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.
As a Japanese, I agree with you.
When friends who are learning the language ask me questions, I sometimes can't even answer them.
So I end up saying "that's just how we say/use it".
And much respect from me.
I wouldn't learn Japanese if my mother tongue is European language.
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.
i have a similar experience. i became mostly fluent after a year of living in the US during high school. (and then living in the US again and other english speaking countries for a few years)
i always explained to people that complained about learning german being hard, that i felt that german is hard at the beginning, but once you are over the hurdle, it gets a lot easier, whereas english is easy at the beginning, and it keeps getting harder.
learning german is like climbing up a steep road followed by a shallow incline, whereas learning english is a not so steep road that just keeps going up and up and up.
I agree with both of your premises. I started going to International school when I was 10 and got all my education in English. I got two college and one masters degrees. I am fairly confident in my ability to use English yet my wife is American and every day she finds something to correct in my English.
My wife have been learning Turkish using Duolingo and a Turkish learning platform for the past couple months, and she can hold her end up in basic conversation. We have many expat friends who have been learning Turkish for a year or so and they can communicate pretty well.
Turkish syntax is wildly different than English syntax, and pronunciations are throat based rather than tongue based. There are lots of synonyms and parallel meanings in everyday use. Moreover there are not many resources to learn Turkish from. Yet, people start speaking broken Turkish enough to communicate complex ideas within a year.
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.)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
While I agree with many of your points comparing Spanish and English, I disagree with several points:
In Spanish, word order is more fluid than in English--greatly facilitated by the fact that the person (1st, 2nd, 3rd...) of a verb is an ending rather than a separate pronoun. You can quite acceptably start sentences with subject, verb, direct object, even indirect object.
And while there are more rules than in English, there is also a much greater dependence on context to understand basic meaning. If you use loismo, 'lo' can refer to: you, he, she, it. If you don't pick up on a sometimes subtle contextual marker, you can quickly be talking at cross-purposes. The need for context also results from the much smaller vocabulary in Spanish, so meaning has to be interpolated by context or remain imprecise. (As a visual demonstration, look at any Spanish-English dictionary and see how much wider the English-to-Spanish section is than its counterpart.)
Your view that spelling = correct pronunciation is not as ironclad as you make it out to be. It has exceptions: Mexico and Texas being a prime examples--the x being pronounced like a jota.
I agree overall that Spanish has a clearer grammar that is more widely applied, but I don't think it's nearly as clearly defined as you make it out to be.
Thank you for your educated empathy! I spent ten years in the US, have the highest proficiency level in the CEFR standard, and yet I dread phrasal verbs. Sure, I get the feeling the set of idioms I know is getting smaller as time goes on, and spelling is, well, not foreign friendly, to put it mildly.
But phrasal verbs... how can I really process that make out is somehow, intuitively, connected to kissing? What about putting out? How can a house burn up but also burn down? Putting off, setting somebody up, giving up? I will always feel more comfortable using postponing, framing and surrendering respectively. (I don't really use them more often to fit in [hey, that one almost makes sense!], but internally most phrasal verbs always feel artificial.)
For the record, coming from Spanish I feel the pain of native English speakers having to cope with to be as both ser y estar, but to this day I still have some trouble with do and make.
I've lived in Spain for many years and speak pretty good Spanish. But there is one thing I still find relatively tricky in Spanish: the correct gender for nouns. The worst is when you're referring to something elsewhere in a sentence just by lo/la, well away from where the noun was, or have to make the adjective match the gender. If you get it wrong native speakers will not fully understand you or at least look at you weird.
For Spanish natives, the "his/her" relationship word when referring to family members can cause problems, since the "his" refers to the other person, whereas su/suya in Spanish refers to the main noun. e.g. "hermana suya" - the "suya" is female because of "hermana" (or "su hermana" the "su" is neutral), whereas in English "his sister" the "his" is male because the other person must be male, the gender of the sister doesn't matter.
> 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.)
I knew someone who came to the US from Latvia. His observation was that in English, first you cut the tree down, then you cut the tree up.
As a Spaniard I agree with your observations. In Spanish most variations of pronunciation come from local variants, so even there there is consistency. In english is quite hard to grasp how to say new words. That's not a problem in Spanish.
For me the most difficult is pronunciation, and having so many exceptions.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
Just a personal anecdote, my native language is Hungarian, and I have been studying English from pretty early on in primary school. And I was really terrible at it, I assume in part because of the “rules” that has more exceptions than applicable cases. And the language “clicked” much later on, when I accumulated enough of the language that I could “hear” whether a given sentence sounds right or not.
This is in stark contrast to my (failed) attempt at learning German, where even though I know like 3 words all together, I could form quite complex sentences because the language is so regular. I didn’t like learning all the rules, but it “clicks” much faster if they are consistent.
So my experience (as a layperson) is that a language has to be “compiled” and one must hear what is correct to be able to speak it to any reasonable extant - and in the learning phase, sentence forming is more like being “interpreted”. And perhaps a more “dynamic” language is more troublesome to compile.
Semitic languages never had a neuter gender. That's one of the prominent differences between classic Semitic and Indo-European languages.
Otherwise this description is pretty correct, but it omits an important part. Middle English was highly influenced not by Anglo-Norman (the dialect of French spoken by the Norman nobility who conquered and settled in England), but also by the Old Norse spoken by the Vikings who conquered and settled the Danelaw before them.
English has gotten about half of its vocabulary from Anglo-Norman (either in French or Latin form) and this is truly a tremendous influence. It is interesting to note, however, that Anglo-Norman mostly supplemented — not replaced! — native Old English words, and often provided a more aristocratic alternative to them. Thus the peasants who raised chicken, cows, pigs, calves and sheep for meat used Old English words to refer to the animals, but the richer classes who actually ate the meat used Anglo-Norman words to refer to it: poultry, beef, pork, veal and mutton.
Old Norse, on the other hand, probably doesn't comprise more than a small percentage (2-5%) of Modern, English vocabulary, but the parts it affected are much more core to the language, and it often replaced the Old English word, which often had a very similar sound: e.g. sister (Old Norse: systir, Old English: sweoster), egg (OE: ǣġ, pronounced 'ey'), sky (ON: ský, OE: heofon - which became restricted to 'heaven'). Even the plural pronoun "they" comes from Norse (ON: their, OE: hīe).
The loss of grammatical gender and case was probably almost complete by the 1066, when William the Conqueror invaded England. The Middle English that we start seeing a little after the Norman conquest is already missing most of the case and gender endings, which led linguists to believe that this change happened earlier, but was not reflected in the conservative writing. As you say, what keeps language unchanging is the ruling class, but this is ONLY true for the written language, which can be policed. The nobles and clergymen can't very much execute every single peasant who drops a grammatical case. But once the Old English ruling class was replaced with a ruling class who only cared about preserving French, and the writing standards for Old English lost hold, the preexisting changes started surfacing in writing.
As to why Old Norse affected Old English grammar so strongly while it had a smaller impact (in sheer size, if not importance) on the vocabulary than French, there seem to be two factors:
1. Contact between Old English and Old Norse was much higher than contact between Middle English and Anglo-Norman, since the Viking migration brought in both lords and peasants, and intermarriage was common. Language contact was especially a daily thing around the border area, which happened to be just around London. This turned out to be important, since other English dialects took more time to lose the grammatical endings, but once became the capital, the London dialect became the more important during the 14th and 15th centuries, once the royal court gradually started replacing French with English, since the English of the kings and court was most influenced by the London dialect.
2. The two Germanic languages were mutually intelligible in vocabulary, but their grammatical endings were strikingly different. The easiest way for English and Norse speakers to understand each other was to ignore the grammatical endings, and thus they lost their meaning.
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.
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!
I'd say English listeners are incredibly fault-tolerant because of how diverse English speakers are. Languages with fewer, more localized speakers are less tolerant of poor pronunciation because there's less variety in what they hear.
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)
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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".
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.
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.
[+] [-] cehrlich|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kh1|5 years ago|reply
And much respect from me. I wouldn't learn Japanese if my mother tongue is European language.
[+] [-] presentation|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] em-bee|5 years ago|reply
i always explained to people that complained about learning german being hard, that i felt that german is hard at the beginning, but once you are over the hurdle, it gets a lot easier, whereas english is easy at the beginning, and it keeps getting harder.
learning german is like climbing up a steep road followed by a shallow incline, whereas learning english is a not so steep road that just keeps going up and up and up.
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
This is how language develops, so I wouldn't feel bad about it.
[+] [-] yigitcakar|5 years ago|reply
My wife have been learning Turkish using Duolingo and a Turkish learning platform for the past couple months, and she can hold her end up in basic conversation. We have many expat friends who have been learning Turkish for a year or so and they can communicate pretty well.
Turkish syntax is wildly different than English syntax, and pronunciations are throat based rather than tongue based. There are lots of synonyms and parallel meanings in everyday use. Moreover there are not many resources to learn Turkish from. Yet, people start speaking broken Turkish enough to communicate complex ideas within a year.
[+] [-] gruppe_sechs|5 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] lordnacho|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zeofig|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IgorPartola|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bane|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leephillips|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] ternaryoperator|5 years ago|reply
In Spanish, word order is more fluid than in English--greatly facilitated by the fact that the person (1st, 2nd, 3rd...) of a verb is an ending rather than a separate pronoun. You can quite acceptably start sentences with subject, verb, direct object, even indirect object.
And while there are more rules than in English, there is also a much greater dependence on context to understand basic meaning. If you use loismo, 'lo' can refer to: you, he, she, it. If you don't pick up on a sometimes subtle contextual marker, you can quickly be talking at cross-purposes. The need for context also results from the much smaller vocabulary in Spanish, so meaning has to be interpolated by context or remain imprecise. (As a visual demonstration, look at any Spanish-English dictionary and see how much wider the English-to-Spanish section is than its counterpart.)
Your view that spelling = correct pronunciation is not as ironclad as you make it out to be. It has exceptions: Mexico and Texas being a prime examples--the x being pronounced like a jota.
I agree overall that Spanish has a clearer grammar that is more widely applied, but I don't think it's nearly as clearly defined as you make it out to be.
[+] [-] ezequiel-garzon|5 years ago|reply
But phrasal verbs... how can I really process that make out is somehow, intuitively, connected to kissing? What about putting out? How can a house burn up but also burn down? Putting off, setting somebody up, giving up? I will always feel more comfortable using postponing, framing and surrendering respectively. (I don't really use them more often to fit in [hey, that one almost makes sense!], but internally most phrasal verbs always feel artificial.)
For the record, coming from Spanish I feel the pain of native English speakers having to cope with to be as both ser y estar, but to this day I still have some trouble with do and make.
[+] [-] CannisterFlux|5 years ago|reply
For Spanish natives, the "his/her" relationship word when referring to family members can cause problems, since the "his" refers to the other person, whereas su/suya in Spanish refers to the main noun. e.g. "hermana suya" - the "suya" is female because of "hermana" (or "su hermana" the "su" is neutral), whereas in English "his sister" the "his" is male because the other person must be male, the gender of the sister doesn't matter.
[+] [-] D-Coder|5 years ago|reply
I knew someone who came to the US from Latvia. His observation was that in English, first you cut the tree down, then you cut the tree up.
[+] [-] iagovar|5 years ago|reply
For me the most difficult is pronunciation, and having so many exceptions.
[+] [-] flobosg|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] toyg|5 years ago|reply
It's just a form of gerundio. As an Italian speaker, that's actually one of the easiest English forms to learn.
[+] [-] smitty1e|5 years ago|reply
Something I'm fond of saying when the office life goes the Full Dilbert.
[+] [-] cletus|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kaba0|5 years ago|reply
Just a personal anecdote, my native language is Hungarian, and I have been studying English from pretty early on in primary school. And I was really terrible at it, I assume in part because of the “rules” that has more exceptions than applicable cases. And the language “clicked” much later on, when I accumulated enough of the language that I could “hear” whether a given sentence sounds right or not.
This is in stark contrast to my (failed) attempt at learning German, where even though I know like 3 words all together, I could form quite complex sentences because the language is so regular. I didn’t like learning all the rules, but it “clicks” much faster if they are consistent.
So my experience (as a layperson) is that a language has to be “compiled” and one must hear what is correct to be able to speak it to any reasonable extant - and in the learning phase, sentence forming is more like being “interpreted”. And perhaps a more “dynamic” language is more troublesome to compile.
[+] [-] unscaled|5 years ago|reply
Otherwise this description is pretty correct, but it omits an important part. Middle English was highly influenced not by Anglo-Norman (the dialect of French spoken by the Norman nobility who conquered and settled in England), but also by the Old Norse spoken by the Vikings who conquered and settled the Danelaw before them.
English has gotten about half of its vocabulary from Anglo-Norman (either in French or Latin form) and this is truly a tremendous influence. It is interesting to note, however, that Anglo-Norman mostly supplemented — not replaced! — native Old English words, and often provided a more aristocratic alternative to them. Thus the peasants who raised chicken, cows, pigs, calves and sheep for meat used Old English words to refer to the animals, but the richer classes who actually ate the meat used Anglo-Norman words to refer to it: poultry, beef, pork, veal and mutton.
Old Norse, on the other hand, probably doesn't comprise more than a small percentage (2-5%) of Modern, English vocabulary, but the parts it affected are much more core to the language, and it often replaced the Old English word, which often had a very similar sound: e.g. sister (Old Norse: systir, Old English: sweoster), egg (OE: ǣġ, pronounced 'ey'), sky (ON: ský, OE: heofon - which became restricted to 'heaven'). Even the plural pronoun "they" comes from Norse (ON: their, OE: hīe).
The loss of grammatical gender and case was probably almost complete by the 1066, when William the Conqueror invaded England. The Middle English that we start seeing a little after the Norman conquest is already missing most of the case and gender endings, which led linguists to believe that this change happened earlier, but was not reflected in the conservative writing. As you say, what keeps language unchanging is the ruling class, but this is ONLY true for the written language, which can be policed. The nobles and clergymen can't very much execute every single peasant who drops a grammatical case. But once the Old English ruling class was replaced with a ruling class who only cared about preserving French, and the writing standards for Old English lost hold, the preexisting changes started surfacing in writing.
As to why Old Norse affected Old English grammar so strongly while it had a smaller impact (in sheer size, if not importance) on the vocabulary than French, there seem to be two factors:
1. Contact between Old English and Old Norse was much higher than contact between Middle English and Anglo-Norman, since the Viking migration brought in both lords and peasants, and intermarriage was common. Language contact was especially a daily thing around the border area, which happened to be just around London. This turned out to be important, since other English dialects took more time to lose the grammatical endings, but once became the capital, the London dialect became the more important during the 14th and 15th centuries, once the royal court gradually started replacing French with English, since the English of the kings and court was most influenced by the London dialect.
2. The two Germanic languages were mutually intelligible in vocabulary, but their grammatical endings were strikingly different. The easiest way for English and Norse speakers to understand each other was to ignore the grammatical endings, and thus they lost their meaning.
[+] [-] dorkwood|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] schrodinger|5 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] dehrmann|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaba0|5 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] ekianjo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soldehierro|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] canada2us|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axaxs|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggawatts|5 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] KaiserPro|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] nullsense|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] soldehierro|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] auganov|5 years ago|reply
[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.
[+] [-] npmn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|5 years ago|reply
My understanding is that all commonly used spoken languages are basically organically evolved and not designed?
[+] [-] dqpb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Arete314159|5 years ago|reply
English is humbling. You are still learning words in middle age. You are still learning pronunciations in middle age. It just never ends.
[+] [-] ggambetta|5 years ago|reply
Huh? We have the same construction in Spanish, which is another European language. "I read" -> "[yo] leo"; "I am reading" -> "[yo] estoy leyendo".
[+] [-] qsdqdf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] globular-toast|5 years ago|reply
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
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.