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Current Events > So what's with this English the the hardest language myth?

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DevsBro
06/19/20 10:53:51 AM
#1:


Who keeps spreading it, and how few languages do they know anything whatsoever about?

Did nobody ever tell them about Spanish with its pages-long conjugation tables for every verb, or Chinese with its 20k+ character symbolic character set?

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ThyCorndog
06/19/20 11:01:04 AM
#3:


It's not the hardest language but it's harder than most european languages to speak correctly bar a few. there's a lot of words that you won't know how to pronounce until you hear someone else pronounce it. other european languages are far more phonetic except for a few

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blablablax17
06/19/20 11:01:26 AM
#4:


Most people literally take 12 years of English in school.
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Prestoff
06/19/20 11:02:19 AM
#5:


If there wasnt so many exception rules...

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Cheese_Crackers
06/19/20 11:02:19 AM
#6:


Everytime this discussion happens, Asian peeps will say that Spanish and German are really hard, while the European ones say that Japanese and Mandarin are tough.

Needless to say that its all relative. Character-based languages are a nightmare for people that only speak Latin languages.

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UnfairRepresent
06/19/20 11:02:28 AM
#7:


It's not "the hardest" but it has weird and inconsistent rules.

its harder than a lot of common languages despite being widespread
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MrToothHasYou
06/19/20 11:04:36 AM
#8:


I think the idea is that due to it borrowing from both French/Latin and Germanic roots, its harder to transfer learned language skills to English from its relatives than, say, two Romance languages or two Germanic languages.

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masterpug53
06/19/20 11:04:58 AM
#9:


Supposedly English is tough because it has very little consistency compared to other languages; it's an odd mix of German and Romantic, and iirc a decent chunk of our modern vocabulary was made up on the spot by Shakespeare.

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cjsdowg
06/19/20 11:05:49 AM
#10:


English is a bastardization of many other languages so that is why many people have a lot of issues.

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DevsBro
06/19/20 11:10:16 AM
#11:


Prestoff posted...
If there wasnt so many exception rules...
You mean like conozco, tengo, tuviste, el problema, el agua, pongo, pus, hago and voy?

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philsov
06/19/20 11:10:21 AM
#12:


It is absolute garbage when it comes to spelling and pronunciation.

https://i.redd.it/cmvcntb07ts41.jpg
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Cheese_Crackers
06/19/20 11:11:54 AM
#13:


cjsdowg posted...
English is a bastardization of many other languages so that is why many people have a lot of issues.
Is this because English is quite young compared to other Romance and Germanic languages? Perhaps in a few more centuries it'll have more of its own identity.

Kind of like the US being a hodge podge of different cultures from Europe, Mexico, etc.

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DevsBro
06/19/20 11:12:55 AM
#14:


blablablax17 posted...
Most people literally take 12 years of English in school.
How much of that is dedicated to stuff like grammar and spelling as opposed to poetry, literature and composition, though?

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GoodOlJr
06/19/20 11:14:38 AM
#15:


Ive been exposed to english, french, spanish, punjabi, cantonese

Punjabi is probably the easiest, its completely phonetic

English/french/spanish are easy for us be cause we grew up with roman characters

Chinese Is hard, brutally hard to learn, the tones are subtle, and their written language is basically memorizing thousands of characters
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DevsBro
06/19/20 11:14:46 AM
#16:


philsov posted...
It is absolute garbage when it comes to spelling and pronunciation.

https://i.redd.it/cmvcntb07ts41.jpg
Not as bad as Chinese.

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Questionmarktarius
06/19/20 11:14:56 AM
#17:


Other languages:


English:

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YonicBoom
06/19/20 11:15:46 AM
#18:


Although the above posts are mostly true, that English does contain a large amount of weird grammar rules and exceptions that even native speakers may not fully understand, it's good to remember that English probably has the largest amount of different words and phrases in common use. Native speakers don't often think about that, but someone learning the language probably has more than double the vocabulary and common phrases to learn compared to just about any other language before they can be considered fluent themselves.

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Thompson
06/19/20 11:17:38 AM
#19:


Chuck, Check, Chip, Champ, Chamel... eon... um...

Chalice, Challenge, Channel, CharactDo'h!

Chair, Chain, Chess, Chew, Chemist...

*rage quit*


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ASithLord7
06/19/20 2:49:28 PM
#20:


Because theyre laymen who are ignorant wrt languages. L2 difficulty is completely dependent on the L1.

Cheese_Crackers posted...
Is this because English is quite young compared to other Romance and Germanic languages? Perhaps in a few more centuries it'll have more of its own identity.

Kind of like the US being a hodge podge of different cultures from Europe, Mexico, etc.

English is no younger than its siblings or cousins, and Old English was more or less contemporaneous with Old German and Old French for example

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thronedfire2
06/19/20 2:50:09 PM
#21:


I think it just has the most quirks that make no sense, so it's confusing for people who learned other languages first

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ASithLord7
06/19/20 3:00:45 PM
#22:


thronedfire2 posted...
I think it just has the most quirks that make no sense, so it's confusing for people who learned other languages first
You have a lot of experience with the other ~6000 languages?

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thronedfire2
06/19/20 3:02:29 PM
#23:


ASithLord7 posted...
You have a lot of experience with the other ~6000 languages?

no, that was just a thing that I heard about people who learned western european languages first

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Doe
06/19/20 3:04:40 PM
#24:


You can speak good Spanish by knowing a handful of important conjugations, and those conjugations are consistent across all verbs, and exception verbs are consistently exceptional. Spanish also has very consistent sounds which is integral to understanding the language.

In English, the pronunciation of words correlates only vaguely to the letters that compose them.

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Doe
06/19/20 3:11:24 PM
#25:


DevsBro posted...
You mean like conozco, tengo, tuviste, el problema, el agua, pongo, pus, hago and voy?
Nouns with -ma are masculine. That's a really consistent rule. El agua IS feminine, but Spanish as a rule uses masculine articles for a- words to prevent double vowel, similar to "an apple."

And everyone learns those exception verbs. It's only a handful of verbs (and verbs that contain them like reconocer for conocer) with these exceptions that are common, and these verbs are consistently exceptional, so it's not like lots of different verbs are exceptional only in specific conjugations.

You can figure this all out in a semester of immersive Spanish. There's no rule to my knowledge that distinguishes the pronunciation of 'though' and 'through.' You just have to know that shit because English is sadistic.

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