44 ms·

English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

137 points by silasdb 6y ago

gruppe_sechs 6y ago
Something I've heard fairly consistently from people who've learned English as a second language is that it's relatively easy to learn English to a basic or intermediate level, since English grammar is relatively simple (no genders, no cases, simple verbs, etc), but taking your English from intermediate to advanced is much harder because of all the weird quirks, irregularities, idioms, phrasal verbs, inconsistent spelling etc.. My experience of learning several Asian languages as a native English speaker is kind of the opposite - the initial learning stage is very hard and it took me a long time to get to a point where people would understand me at all. But once I got over the initial hump, things progressed from "basic" to "intermediate" quite smoothly. (I never stuck around for long enough to get from "intermediate" to "advanced" though, so who knows.)
- zeofig 6y ago
  Yeah I've heard/seen that a lot. I know a few foreigners with great English, but they still make mistakes all the time. It must be one of the least consistent languages out there. But most languages probably have some interesting surprises at the "advanced" level. I learned French for a long time. It's hard at first because the spelling/pronunciation is weird for an English speaker. Then it gets much easier, because French is in fact a fairly consistent language with nice structure. However at the advanced level French has quite a few surprises. Strange inconsistencies preserved for historical or aesthetic reasons, opaque idioms, surprising new tenses, chains of relative clauses to make your head spin...
  - kergonath 6y ago
    To be fair, native speakers make mistakes all the time (less/fewer, wrong tense, etc).
    - deleted 6y ago
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- bane 6y ago
  True. My wife started learning English seriously in her mid 20s and even after over 25 years of daily, immersed, use struggles with native grammar and pronunciation constructs.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  My first language is Russian. I learned English from 12 to 14 to a basic level and from then came to the US and learned the rest of what I know here. Some thoughts: 1. English has a very simple, pre-defined sentence structure. Run-on sentence are discouraged. The language has almost logical decisions regarding the use of the verb “be”. Words are rarely skipped because they are implied. By contrast Russian is much more contextual and free flowing. “I love you”, “you I love”, and “love I you” are all valid sentences with slightly different meanings. “To be” is often skipped. “I hungry” is valid because what else would you put between those two words other than “am”? 2. English has almost no conjugation. The only word changes that happen. Are for present to past or past perfect tenses (go/went/gone). By contrast in Russian you end up conjugating loads of words depending on the relationships between the object and the subject based on direction, action, possession, and gender. 3. English has nine tenses plus the infinitive. Russian has 3+1, which encapsulate the meaning of the 9+1 in English with implied context. 4. English used articles the/a/an to indicate specificity. Russian has no such concept. 5. Word munging is uncommon in English. When a new word is coined it is mostly atomic (app, tweet, selfie). You rarely can take two existing words and combine them with a prefix, a suffix, an ending and get a new word that is grammatically correct. In Russian “protoplanotraincycled” would be a word you could coin and use on the fly. Those are just some of the more glaring examples of differences. Aside from the extra/more specific tenses and the articles, Russian contains all the complexity of English. Therefore as someone who knows Russian, I think it’s easier to learn English. This is like if you know Haskell you probably have an easier time learning Basic but not the other way around. Where the drudgery of English comes in is vocabulary. Anyone that tells you that the SATs are not biased towards native speakers is full of putrescible waste. I used to play this game when I was in high school where I would hand a sizable English/Russian translation book to a friend and tell them to pick any Russian word and I could translate it to English. I had a nearly perfect success rate. The vocabulary just isn’t full of obscure $5 words. And before you object that this was simply because the book didn’t contain all the words in usage, not so: the Russian language is just a smaller language where words’ meanings are changed with prefixes and suffixes more than by using entirely different words. In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”? Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”? The usual answer I hear is that it’s because it makes the language more beautiful and precise. I think it makes it inflexible and inconvenient in the same way that it’s easier to have 26 letters combined in arbitrary patterns than 5000 kanji that each represent one or more things. P.S.: this is why cursing in English is so simple and stunted while in Russian I can have a conversation with someone using nothing but the word “dick” and it would be not only perfectly understandable but also quite expressive. P.P.S.: “dick off the dicks over the dick and re-dick them dickwards” is close but not close enough. Russian is a nightmare to learn, 0/10 would not recommend.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  OTOH, English speakers are happy to accept that you speak decent English with a relatively low bar. I can have a conference call with French, German, or Russian accented people, where nobody questions whether those people understand the content of the conversation. Certain languages are so specific that as soon as someone says one wrong thing, everyone switches to... English. Happens all the time in every other language that I know anything in. Someone shows up who gets a der/die/das wrong, or they can't do a soft Danish D, or they muck up a tone, and everyone else looks at each other and reply in, of all things, foreign accented English.
  - theobeers 6y ago
    Yeah, part of the bargain of making English the international language is a shared understanding that bad English is good enough. It doesn’t fly in any other language that I’ve used. Sometimes I point this out to mollify friends who complain about English linguistic/cultural hegemony. The flip side is that, e.g., my French colleagues are much more able to insist upon standards in their mother tongue.
    - nickkell 6y ago
      It's a blessing and a curse. Being able to work almost anywhere in the world whilst speaking your first language is a privilege. Being replied to in terrible English after addressing somebody in their native language is very frustrating.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        I’ve gotten the “Please, sir, we do this in English” response most often in Paris, but I don’t get frustrated by it. I tried, but it wasn’t good enough. Fair enough.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      And, even if not bad, relatively simple. If you do what I'll refer to as business writing, even if you don't totally dumb it down and chop it up into short sentences as tools like Grammarly will nag you to, your editor is still not going to want a lot of long sentences, "SAT words," complex tense structures, etc.
ekianjo 6y ago
That sounds like a blanket statement valid for most languages.
- canada2us 6y ago
  Agree.
- soldehierro 6y ago
  "Angloexceptionalism" really gets on my nerves to no end, and the worst part of it is that it seems it's mainly anglophone monolinguals that are making these outrageous claims, like English being intrinsically superior to other languages or being exceptionally easy to learn. Sure, English is really damn useful, but the grand scheme of things it's no more fit to be the global lingua franca than say Mandarin or Hungarian.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    As a Hungarian speaker who also knows other languages, I think there is indeed a difference. To construct even quite basic sentences in Hungarian you have to learn much more rules than to do the same for English. At a basic level English feels like just putting words next to one another. I mean basics like "I go in the house. You eat dinner." To say these in Hungarian as a beginner you'd have to either rote learn stuff or prepare to work through lots of rules and tables. In my experience English tends to be more "forgiving" and robust to non native mistakes for basic communication and the time to one's first fully correct sentence (self made) is shorter.
    - WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
      As a learner of Hungarian: the Hungarian syntax feels like you take a sentence in English and then read it word by word backwards.
    - ekianjo 6y ago
      Old english was a more complex language but evolved to more simple grammar over time. Languages are not static.
dqpb 6y ago
Everything is relatively easy to learn, but not to master
- kosievdmerwe 6y ago
  Same true for any language too. Depending on the size of a language's vocabulary learning 10,000 or 20,000 words is a matter of years of effort.
bsder 6y ago
> I know a few foreigners with great English, but they still make mistakes all the time. Listened to any native English speakers lately? At least in the US, the native speakers mangle the language to a horrible extent. Most foreigners with decent English are actually much better at "English" than most Americans.
- ummonk 6y ago
  We speak American here, not “English”.
  - bsder 6y ago
    By virtue of both our size and cultural exports, "'Murrican" is "English" as much as those residents of the Commonwealth would prefer otherwise. However, even by "American" standards, most native speakers are lousy at "English".
- torstenvl 6y ago
  > Listened to any native English speakers lately? At least in the US, the native speakers mangle the language to a horrible extent. That's literally impossible. Please don't confuse your classism for linguistics.
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  - jimbob45 6y ago
    He’s right though. Who vs whom is one example that no one tends to get right. Ain’t is commonly misused, even as slang. Done vs have is epidemic within Ebonics.
    - plorkyeran 6y ago
      "Correct" is defined by what native speakers do.
    - 6y ago
cletus 6y ago
I find the transformation and evolution of languages in general and English in particular fascinating. Old English was a Germanic language primarily. After 1066, the court language of England became French and remained so for centuries. It was in this period that the Middle English transformation happened. The fascinating thing about this is that the language became much more regular in that period and, more importantly, it dropped a lot of what I as a native English-speaker at least consider pointless grammatical cruft. For example: Old English had 3 noun genders (male, female, neuter; this being the norm for European and Semitic languages). Middle English lost that (other than male and female for people). Old English had 5 cases. By comparison, modern German has 4, Latin has 6, some Eastern European languages have more. The concept of case has almost completely disappeared from English (pronouns and the Saxon genitive notwithstanding). It's fascinating because it seems what keeps languages unchanging is a ruling class. It's a bit like the philosophical view of grammar as being descriptive (my view) vs prescriptive. It's almost a model for conservatism being the resistance to change. As a native English speaker I've found it difficult to learn other languages not just because of the ubiquity of English but because other languages have concepts that English just doesn't, like in German where adjectives and pronouns have to agree by case, number gender and article of a noun (eg "the" vs der/die/das/den/dem/denen/der/des). That structure just seems like such pointless cognitive load, at least to learn. I'm sure it's zero cost if you grew up with it. But it does seem like it makes English easier to learn. Obviously there are some complexities in English (eg adjective order and the tenses). And before anyone mentions Asian languages for simple grammar let me just point out: no clear word separators and the writing system in general (although this varies too).
- jeswin 6y ago
  The biggest problem that non-native speakers face with English is the pronunciation. There are no consistent rules which can be applied to letter combinations; and that alone makes it hard to master. English is not my native language, but I've been using it for decades. Still have to look up pronunciation. OTOH, my native language Malayalam (and other Indian languages) doesn't really have the pronunciation problem. They're just read as they are written.
  - 6y ago
leephillips 6y ago
I am, at the moment, learning Spanish and also teaching English to native Spanish speakers. The languages present almost opposite sets of challenges. English is chaos: the connection between spelling and pronunciation is so random that one practically has to memorize how to say every word, as if they are ideograms; there are few conjugations to learn, but in place of that many rules for modal and auxiliary verbs; word order is extremely free, but that means that a listener needs to figure out the meaning of a sentence that might have a half dozen different structures; almost any verb can be combined with any preposition to form a phrasal verb with a meaning that needs to be memorized (put up, put down, put out (!), etc.); there are ironclad rules on one hand, but on the other, more exceptions than rules. I am fascinated by the challenge of really learning English grammar for the first time, so that I can try to explain how it works. Spanish, by contrast, is almost a formal mathematical system. There are many rules, but they are actual rules. They are difficult to master, but once you have them, they define the language. The spelling of a word tells you exactly how to pronounce it. The rules demand to be followed. My teachers are on my case for even a minor variation in punctuation, that would be perfectly normal in English. And one must beware of the different vocabularies in neighboring countries, which can get you in trouble. That situation is way worse than the differences between US and UK. The notes in the article were interesting, but I was puzzled by the one about the present continuous tense, which does exist in Spanish. Also, the usage is the same as in English, although the use of simple present for present continuous is common in casual speech, and impossible in English (just because there are rules doesn’t mean people follow them).
- flobosg 6y ago
  > I was puzzled by the one about the present continuous tense, which does exist in Spanish According to Spanish grammar, what would be considered the Spanish analog of the English present continuous is formally classified not as a tense, but a periphrasis.
  - leephillips 6y ago
    Yes, it seems some grammarians reserve “tense” for conjugations. The same grammarians will say that English has no future tense.
soldehierro 6y ago
The part about European langauges not having a present progessive tense was painful to read. Many european languages do have a present progressive, just not French and German, which aren't much of a representative sample.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  And they "do have" it, but just in special occasions (more common in French, where it's directly translatable)
rantwasp 6y ago
we don’t use the word master anymore.
- GoOnThenDoTell 6y ago
  grabs pen, crosses out word in dictionary
- nullsense 6y ago
  English is relatively easy to learn, but not to main.
  - rvz 6y ago
    Yet here we are after the solidarity stunts, renaming of branches, the term 'master' is still used. As the change solved nothing, it can be described as a magnificent waste of time. They are going to be fighting forever over a change that doesn't address the actual issue of what they are fighting against.
bane 6y ago
Being a de facto global language where listeners also have to learn to tolerate very wide differences in pronunciation and grammar, I wonder how this simplifies the perceived learning of the language. I know when I try to learn and use languages in other countries even mild issues with pronunciation will get you blank stare in return which is highly frustrating.
- something98 6y ago
  This! It’s been many years since I first started “adjusting” my processing circuits to understand all of the ways various English learners can mess up (and long ago started noticing similarities on what they consistently mess up, and their mother tongue). And don’t get me wrong, watching two or more people use broken English as their intermediary is always cool. However, even the slightest mispronunciation in -their- tongue just hits a brick wall. I suspect it’s because so few have to deal with poor to intermediate speakers (excepting children) that their brains just can’t cope with imperfection.
Waterluvian 6y ago
This got me wondering about the concept of a custom designed language focused on functionality, unambiguity, ease to learn. My understanding is that all commonly used spoken languages are basically organically evolved and not designed?
- luisfmh 6y ago
  That's the whole concept of esperanto afaik. Google it, it's a language designed to be easy to learn.
  - akvadrako 6y ago
    Yes and it lives up to that promise. This article says English is "easy" but Esperanto is so much easier you can learn it for free along the way of learning English. For an overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant... And a recent experiment: https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/projects/eplus-project-details/#project/2017-1-HR01-KA201-035396 https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/projects/eplus-... > The tests were completed by the pupils who learned Esperanto and a control group of equal size and same previous language learning experience, who did not. They showed that the children who participated in Multilingualism Accelerator classes had considerably higher scores than those who didn't.
  - martinrue 6y ago
    Lots of my friends are Esperanto speakers and we use only Esperanto to communicate. I learned it to fluency in around 2 years. It’s incredibly easy to learn, super fun to use, and unique in that it bridges so many other languages that one can really experience a lot of different culture through the language.
    - martinrue 6y ago
      If anyone’s curious, I wrote more about it here: https://martinrue.com/zamenhofa-tago-18/ https://martinrue.com/zamenhofa-tago-18/
mxcrossb 6y ago
The article has some interesting notes about English, but I don’t really understand the connection to the post title?
schrodinger 6y ago
After talking to people from a lot of other countries (inc. europeans who use English as their "lingua franca"), the main benefit of English is that it's incredibly fault tolerant. It's difficult to learn well enough to sound like a native speaker, but even if you are very far from it, you're still understandable. Think about these phrases: * I go store now * I hungry * I wash car later * I cook food grill tomorrow if no rain These all immediately sound like a "foreigner" speaking, yet are completely understandable. Many other languages, relying on conjugations and implicit subjects & objects are way more inaccessible to new learners!
- axaxs 6y ago
  This is a really good point. It reminds me of exactly how my daughter spoke English as she was learning. It always amazed me how she put words together to make a sentence that was at face value wrong, but intent was understood. I think my two favorites were 'i scary' and 'that makes me funny'(after laughing, I guess context matters too)
- kaba0 6y ago
  They would be equally understandable in any language given a one-by-one translation of each word, since the same information is conveyed either way. I think humans are the fault tolerant in language understanding, not a language. (Or in a different meaning of fault tolerance, like used in information theory, I would even wager that a more regular language will have more of it, because of some “parity checks”. For example, a disappearing subject will still make a sentence understandable because a suffix makes if contextually guessable, eg a gender)
- nullsense 6y ago
  Not much different than any other language... You can still get get quite a bit wrong and still be understood no matter what you're speaking. You dont even need to conjugate verbs necessarily.
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    Reminds me of my dad, when he taught Norwegian to Vietnamese immigrants. First time and he was checking attendance. He called out a name, looked up and saw 20 hands in the air. He was very surprised because due to the way it was written it should have been only one...
axaxs 6y ago
I'm convinced English is impossible to master. There are just too many corner cases. That said, English is also a very abused language. Sadly these days, correcting someone leads to 'oh it's a living language and use determines definition', and more sadly, dictionaries play along with this idea. This both makes the language harder to understand, and impossible to master IMO.
- ivan1783 6y ago
  Its also impossible to master because what can be 100% correct in the US is wrong in India or in the UK or in Australia or New Zealand - all of who have English as their native language.
surfsvammel 6y ago
I’ve thought, for years, about improving my English. But I don’t know how to go about doing so. I already speak, read, and write English without effort. But I want to improve further. There seem to be a lack of options for someone in this situation, all English learning resources seem to be aimed at beginners.
- squabble 6y ago
  An app called "elevate" has some good exercises
- jpindar 6y ago
  I often find these interesting. https://english.stackexchange.com/ https://english.stackexchange.com/ https://ell.stackexchange.com/ https://ell.stackexchange.com/
nullsense 6y ago
Easy vs hard is dominated not by grammar and vocabulary, but by access to the language and interest in it. Nothing is more accessible than English, and there is absolutely mountains upon mountains of pop culture from the Anglosphere which no other language comes close to matching except for Japanese. If you have access to people that speak the language, access to native media, and there is lots of stuff on that language that interests you, then it's easy. If you want hard vs easy you could move to Antarctica and try learn Kimbundu.
dorkwood 6y ago
I know people who have spoken English for over 10 years, but still give themselves away as non-native speakers by using the incorrect tense. A common one is that they'll type something like "I didn't understood what he said". I can see their reasoning here: "understood" seems like the correct word to use when talking about a past event. Sadly, I don't know enough about my own native language to explain to them why they should be using the word "understand" instead.
- anoncake 6y ago
  Let me try: "Understand" is an an infinite verb. "Understood" and "did" are finite ones. Each clause can have only one finite verb (its head) so "did" and "understood" cannot both occur in one. Put another way, "did" only takes an infinite verb as its argument.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  That's actually quite a common rule found in many languages Usually the second or third verbs in a sentence take their infinitive form. If you want to learn more about English and be able to help people in these cases, the best way is to learn a foreign language. I recommend French or German and get the corresponding "English Grammar for Students of..." book, i.e. for French: https://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Grammar-Students-French-Learning/dp/0934034370 https://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Grammar-Students-French-Lea... These books are excellent. You can read it in a day. You won't be that close to being able to speak French (as you won't know any vocabulary for a start), but you'll suddenly appreciate the grammar of your own language. It will even make you appreciate programming languages more. It's a truly enlightening experience. All the second-language European speakers you meet will know this stuff already.
  - anoncake 6y ago
    > That's actually quite a common rule found in many languages Usually the second or third verbs in a sentence take their infinitive form. It's just a bit hidden in English because the conjugated form is identical to the infinitive so often.
singingfish 6y ago
In this sense it's like perl. In fact perl is this way by design as it was not designed by a theoretical linguist but a practical linguist.
ggambetta 6y ago
> The “-ing” progressive form of present tense (“I am reading”) is unique to English from other European languages (in French “Je mange” can be translated as both “I eat” and “I am eating.”) Huh? We have the same construction in Spanish, which is another European language. "I read" -> "[yo] leo"; "I am reading" -> "[yo] estoy leyendo".
- deleted 6y ago
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- qsdqdf 6y ago
  This form also exists in French, but uses a fixed expression and the verb infinitive, eg. "Je suis en train de lire", which could be translated literally as "I am in the process of reading".
- globular-toast 6y ago
  It didn't say you can't express the same thing. Of course you can. The point was the present progressive tense is unique to English. Also, the translation of present progressive in English is more often than not simple present in Romance languages. I only know French but, example "I am eating" would be "je mange" in most contexts. The French way to express progressive, as "je suis en train de manger" is relatively uncommon. I typed the following out in reply to a similar and now deleted comment about German having "Ich bin am essen" etc.: It's not a boring detail and you're missing the point. In the examples given in French, German and Spanish, the primary verb is "to be". That is to say, you are primarily expressing your current state. The tense is present. You are expressing your current state and in particular what you are currently doing. In English, present progressive is a first-class tense. When I say "I'm eating a sandwich", the primary verb is "to eat". I'm telling you my current state as a side effect only. The correct translation in French would be "je mange un sandwich". If the sentence was "I can't come because I'm eating a sandwich", the translation would probably be different. We also use the same tense to express future or an intention, e.g. "I'm going to town tomorrow", and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_continuous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_continuous It's odd to to see people disputing the uniqueness of the present progressive tense in English. It's very well known amongst scholars and teachers. It's one of the very first things anyone learning English has to learn and, conversely, one of the first things an English speaker needs unlearn when learning a foreign language.
KaiserPro 6y ago
Learning to read english is not simple. I've been learning dutch, and teaching my children to read (english, native language) The one thing that struck me is how impossible it is to "sound out" english. That is use the letters to make a stab at what the word will sound like. Unlike dutch, the written word is only a slight guide as to how its supposed to sound. I can't spell for shit in english, but I can spell quite well in dutch.
- jeroenhd 6y ago
  As a native Dutchman, I won't pretend that our language doesn't have some of these problems as well (good luck pronouncing things like "glooiing" or "apostelen" right the first time), but English is just special. One of the simplest words, "read", has two correct interpretations that can sometimes even exist in the same sentence, with its pronunciation purely being based on context. There's an entire poem[1] about pronunciation in English that's near impossible to read for anyone but native speakers. In my experience, speaking English is something you can learn about as quickly as you can learn any language, depending on how close your native tongue is to its language family. There's a few rules about how to structure a sentence, but overal, it's not a language that's particularly difficult to learn. Reading becomes a challenge. If you don't know how a word is pronounced, you'll often mispronounced it the first time you read it. When it comes to writing, you may as well be learning Chinese or Japanese; nobody in their right mind would write "thorough" and "tough" like they are written if they would come up with a writing system today. I think the problem with English is that it's been written down without a proper reform for so long. Pronunciation changes over time, but if the written word doesn't change with it, you end up with a mess that's only making things difficult for kids and foreigners. I'm not saying English is the only language with problems, though. If you're learning Dutch, you've probably run into the impossible "de" vs "het" problem, a remnant of when the language still had masculine, feminine and neuter. I've argued with other native speakers which articles feel more natural compared to which noun, only to find out the dictionary says both are allowed. Luckily, there are some rules (many of which are vague and full of exceptions), but most native speakers won't be able to tell them to you. Every language has its challenges. [1]: http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
dragonwriter 6y ago
> The “-ing” progressive form of present tense (“I am reading”) is unique to English from other European languages (in French “Je mange” can be translated as both “I eat” and “I am eating.”) At a minimum, Dutch and Spanish, among European languages, are also generally recognized as having a present continuous/progressive tense. Though this is somewhat arbitrary: In English, the sense of the present continuous can be subsumed by the simple present, too, the present continuous emphasizes the continuous nature, but is not essential to communicate it. And French has a construct that serves a similar emphatic function (être <conjugated in simple present> en train de + <infinitive>) So this construct that communicates the exact same thing is not a present continuous tense but the english (to be <conjugated in the present tense> + present participle) construct is a present continuous tense; a fairly arbitrary distinction as to which productions that are applied to verb roots to form an expression which conveys a particular semantic combination of tense (time/location), aspect, mood, etc. is considered a grammatical tense and which productions that serve that purpose are instead considered idiom or something else that isn't a grammatical tense.
- smitty1e 6y ago
  "I love my job, and my job loves loving me." Something I'm fond of saying when the office life goes the Full Dilbert.
- toyg 6y ago
  Yeah, that sentence is bullshit. Italian has a construct that matches the English one precisely: io sto mangiando, I am eating; io sto leggendo, I am reading; lei stava facendo, she was doing... It's just a form of gerundio. As an Italian speaker, that's actually one of the easiest English forms to learn.
  - afiori 6y ago
    personally I am a fan of the parallel universe where the translation of "I am eating" is "sono mangiante"
  - brabel 6y ago
    Portuguese is exactly the same in your examples! io sto mangiando - eu estou comendo io sto leggendo - eu estou lendo lei stava facendo - ela estava fazendo I was learning Italian some years ago in a class where others students were all English speakers, and it felt like cheating as the grammar was basically the same, just the words changed a bit, so I was having a much better time than anyone else! But when the teacher spoke fluently to me in Italian, obviously I would suddenly realize my Italian was still very poor and I had a lot to learn. EDIT: by the way, the author must have meant that other germanic languages don't have "gerundio"? Looks like all Latin languages do.
cehrlich 6y ago
I agree with the premise of the article. I started going to International school (all classes in English) at age 9. Got two University degrees in England. Have several academic papers published. There are still moments where I'm made aware that I'm not a native English speaker - for example I sometimes translate German figures of speech into English, where they don't exist. However I'd disagree that the article's premise is unique to English. I've been learning Japanese for the past few years, and while it's definitely more difficult to learn than English for someone who's coming from another European language, I think the long tail of being native-like is equally infinite. It's just based on different things. Examples would be は vs が (this is a beginner-level topic as well, but comes back in a different way much later), sentence-level pitch accent, the fact that writing in formal language is basically the world's most elaborate game of madlibs, etc.
- presentation 6y ago
  Im learning Japanese too and both agree and disagree. There are way fewer idiosyncrasies in the language IMO, the rules tend to hold and depending on how you’re explained concepts they make more sense (は described as the “topic” particle, が described as the “identifier” particle, which most resources don’t explain properly but makes the choice much easier to understand). Sounding things out is super straightforward due to the direct mapping from sounds to kana. But some things are pretty elusive or just require a great deal of memorization to sound natural, like which counter words are the correct counter for the given noun, or the proper pitch accent patterns and intonation to apply to words and phrases, and speaking with the different levels of formality. Plus the huge hurdle of learning a ton of Kanji.
  - andi999 6y ago
    Well the English 'counter words' for animals are also tough aren't they? Ok, a flock of birds everybody knows as well as a murder of crows. But what about an exaltation of larks? And is it a school of dolphins or rather a pod?
    - AndrewDucker 6y ago
iamacyborg 6y ago
This feels like a general truism for pretty much everything.
eckza 6y ago
Ah, English: the Javascript of spoken language.
nathias 6y ago
Easy to learn and easy to master compared to other languages.
deleted 6y ago
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3131s 6y ago
Everybody thinks they have some brilliant insight about language without ever bothering to look at the work of people who actually study it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILR_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILR_scale
hahahahe 6y ago
Mastering a language is not easy even for native speakers.
- tocoder 6y ago
  I agree with this assessment as a person of colour who was born in an English-speaking country. I also have a degree on English. I'm currently at a threshold where I could get better, but the margins in terms of pay-off to diminishing returns is not appealing.
quattrofan 6y ago
Why does he keep referring to here as "the English isles" it's really annoying. These are the British Isles.
jiggawatts 6y ago
As a point of reference, I just watched a video of a non-native speaker speaking Hungarian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S44KrRp7QgA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S44KrRp7QgA He's trying really hard, but it's like nails on a chalkboard listening to him. It's worse than a bad computer text-to-speech converter. Hungarian is one of those languages where it is shockingly difficult to learn to a level where you're intelligible at all, and learning to be fluent as an adult is borderline impossible. I've never met a person who has managed it. For comparison, I once came across some Dutch primary school teachers on holiday that were more fluent in English than most native speakers that I know. They had a bigger vocabulary and used more complex sentence structures than I was used to from the typical locals. They had a mild, barely detectable accent. Not all languages are equal!
- jvvw 6y ago
  My sister became fluent in less than a year I'd say (living in Hungary, Hungarian boyfriend, worked hard at it and super-good at languages generally). I don't know what her accent is like but she definitely has no problem being understood by Hungarians - she has since lived in Budapest for a decade and came top of her year in her Masters degree in translation there which involved lots of translation into Hungarian (including things like poetry!). So possible if difficult!
- wwwwewwww 6y ago
  I don't think it's possible to be more fluent then a native speaker. You can sound more educated, or elite, or have better verbal skills or otherwise have a "gift of the gab", but a language is defined by the native speakers (except in special cases like Continental English or Esperanto). One mark of high-level fluency is being able to casually confuse "less" and "few" and say things like "more better" just like a native English speaker does.
auganov 6y ago
Everything about English is very different just because of its standing in the world. People aren't even that interested in "mastering" other languages. Not just a native vs non-native thing either [0]. You'll see fewer books about style, copywriting and so forth targeting the native population too. People just don't do it as much in these languages and it's not as good of an investment. An American may be as interested in better writing skills as any ESL speaker. Fewer Frenchmen will think French skills are a good investment. [0] Though this is interesting too. "Natives" of English may be more invested in this distinction than those of other languages. Native vs non-native dynamics are very different in English too.
HPsquared 6y ago
So, English is like Python?
npmn 6y ago
So English is like Javascript, both languages are spoken/written by the majority of its intended engineers, have ton of resources/books/materials and lastly both the languages are easy to start but difficult to master.
Razengan 6y ago
English is not easy to learn (or teach) without being [involuntarily] exposed to it in one way or the other since childhood. One of the best examples of the convoluted mess of ambiguities and exceptions in English: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581841 It's particularly frustrating when English-speakers arrogantly make fun of other languages (like Chinese/Japanese) as if English doesn't have its share of stupid shit.
emrah 6y ago
Relative to other languages, the premise might be correct but learning English was still not easy due to all the irregularities and overloaded words one has to memorize.
sershe 6y ago
Comparing Russian (my native language), English, and Turkish (that I've learned to lower-intermediate level 15 years ago and have since forgotten)... English has very simple rules, and tons of irregularities and exceptions everywhere. And as some have mentioned, tons of vocabulary. Aspects of Turkish sometimes felt to me almost like a programming language, it's very modular with complex rules compared to English (for a non-native learner of both), but there seem to be relatively few irregularities. Russian has both - complex rules, and tons of irregularities. I am guessing rote learning without many complex rules is easier for most people? PS. The biggest gap in my English that is obvious in my daily life is that I cannot for the life of me understand half of ZZ Top lyrics. Can native English speakers understand ZZ Top lyrics, e.g. "Poke Chop Sandwich" or "Two Ways To Play"?
- ccpcx 6y ago
  Do you mean understanding what the words are or what they're talking about? I can understand the words in Two Ways to Play, but I would have had a lot of gaps in Poke Chop Sandwich if I hadn't already looked at the lyrics. I have little, if any, idea of what either of them are actually talking about. I get the vague sense that Poke Chop Sandwich might be their version of Fat Bottomed Girls by Queen ("waiting in the sack" and "gonna get some" might support this). Two Ways to Play is probably about a relationship, but I can't tell for sure what the problem is or what the singer is saying he wants to do about it. In any case, it seems like he wants to try again, but I can't entirely grasp what he's expressing about his philosophy of relationships.
  - sershe 6y ago
    I can understand the words, I just have very vague (or no) idea of what they're talking about :)
anticensor 6y ago
I think that applies to all languages, not only English?
Arete314159 6y ago
I've 45, a native English speaker, and extremely literate. A few months ago I got into a disagreement with my husband on how to pronounce a word ("satiety"). Because I'd never seen it before, and while I could figure it out from context, it turns out my guess at the pronunciation was wrong. English is humbling. You are still learning words in middle age. You are still learning pronunciations in middle age. It just never ends.

137 points by silasdb 6y ago

Something I've heard fairly consistently from people who've learned English as a second language is that it's relatively easy to learn English to a basic or intermediate level, since English grammar is relatively simple (no genders, no cases, simple verbs, etc), but taking your English from intermediate to advanced is much harder because of all the weird quirks, irregularities, idioms, phrasal verbs, inconsistent spelling etc.. My experience of learning several Asian languages as a native English speaker is kind of the opposite - the initial learning stage is very hard and it took me a long time to get to a point where people would understand me at all. But once I got over the initial hump, things progressed from "basic" to "intermediate" quite smoothly. (I never stuck around for long enough to get from "intermediate" to "advanced" though, so who knows.)

zeofig 6y ago
Yeah I've heard/seen that a lot. I know a few foreigners with great English, but they still make mistakes all the time. It must be one of the least consistent languages out there. But most languages probably have some interesting surprises at the "advanced" level. I learned French for a long time. It's hard at first because the spelling/pronunciation is weird for an English speaker. Then it gets much easier, because French is in fact a fairly consistent language with nice structure. However at the advanced level French has quite a few surprises. Strange inconsistencies preserved for historical or aesthetic reasons, opaque idioms, surprising new tenses, chains of relative clauses to make your head spin...
- kergonath 6y ago
  To be fair, native speakers make mistakes all the time (less/fewer, wrong tense, etc).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
bane 6y ago
True. My wife started learning English seriously in her mid 20s and even after over 25 years of daily, immersed, use struggles with native grammar and pronunciation constructs.
IgorPartola 6y ago
My first language is Russian. I learned English from 12 to 14 to a basic level and from then came to the US and learned the rest of what I know here. Some thoughts: 1. English has a very simple, pre-defined sentence structure. Run-on sentence are discouraged. The language has almost logical decisions regarding the use of the verb “be”. Words are rarely skipped because they are implied. By contrast Russian is much more contextual and free flowing. “I love you”, “you I love”, and “love I you” are all valid sentences with slightly different meanings. “To be” is often skipped. “I hungry” is valid because what else would you put between those two words other than “am”? 2. English has almost no conjugation. The only word changes that happen. Are for present to past or past perfect tenses (go/went/gone). By contrast in Russian you end up conjugating loads of words depending on the relationships between the object and the subject based on direction, action, possession, and gender. 3. English has nine tenses plus the infinitive. Russian has 3+1, which encapsulate the meaning of the 9+1 in English with implied context. 4. English used articles the/a/an to indicate specificity. Russian has no such concept. 5. Word munging is uncommon in English. When a new word is coined it is mostly atomic (app, tweet, selfie). You rarely can take two existing words and combine them with a prefix, a suffix, an ending and get a new word that is grammatically correct. In Russian “protoplanotraincycled” would be a word you could coin and use on the fly. Those are just some of the more glaring examples of differences. Aside from the extra/more specific tenses and the articles, Russian contains all the complexity of English. Therefore as someone who knows Russian, I think it’s easier to learn English. This is like if you know Haskell you probably have an easier time learning Basic but not the other way around. Where the drudgery of English comes in is vocabulary. Anyone that tells you that the SATs are not biased towards native speakers is full of putrescible waste. I used to play this game when I was in high school where I would hand a sizable English/Russian translation book to a friend and tell them to pick any Russian word and I could translate it to English. I had a nearly perfect success rate. The vocabulary just isn’t full of obscure $5 words. And before you object that this was simply because the book didn’t contain all the words in usage, not so: the Russian language is just a smaller language where words’ meanings are changed with prefixes and suffixes more than by using entirely different words. In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”? Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”? The usual answer I hear is that it’s because it makes the language more beautiful and precise. I think it makes it inflexible and inconvenient in the same way that it’s easier to have 26 letters combined in arbitrary patterns than 5000 kanji that each represent one or more things. P.S.: this is why cursing in English is so simple and stunted while in Russian I can have a conversation with someone using nothing but the word “dick” and it would be not only perfectly understandable but also quite expressive. P.P.S.: “dick off the dicks over the dick and re-dick them dickwards” is close but not close enough. Russian is a nightmare to learn, 0/10 would not recommend.
lordnacho 6y ago
OTOH, English speakers are happy to accept that you speak decent English with a relatively low bar. I can have a conference call with French, German, or Russian accented people, where nobody questions whether those people understand the content of the conversation. Certain languages are so specific that as soon as someone says one wrong thing, everyone switches to... English. Happens all the time in every other language that I know anything in. Someone shows up who gets a der/die/das wrong, or they can't do a soft Danish D, or they muck up a tone, and everyone else looks at each other and reply in, of all things, foreign accented English.
- theobeers 6y ago
  Yeah, part of the bargain of making English the international language is a shared understanding that bad English is good enough. It doesn’t fly in any other language that I’ve used. Sometimes I point this out to mollify friends who complain about English linguistic/cultural hegemony. The flip side is that, e.g., my French colleagues are much more able to insist upon standards in their mother tongue.
  - nickkell 6y ago
    It's a blessing and a curse. Being able to work almost anywhere in the world whilst speaking your first language is a privilege. Being replied to in terrible English after addressing somebody in their native language is very frustrating.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      I’ve gotten the “Please, sir, we do this in English” response most often in Paris, but I don’t get frustrated by it. I tried, but it wasn’t good enough. Fair enough.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    And, even if not bad, relatively simple. If you do what I'll refer to as business writing, even if you don't totally dumb it down and chop it up into short sentences as tools like Grammarly will nag you to, your editor is still not going to want a lot of long sentences, "SAT words," complex tense structures, etc.

ekianjo 6y ago

That sounds like a blanket statement valid for most languages.

canada2us 6y ago
Agree.
soldehierro 6y ago
"Angloexceptionalism" really gets on my nerves to no end, and the worst part of it is that it seems it's mainly anglophone monolinguals that are making these outrageous claims, like English being intrinsically superior to other languages or being exceptionally easy to learn. Sure, English is really damn useful, but the grand scheme of things it's no more fit to be the global lingua franca than say Mandarin or Hungarian.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  As a Hungarian speaker who also knows other languages, I think there is indeed a difference. To construct even quite basic sentences in Hungarian you have to learn much more rules than to do the same for English. At a basic level English feels like just putting words next to one another. I mean basics like "I go in the house. You eat dinner." To say these in Hungarian as a beginner you'd have to either rote learn stuff or prepare to work through lots of rules and tables. In my experience English tends to be more "forgiving" and robust to non native mistakes for basic communication and the time to one's first fully correct sentence (self made) is shorter.
  - WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
    As a learner of Hungarian: the Hungarian syntax feels like you take a sentence in English and then read it word by word backwards.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    Old english was a more complex language but evolved to more simple grammar over time. Languages are not static.

dqpb 6y ago

Everything is relatively easy to learn, but not to master

kosievdmerwe 6y ago
Same true for any language too. Depending on the size of a language's vocabulary learning 10,000 or 20,000 words is a matter of years of effort.

bsder 6y ago

> I know a few foreigners with great English, but they still make mistakes all the time. Listened to any native English speakers lately? At least in the US, the native speakers mangle the language to a horrible extent. Most foreigners with decent English are actually much better at "English" than most Americans.

ummonk 6y ago
We speak American here, not “English”.
- bsder 6y ago
  By virtue of both our size and cultural exports, "'Murrican" is "English" as much as those residents of the Commonwealth would prefer otherwise. However, even by "American" standards, most native speakers are lousy at "English".
torstenvl 6y ago
> Listened to any native English speakers lately? At least in the US, the native speakers mangle the language to a horrible extent. That's literally impossible. Please don't confuse your classism for linguistics.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jimbob45 6y ago
  He’s right though. Who vs whom is one example that no one tends to get right. Ain’t is commonly misused, even as slang. Done vs have is epidemic within Ebonics.
  - plorkyeran 6y ago
    "Correct" is defined by what native speakers do.
  - 6y ago

cletus 6y ago

I find the transformation and evolution of languages in general and English in particular fascinating. Old English was a Germanic language primarily. After 1066, the court language of England became French and remained so for centuries. It was in this period that the Middle English transformation happened. The fascinating thing about this is that the language became much more regular in that period and, more importantly, it dropped a lot of what I as a native English-speaker at least consider pointless grammatical cruft. For example: Old English had 3 noun genders (male, female, neuter; this being the norm for European and Semitic languages). Middle English lost that (other than male and female for people). Old English had 5 cases. By comparison, modern German has 4, Latin has 6, some Eastern European languages have more. The concept of case has almost completely disappeared from English (pronouns and the Saxon genitive notwithstanding). It's fascinating because it seems what keeps languages unchanging is a ruling class. It's a bit like the philosophical view of grammar as being descriptive (my view) vs prescriptive. It's almost a model for conservatism being the resistance to change. As a native English speaker I've found it difficult to learn other languages not just because of the ubiquity of English but because other languages have concepts that English just doesn't, like in German where adjectives and pronouns have to agree by case, number gender and article of a noun (eg "the" vs der/die/das/den/dem/denen/der/des). That structure just seems like such pointless cognitive load, at least to learn. I'm sure it's zero cost if you grew up with it. But it does seem like it makes English easier to learn. Obviously there are some complexities in English (eg adjective order and the tenses). And before anyone mentions Asian languages for simple grammar let me just point out: no clear word separators and the writing system in general (although this varies too).

jeswin 6y ago
The biggest problem that non-native speakers face with English is the pronunciation. There are no consistent rules which can be applied to letter combinations; and that alone makes it hard to master. English is not my native language, but I've been using it for decades. Still have to look up pronunciation. OTOH, my native language Malayalam (and other Indian languages) doesn't really have the pronunciation problem. They're just read as they are written.
- 6y ago

leephillips 6y ago

I am, at the moment, learning Spanish and also teaching English to native Spanish speakers. The languages present almost opposite sets of challenges. English is chaos: the connection between spelling and pronunciation is so random that one practically has to memorize how to say every word, as if they are ideograms; there are few conjugations to learn, but in place of that many rules for modal and auxiliary verbs; word order is extremely free, but that means that a listener needs to figure out the meaning of a sentence that might have a half dozen different structures; almost any verb can be combined with any preposition to form a phrasal verb with a meaning that needs to be memorized (put up, put down, put out (!), etc.); there are ironclad rules on one hand, but on the other, more exceptions than rules. I am fascinated by the challenge of really learning English grammar for the first time, so that I can try to explain how it works. Spanish, by contrast, is almost a formal mathematical system. There are many rules, but they are actual rules. They are difficult to master, but once you have them, they define the language. The spelling of a word tells you exactly how to pronounce it. The rules demand to be followed. My teachers are on my case for even a minor variation in punctuation, that would be perfectly normal in English. And one must beware of the different vocabularies in neighboring countries, which can get you in trouble. That situation is way worse than the differences between US and UK. The notes in the article were interesting, but I was puzzled by the one about the present continuous tense, which does exist in Spanish. Also, the usage is the same as in English, although the use of simple present for present continuous is common in casual speech, and impossible in English (just because there are rules doesn’t mean people follow them).

flobosg 6y ago
> I was puzzled by the one about the present continuous tense, which does exist in Spanish According to Spanish grammar, what would be considered the Spanish analog of the English present continuous is formally classified not as a tense, but a periphrasis.
- leephillips 6y ago
  Yes, it seems some grammarians reserve “tense” for conjugations. The same grammarians will say that English has no future tense.

soldehierro 6y ago

The part about European langauges not having a present progessive tense was painful to read. Many european languages do have a present progressive, just not French and German, which aren't much of a representative sample.

raverbashing 6y ago
And they "do have" it, but just in special occasions (more common in French, where it's directly translatable)

rantwasp 6y ago

we don’t use the word master anymore.

GoOnThenDoTell 6y ago
grabs pen, crosses out word in dictionary
nullsense 6y ago
English is relatively easy to learn, but not to main.
- rvz 6y ago
  Yet here we are after the solidarity stunts, renaming of branches, the term 'master' is still used. As the change solved nothing, it can be described as a magnificent waste of time. They are going to be fighting forever over a change that doesn't address the actual issue of what they are fighting against.

bane 6y ago

Being a de facto global language where listeners also have to learn to tolerate very wide differences in pronunciation and grammar, I wonder how this simplifies the perceived learning of the language. I know when I try to learn and use languages in other countries even mild issues with pronunciation will get you blank stare in return which is highly frustrating.

something98 6y ago
This! It’s been many years since I first started “adjusting” my processing circuits to understand all of the ways various English learners can mess up (and long ago started noticing similarities on what they consistently mess up, and their mother tongue). And don’t get me wrong, watching two or more people use broken English as their intermediary is always cool. However, even the slightest mispronunciation in -their- tongue just hits a brick wall. I suspect it’s because so few have to deal with poor to intermediate speakers (excepting children) that their brains just can’t cope with imperfection.

Waterluvian 6y ago

This got me wondering about the concept of a custom designed language focused on functionality, unambiguity, ease to learn. My understanding is that all commonly used spoken languages are basically organically evolved and not designed?

luisfmh 6y ago
That's the whole concept of esperanto afaik. Google it, it's a language designed to be easy to learn.
- akvadrako 6y ago
  Yes and it lives up to that promise. This article says English is "easy" but Esperanto is so much easier you can learn it for free along the way of learning English. For an overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant... And a recent experiment: https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/projects/eplus-project-details/#project/2017-1-HR01-KA201-035396 https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/projects/eplus-... > The tests were completed by the pupils who learned Esperanto and a control group of equal size and same previous language learning experience, who did not. They showed that the children who participated in Multilingualism Accelerator classes had considerably higher scores than those who didn't.
- martinrue 6y ago
  Lots of my friends are Esperanto speakers and we use only Esperanto to communicate. I learned it to fluency in around 2 years. It’s incredibly easy to learn, super fun to use, and unique in that it bridges so many other languages that one can really experience a lot of different culture through the language.
  - martinrue 6y ago
    If anyone’s curious, I wrote more about it here: https://martinrue.com/zamenhofa-tago-18/ https://martinrue.com/zamenhofa-tago-18/

mxcrossb 6y ago

The article has some interesting notes about English, but I don’t really understand the connection to the post title?

schrodinger 6y ago

After talking to people from a lot of other countries (inc. europeans who use English as their "lingua franca"), the main benefit of English is that it's incredibly fault tolerant. It's difficult to learn well enough to sound like a native speaker, but even if you are very far from it, you're still understandable. Think about these phrases: * I go store now * I hungry * I wash car later * I cook food grill tomorrow if no rain These all immediately sound like a "foreigner" speaking, yet are completely understandable. Many other languages, relying on conjugations and implicit subjects & objects are way more inaccessible to new learners!

axaxs 6y ago
This is a really good point. It reminds me of exactly how my daughter spoke English as she was learning. It always amazed me how she put words together to make a sentence that was at face value wrong, but intent was understood. I think my two favorites were 'i scary' and 'that makes me funny'(after laughing, I guess context matters too)
kaba0 6y ago
They would be equally understandable in any language given a one-by-one translation of each word, since the same information is conveyed either way. I think humans are the fault tolerant in language understanding, not a language. (Or in a different meaning of fault tolerance, like used in information theory, I would even wager that a more regular language will have more of it, because of some “parity checks”. For example, a disappearing subject will still make a sentence understandable because a suffix makes if contextually guessable, eg a gender)
nullsense 6y ago
Not much different than any other language... You can still get get quite a bit wrong and still be understood no matter what you're speaking. You dont even need to conjugate verbs necessarily.
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  Reminds me of my dad, when he taught Norwegian to Vietnamese immigrants. First time and he was checking attendance. He called out a name, looked up and saw 20 hands in the air. He was very surprised because due to the way it was written it should have been only one...

axaxs 6y ago

I'm convinced English is impossible to master. There are just too many corner cases. That said, English is also a very abused language. Sadly these days, correcting someone leads to 'oh it's a living language and use determines definition', and more sadly, dictionaries play along with this idea. This both makes the language harder to understand, and impossible to master IMO.

ivan1783 6y ago
Its also impossible to master because what can be 100% correct in the US is wrong in India or in the UK or in Australia or New Zealand - all of who have English as their native language.

surfsvammel 6y ago

I’ve thought, for years, about improving my English. But I don’t know how to go about doing so. I already speak, read, and write English without effort. But I want to improve further. There seem to be a lack of options for someone in this situation, all English learning resources seem to be aimed at beginners.

squabble 6y ago
An app called "elevate" has some good exercises
jpindar 6y ago
I often find these interesting. https://english.stackexchange.com/ https://english.stackexchange.com/ https://ell.stackexchange.com/ https://ell.stackexchange.com/

nullsense 6y ago

Easy vs hard is dominated not by grammar and vocabulary, but by access to the language and interest in it. Nothing is more accessible than English, and there is absolutely mountains upon mountains of pop culture from the Anglosphere which no other language comes close to matching except for Japanese. If you have access to people that speak the language, access to native media, and there is lots of stuff on that language that interests you, then it's easy. If you want hard vs easy you could move to Antarctica and try learn Kimbundu.

dorkwood 6y ago

I know people who have spoken English for over 10 years, but still give themselves away as non-native speakers by using the incorrect tense. A common one is that they'll type something like "I didn't understood what he said". I can see their reasoning here: "understood" seems like the correct word to use when talking about a past event. Sadly, I don't know enough about my own native language to explain to them why they should be using the word "understand" instead.

anoncake 6y ago
Let me try: "Understand" is an an infinite verb. "Understood" and "did" are finite ones. Each clause can have only one finite verb (its head) so "did" and "understood" cannot both occur in one. Put another way, "did" only takes an infinite verb as its argument.
globular-toast 6y ago
That's actually quite a common rule found in many languages Usually the second or third verbs in a sentence take their infinitive form. If you want to learn more about English and be able to help people in these cases, the best way is to learn a foreign language. I recommend French or German and get the corresponding "English Grammar for Students of..." book, i.e. for French: https://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Grammar-Students-French-Learning/dp/0934034370 https://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Grammar-Students-French-Lea... These books are excellent. You can read it in a day. You won't be that close to being able to speak French (as you won't know any vocabulary for a start), but you'll suddenly appreciate the grammar of your own language. It will even make you appreciate programming languages more. It's a truly enlightening experience. All the second-language European speakers you meet will know this stuff already.
- anoncake 6y ago
  > That's actually quite a common rule found in many languages Usually the second or third verbs in a sentence take their infinitive form. It's just a bit hidden in English because the conjugated form is identical to the infinitive so often.

singingfish 6y ago

In this sense it's like perl. In fact perl is this way by design as it was not designed by a theoretical linguist but a practical linguist.

ggambetta 6y ago

> The “-ing” progressive form of present tense (“I am reading”) is unique to English from other European languages (in French “Je mange” can be translated as both “I eat” and “I am eating.”) Huh? We have the same construction in Spanish, which is another European language. "I read" -> "[yo] leo"; "I am reading" -> "[yo] estoy leyendo".

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
qsdqdf 6y ago
This form also exists in French, but uses a fixed expression and the verb infinitive, eg. "Je suis en train de lire", which could be translated literally as "I am in the process of reading".
globular-toast 6y ago
It didn't say you can't express the same thing. Of course you can. The point was the present progressive tense is unique to English. Also, the translation of present progressive in English is more often than not simple present in Romance languages. I only know French but, example "I am eating" would be "je mange" in most contexts. The French way to express progressive, as "je suis en train de manger" is relatively uncommon. I typed the following out in reply to a similar and now deleted comment about German having "Ich bin am essen" etc.: It's not a boring detail and you're missing the point. In the examples given in French, German and Spanish, the primary verb is "to be". That is to say, you are primarily expressing your current state. The tense is present. You are expressing your current state and in particular what you are currently doing. In English, present progressive is a first-class tense. When I say "I'm eating a sandwich", the primary verb is "to eat". I'm telling you my current state as a side effect only. The correct translation in French would be "je mange un sandwich". If the sentence was "I can't come because I'm eating a sandwich", the translation would probably be different. We also use the same tense to express future or an intention, e.g. "I'm going to town tomorrow", and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_continuous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_continuous It's odd to to see people disputing the uniqueness of the present progressive tense in English. It's very well known amongst scholars and teachers. It's one of the very first things anyone learning English has to learn and, conversely, one of the first things an English speaker needs unlearn when learning a foreign language.

KaiserPro 6y ago

Learning to read english is not simple. I've been learning dutch, and teaching my children to read (english, native language) The one thing that struck me is how impossible it is to "sound out" english. That is use the letters to make a stab at what the word will sound like. Unlike dutch, the written word is only a slight guide as to how its supposed to sound. I can't spell for shit in english, but I can spell quite well in dutch.

jeroenhd 6y ago
As a native Dutchman, I won't pretend that our language doesn't have some of these problems as well (good luck pronouncing things like "glooiing" or "apostelen" right the first time), but English is just special. One of the simplest words, "read", has two correct interpretations that can sometimes even exist in the same sentence, with its pronunciation purely being based on context. There's an entire poem[1] about pronunciation in English that's near impossible to read for anyone but native speakers. In my experience, speaking English is something you can learn about as quickly as you can learn any language, depending on how close your native tongue is to its language family. There's a few rules about how to structure a sentence, but overal, it's not a language that's particularly difficult to learn. Reading becomes a challenge. If you don't know how a word is pronounced, you'll often mispronounced it the first time you read it. When it comes to writing, you may as well be learning Chinese or Japanese; nobody in their right mind would write "thorough" and "tough" like they are written if they would come up with a writing system today. I think the problem with English is that it's been written down without a proper reform for so long. Pronunciation changes over time, but if the written word doesn't change with it, you end up with a mess that's only making things difficult for kids and foreigners. I'm not saying English is the only language with problems, though. If you're learning Dutch, you've probably run into the impossible "de" vs "het" problem, a remnant of when the language still had masculine, feminine and neuter. I've argued with other native speakers which articles feel more natural compared to which noun, only to find out the dictionary says both are allowed. Luckily, there are some rules (many of which are vague and full of exceptions), but most native speakers won't be able to tell them to you. Every language has its challenges. [1]: http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

dragonwriter 6y ago

> The “-ing” progressive form of present tense (“I am reading”) is unique to English from other European languages (in French “Je mange” can be translated as both “I eat” and “I am eating.”) At a minimum, Dutch and Spanish, among European languages, are also generally recognized as having a present continuous/progressive tense. Though this is somewhat arbitrary: In English, the sense of the present continuous can be subsumed by the simple present, too, the present continuous emphasizes the continuous nature, but is not essential to communicate it. And French has a construct that serves a similar emphatic function (être <conjugated in simple present> en train de + <infinitive>) So this construct that communicates the exact same thing is not a present continuous tense but the english (to be <conjugated in the present tense> + present participle) construct is a present continuous tense; a fairly arbitrary distinction as to which productions that are applied to verb roots to form an expression which conveys a particular semantic combination of tense (time/location), aspect, mood, etc. is considered a grammatical tense and which productions that serve that purpose are instead considered idiom or something else that isn't a grammatical tense.

smitty1e 6y ago
"I love my job, and my job loves loving me." Something I'm fond of saying when the office life goes the Full Dilbert.
toyg 6y ago
Yeah, that sentence is bullshit. Italian has a construct that matches the English one precisely: io sto mangiando, I am eating; io sto leggendo, I am reading; lei stava facendo, she was doing... It's just a form of gerundio. As an Italian speaker, that's actually one of the easiest English forms to learn.
- afiori 6y ago
  personally I am a fan of the parallel universe where the translation of "I am eating" is "sono mangiante"
- brabel 6y ago
  Portuguese is exactly the same in your examples! io sto mangiando - eu estou comendo io sto leggendo - eu estou lendo lei stava facendo - ela estava fazendo I was learning Italian some years ago in a class where others students were all English speakers, and it felt like cheating as the grammar was basically the same, just the words changed a bit, so I was having a much better time than anyone else! But when the teacher spoke fluently to me in Italian, obviously I would suddenly realize my Italian was still very poor and I had a lot to learn. EDIT: by the way, the author must have meant that other germanic languages don't have "gerundio"? Looks like all Latin languages do.

cehrlich 6y ago

I agree with the premise of the article. I started going to International school (all classes in English) at age 9. Got two University degrees in England. Have several academic papers published. There are still moments where I'm made aware that I'm not a native English speaker - for example I sometimes translate German figures of speech into English, where they don't exist. However I'd disagree that the article's premise is unique to English. I've been learning Japanese for the past few years, and while it's definitely more difficult to learn than English for someone who's coming from another European language, I think the long tail of being native-like is equally infinite. It's just based on different things. Examples would be は vs が (this is a beginner-level topic as well, but comes back in a different way much later), sentence-level pitch accent, the fact that writing in formal language is basically the world's most elaborate game of madlibs, etc.

presentation 6y ago
Im learning Japanese too and both agree and disagree. There are way fewer idiosyncrasies in the language IMO, the rules tend to hold and depending on how you’re explained concepts they make more sense (は described as the “topic” particle, が described as the “identifier” particle, which most resources don’t explain properly but makes the choice much easier to understand). Sounding things out is super straightforward due to the direct mapping from sounds to kana. But some things are pretty elusive or just require a great deal of memorization to sound natural, like which counter words are the correct counter for the given noun, or the proper pitch accent patterns and intonation to apply to words and phrases, and speaking with the different levels of formality. Plus the huge hurdle of learning a ton of Kanji.
- andi999 6y ago
  Well the English 'counter words' for animals are also tough aren't they? Ok, a flock of birds everybody knows as well as a murder of crows. But what about an exaltation of larks? And is it a school of dolphins or rather a pod?
  - AndrewDucker 6y ago

iamacyborg 6y ago

This feels like a general truism for pretty much everything.

eckza 6y ago

Ah, English: the Javascript of spoken language.

nathias 6y ago

Easy to learn and easy to master compared to other languages.

deleted 6y ago

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3131s 6y ago

Everybody thinks they have some brilliant insight about language without ever bothering to look at the work of people who actually study it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILR_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILR_scale

hahahahe 6y ago

Mastering a language is not easy even for native speakers.

tocoder 6y ago
I agree with this assessment as a person of colour who was born in an English-speaking country. I also have a degree on English. I'm currently at a threshold where I could get better, but the margins in terms of pay-off to diminishing returns is not appealing.

quattrofan 6y ago

Why does he keep referring to here as "the English isles" it's really annoying. These are the British Isles.

jiggawatts 6y ago

As a point of reference, I just watched a video of a non-native speaker speaking Hungarian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S44KrRp7QgA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S44KrRp7QgA He's trying really hard, but it's like nails on a chalkboard listening to him. It's worse than a bad computer text-to-speech converter. Hungarian is one of those languages where it is shockingly difficult to learn to a level where you're intelligible at all, and learning to be fluent as an adult is borderline impossible. I've never met a person who has managed it. For comparison, I once came across some Dutch primary school teachers on holiday that were more fluent in English than most native speakers that I know. They had a bigger vocabulary and used more complex sentence structures than I was used to from the typical locals. They had a mild, barely detectable accent. Not all languages are equal!

jvvw 6y ago
My sister became fluent in less than a year I'd say (living in Hungary, Hungarian boyfriend, worked hard at it and super-good at languages generally). I don't know what her accent is like but she definitely has no problem being understood by Hungarians - she has since lived in Budapest for a decade and came top of her year in her Masters degree in translation there which involved lots of translation into Hungarian (including things like poetry!). So possible if difficult!
wwwwewwww 6y ago
I don't think it's possible to be more fluent then a native speaker. You can sound more educated, or elite, or have better verbal skills or otherwise have a "gift of the gab", but a language is defined by the native speakers (except in special cases like Continental English or Esperanto). One mark of high-level fluency is being able to casually confuse "less" and "few" and say things like "more better" just like a native English speaker does.

auganov 6y ago

Everything about English is very different just because of its standing in the world. People aren't even that interested in "mastering" other languages. Not just a native vs non-native thing either [0]. You'll see fewer books about style, copywriting and so forth targeting the native population too. People just don't do it as much in these languages and it's not as good of an investment. An American may be as interested in better writing skills as any ESL speaker. Fewer Frenchmen will think French skills are a good investment. [0] Though this is interesting too. "Natives" of English may be more invested in this distinction than those of other languages. Native vs non-native dynamics are very different in English too.

HPsquared 6y ago

So, English is like Python?

npmn 6y ago

So English is like Javascript, both languages are spoken/written by the majority of its intended engineers, have ton of resources/books/materials and lastly both the languages are easy to start but difficult to master.

Razengan 6y ago

English is not easy to learn (or teach) without being [involuntarily] exposed to it in one way or the other since childhood. One of the best examples of the convoluted mess of ambiguities and exceptions in English: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581841 It's particularly frustrating when English-speakers arrogantly make fun of other languages (like Chinese/Japanese) as if English doesn't have its share of stupid shit.

emrah 6y ago

Relative to other languages, the premise might be correct but learning English was still not easy due to all the irregularities and overloaded words one has to memorize.

sershe 6y ago

Comparing Russian (my native language), English, and Turkish (that I've learned to lower-intermediate level 15 years ago and have since forgotten)... English has very simple rules, and tons of irregularities and exceptions everywhere. And as some have mentioned, tons of vocabulary. Aspects of Turkish sometimes felt to me almost like a programming language, it's very modular with complex rules compared to English (for a non-native learner of both), but there seem to be relatively few irregularities. Russian has both - complex rules, and tons of irregularities. I am guessing rote learning without many complex rules is easier for most people? PS. The biggest gap in my English that is obvious in my daily life is that I cannot for the life of me understand half of ZZ Top lyrics. Can native English speakers understand ZZ Top lyrics, e.g. "Poke Chop Sandwich" or "Two Ways To Play"?

ccpcx 6y ago
Do you mean understanding what the words are or what they're talking about? I can understand the words in Two Ways to Play, but I would have had a lot of gaps in Poke Chop Sandwich if I hadn't already looked at the lyrics. I have little, if any, idea of what either of them are actually talking about. I get the vague sense that Poke Chop Sandwich might be their version of Fat Bottomed Girls by Queen ("waiting in the sack" and "gonna get some" might support this). Two Ways to Play is probably about a relationship, but I can't tell for sure what the problem is or what the singer is saying he wants to do about it. In any case, it seems like he wants to try again, but I can't entirely grasp what he's expressing about his philosophy of relationships.
- sershe 6y ago
  I can understand the words, I just have very vague (or no) idea of what they're talking about :)

anticensor 6y ago

I think that applies to all languages, not only English?

Arete314159 6y ago

I've 45, a native English speaker, and extremely literate. A few months ago I got into a disagreement with my husband on how to pronounce a word ("satiety"). Because I'd never seen it before, and while I could figure it out from context, it turns out my guess at the pronunciation was wrong. English is humbling. You are still learning words in middle age. You are still learning pronunciations in middle age. It just never ends.