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Reading and writing the alphabet, yes. The grammar and pronunciation rules for speakers (not the pronunciation itself)? English is quite a bit more difficult th

Reading and writing the alphabet, yes. The grammar and pronunciation rules for speakers (not the pronunciation itself)? English is quite a bit more difficult than most people realize. You can learn Pinyin in a few days, which is sufficient for you to pronounce any Mandarin Chinese romanized into Pinyin. Chinese grammar is fairly simple compared to Latin languages. Whereas English is a rats nest of special-need-to-memorize pronunciation rules. Most of the real difficulty people experience with Chinese comes from the shock of learning the characters.

lucb1e 8y ago
Coming from Dutch, I found English easier than German. Some people say German is so close, it's mutually intelligible with Dutch: not only is it not, I even find it much harder than English. At least from my perspective, someone who knows a language very close to another and still found English easier than this other language, English is easy. Pronunciation is indeed quite a lot of learning by heart, but it's not hard to get used to if you got the rest down. Of course, this might be much harder for Chinese, I wouldn't know.
- larkost 8y ago
  Two things: 1. As an English-native-speaker who also learned German I find that I can mostly understand spoken and written Dutch through my German. I think part of your difficulty there is that it is closer to your native language where you have very tight internal rules about how the language should be, so get caught up in those differences. On my side my internal rules on German are relatively loose, so Dutch mostly fits in there. 2. One good-sized chunk of the messiness of English pronunciation (vs. written words) is actually the fault of the Dutch. Prior to the printing press spelling was more an art than a science, and the same transcribed book could be found with different spellings (especially true in different regions). Since the Dutch were the first ones with the printing press, many English books of the time were printed there, and the Dutch printers made some pretty arbitrary decisions on how they thought English should be spelled (e.g. the 'h' in 'ghost'). There was a similar effect from French scribes when they invaded England. Now my no means were they they only ones to mess up English (read up on "The Great Vowel Shift" if you want a headache), but they did their part.

lucb1e 8y ago

Coming from Dutch, I found English easier than German. Some people say German is so close, it's mutually intelligible with Dutch: not only is it not, I even find it much harder than English. At least from my perspective, someone who knows a language very close to another and still found English easier than this other language, English is easy. Pronunciation is indeed quite a lot of learning by heart, but it's not hard to get used to if you got the rest down. Of course, this might be much harder for Chinese, I wouldn't know.

larkost 8y ago
Two things: 1. As an English-native-speaker who also learned German I find that I can mostly understand spoken and written Dutch through my German. I think part of your difficulty there is that it is closer to your native language where you have very tight internal rules about how the language should be, so get caught up in those differences. On my side my internal rules on German are relatively loose, so Dutch mostly fits in there. 2. One good-sized chunk of the messiness of English pronunciation (vs. written words) is actually the fault of the Dutch. Prior to the printing press spelling was more an art than a science, and the same transcribed book could be found with different spellings (especially true in different regions). Since the Dutch were the first ones with the printing press, many English books of the time were printed there, and the Dutch printers made some pretty arbitrary decisions on how they thought English should be spelled (e.g. the 'h' in 'ghost'). There was a similar effect from French scribes when they invaded England. Now my no means were they they only ones to mess up English (read up on "The Great Vowel Shift" if you want a headache), but they did their part.