English is considered one of the hardest languages to learn because we have rules. And then we don't use them. It doesn't help that it's actually something like a 5 language mash up.

[–] Voyajer@lemmy.world 19 points 5 days ago

The upside is you can speak in the most broken English imaginable and with patience you'll be able to get much of your point across

[–] idiomaddict@lemmy.world 16 points 5 days ago (1 children)

If English were one of the hardest languages to learn, it would not be the most common second language worldwide. It is a difficult language to master, but we barely conjugate verbs, have only remnants of a case system, and no grammatical gender.

The hardest parts about English are the spelling and the advanced weird cases, like “I will have done that by tonight,” but those are not things that the standard language learner has to care about. It’s perfectly fine to ignore all the rules that don’t inhibit communication, so no ESL speaker needs to learn about not splitting infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions (unless they want to do academic writing in the arts, I guess).

[–] TheBrideWoreCrimson@sopuli.xyz 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Greek, Latin, French were once important languages, yet no-one ever called them easy. English seems easy to you because you're used to it. The grammar, especially the tenses, are extraordinarily hard to get right and I would comment a lot more if I knew which fucking tense to use when.
To illustrate: English grammar links to "English verbs," a huge Wikipedia article on its own, which then branches further out to stuff like "Simple past" with their own Wikipedia pages. You - you realize other languages don't have something similar, not because they are necessarily less spoken, but because they don't need it?

[–] idiomaddict@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Tenses are one of the more difficult aspects of English, as I noted, yes. Luckily, English allows for asimplification in most cases. English seems easy to me because I’m a language instructor (not teaching English) working with students from all over the world and they almost always rate English as pretty easy compared to other languages they’ve learned. One of my current students is a native Arabic speaker who found English easier than Persian in spite of the increased linguistic distance, for example.

The German and Spanish Wikipedias both also include pages for characteristic tenses and modes, respectively (the reason the English page for that case is split is because it’s got a different name in English). Every language has complex aspects, but one does not need to learn how to properly distinguish between “I would have been going” and “I would have gone” to speak English at a B2 level.

I’m sorry you’re not confident in your English, it’s great. Perhaps you haven’t mastered the tenses (many native speakers also have difficulty with them), but you are perfectly competent at communicating in English.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Farsi and Arabic are not even remotely related, so I don't think that is the right thing to say as an example. Also, Farsi, like English, is Indo-European. Arabic is Semitic. So if anything, Farsi and English are much closer to each other than Arabic and either of them.

Languages from groups right next to each other do not have to be related at all. Finnish and Swedish were mentioned above. Swedish is Indo-European, Finnish is Uralic.

[–] idiomaddict@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

They use similar alphabets and have a lot of vocabulary in common, so many Arabic speakers find it pretty easy to learn, ime, though that doesn’t work the other way.

There is a greater linguistic distance between English and Arabic than between Farsi and Arabic, even though Farsi and English have a shorter linguistic distance between themselves than either does with Arabic.

Similarly, Finns probably have an easier time learning Swedish than they do Spanish even though Swedish and Finnish are from different language families, just because a lot of vocabulary will be similar. Estonian would probably be even easier for Finnish speakers because of common vocabulary and a shared language family.

[–] Revan343@lemmy.ca 11 points 5 days ago

we have rules. And then we don't use them

That's the most succinct explanation I've seen of what's wrong with English