Spanish is so much easier. I barely paid attention for a couple semesters of very half-assed Spanish instruction in high school, but I bet I could correctly guess noun gender in Spanish at a much higher rate than I could French nouns, which language I studied both more recently and probably got ~100x as good at as I ever was with Spanish.
My main issue with the language was pronunciation and orthography, the fact the way you write is not the way you read for many words was just bonkers for my brain used to read any word in Portuguese and know how to pronounce it but now that I see even natives struggling i don't mind it that much anymore HAHAHA!
The only adopted word I can think of that avoids this is ‘Canyon’, since the y is added from the ñ. In Spanish it is ‘Cañon’.
Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal's Portuguese have very different pronunciation rules (and accents) but you, as a speaker of any of these languages, would know how to pronounce any word you haven't seen before because the phonetics are consistent inside your accent, if you can read a word in Portuguese you know how it's going to be pronounced _in your accent_.
And this just doesn't exist in English as there are multiple words that are written the same but are pronounced differently. So while there are some rules as to how English is spoken the written language does not encode them, mostly because someone somewhere decided to use an orthography that would link the word to its source word in latin or french or whatever.
Having to understand the concept of grammatical tense through conjugating verbs in Spanish made me actually think about things like past tense, the present participle, the fact that English does not have a future tense, and much more. I’m really thankful for the realization but a little disappointed now that I realize our English curriculum in the United States is basically a culture class more than it is a language class.
There are really two different pedagogical goals:
- Learn to read and write accurately and clearly in the English language (what would, in Spain, Germany or China also be "English Class")
- Practice a REPL regarding things that other people have written (in the context of a larger corpus of things that people have written), by happenstance in English because that's what the students are most familiar with[0]. This could better be called "Language Arts" because presumably they do similar things in Germany, Spain and China but they (also presumably) don't call it "English Class".
[0] I had an angry moment in high school (among many) when I found out that my English class would be spending an entire year reading translated works.
There are different components (the REPL part is called “Literature" when separated out, and other major, though conceptually lower-level, parts are called “Composition” and “Grammar”, and there are probably more; equal with Literature, and also a kind of REPL, are “Conversation” or “Speech”, where the P and, in the former case, the R of the REPL are oral rather than written.)
Foreign languages are often taught similarly, including the REPL parts.
English class is usually a bunch of things. There's a reason they've moved away from just calling it "English", now. Comprehension is a huge part of literacy, yet most adults are pretty bad at it despite all the time schools spend trying to teach it to them.
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
The same can be said for all of the languages being discussed in this thread. I'm skeptical that English is any harder to learn at a native level than French, German or Polish.
One of the worst destructions of foreign pronunciation has to be Notre Dame. It hurts me to say "noter dayme". More recently, having to pronounce La Croix as "lah croy" has also been annoying. But unfortunately for both of those it's objectively wrong to pronounce them the French way since they are proper nouns and whoever is using that proper noun defines how it is pronounced when referring to them.
For this example specifically though, I do agree with other comments saying the "MVP" of English is quite small, but frankly English is just everywhere. Comme quelqu'en qui apprend le français maintenant, it's just hard to find content to immerse myself with in America, and that's with one of the most popular languages in the world. Could you say the same of English, in almost anywhere else in the world?
Depends on the age of the learner and the duration of the instruction. If you start learning a second language in elementary school or even in kindergarten and spread it out over the rest of the school years, then there's nothing to it. If, on the other hand, you start as an adult and want to learn a language over a short period of time, then my pity goes to you regardless of which language you are learning.
For every common word, English has a version derived from Celtic, Germanic and early French. Sometimes there are also versions with Latin or Greek descent. If you know any European language (stemming from Indo-European, languages like Hungarian and Finnish are something else entirely) then you'll quickly find words that you can link back to your own language.
Learning all the different words meaning the exact same thing is kind of a chore to really master it, but it's really not a bad language to quickly get started in and have a conversation in for a native speaker of many European languages.
The writing rules are completely arbitrary, though. Written English and spoken English rarely corresponds in any way that makes sense. The easiest example is that you can't tell if "read" is past or present tense, because -ea- has two entirely different pronunciations that are used arbitrarily. There's a good reason for many of these problems (the great vowel shift comes to mind) but that doesn't make the language any more usable in practice. This makes the learning experience a lot more challenging, because without the ability to somewhat reasonably sound out the words you're reading on paper, the learning process takes a lot more time and resources. Languages with easier to grasp spellings just come with better tools.
Every language has is peculiarities and inconsistencies. Even Latin, which at some point in history was standardized as much as possible has exemptions on exemptions to its many rules upon rules. As people speak a language, the language changes, so the older then language, the weirder it becomes. I don't think there are (natural, not invented) languages that are "hard" or "easy" to learn from a general standpoint, because if the language was actually hard and illogical, humans would've changed the way they used the language automatically already. From what I can tell, all languages can be easy to learn as long as your mother tongue is related to them in some way. It could be the grammar structure (like featuring nominative, accusative, etc.) or the way verbs are used, but as long as you can fine some match between your own language and the one you're trying to learn, you'll have an advantage.
I would think English is nearly impossible to teach to a Chinese person, but shouldn't be hard to teach to a French or German person at all. The same goes the other way around: there is much more overlap between Japanese and Chinese then there possibly could be between English and Chinese, so learning those languages becomes terribly complicated for many westerners.
As much as I despised having to learn different languages in middle/high school, I do think that everyone should be taught at least one other language. It'd help the students if that language was something similar to the local language, but for American or English kids it wouldn't matter if that second language was Spanish, German, French or Italian. What matters is the insight you get when you start thinking about language rather than using it. You start to get a feeling for why certain parts of the language are like they are, rather than just being told that this is just how the language works and you should deal with it. For example, explaining the use of "who" and "whom" to someone without an understanding of grammatical cases, which many Indo-European languages still feature today, might be an impossible task even native speakers sometimes struggle with. You could go it about another way and teach Middle English in English-speaking countries to explain these systems, but I don't think anyone would be interested in that.
Japanese is SOV and has a topic/subject distinction foreign to English. 今日 りんご を 食べる = Today apples (object marker) eat, the subject is implicit.
That's a good example, but since regardless of tense, both pronunciations have the same essential meaning (to consume/have consumed written material), it's not hard to pick up the meaning from context.
Incorrect usage can be much more problematic. The lose <--> loose issue is a really egregious example.
Lose (luz) is to "not win" or to "no longer have something", while loose (lew-se) can be "not tight" or "freed from some constraint."[0]
I imagine that sort of incorrect usage confuses non-native English users more than differences in pronunciation.
[0] Definitions and pronunciation are inexact, but close enough IMHO.