{"id":434,"date":"2016-03-26T09:27:20","date_gmt":"2016-03-26T09:27:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/detotunamicaenllengues\/?p=434"},"modified":"2016-03-26T09:28:05","modified_gmt":"2016-03-26T09:28:05","slug":"why-is-english-so-hard-to-learn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/detotunamicaenllengues\/2016\/03\/26\/why-is-english-so-hard-to-learn\/","title":{"rendered":"Why is English so hard to learn"},"content":{"rendered":"

(…) Most of us who have tried it probably feel that learning a new language is difficult, even if that new language is similar to our own. So how difficult is it to learn English<\/a> and especially if your first language is quite different?<\/p>\n

The difficulty of learning a new language will depend on how similar that language is to one you already know. Despite English speakers often rating certain languages as being particularly difficult \u2013 languages such as French, which indicate the gender of nouns with articles like le and la, and the Chinese writing system \u2013 there are similarities between these languages.<\/p>\n

If you were to learn French you\u2019d immediately recognise many words, because the English equivalents have French Latin roots, such as ballet or amiable. If you were to learn Chinese you\u2019d find that its grammar is similar to English in many ways \u2013 for example each Chinese sentence has a subject, a predicate and an object (though an English speaker would most likely find learning French easier than Chinese).<\/p>\n

The most difficulty arises when people learn English when they don\u2019t have the advantage of sharing many borrowed words or grammatical patterns with English. This will include speakers of Arabic, Urdu and Bengali \u2013 three of the most common languages spoken by Muslim immigrants in Britain.<\/p>\n

Baffling spellings<\/strong><\/p>\n

In my experience, the most common complaint language learners make about English is that the spelling of words often has little or nothing to do with their pronunciation. It\u2019s easy enough to teach someone how to write the letter \u201ca\u201d, for example, but then they must be taught that its pronunciation changes in words like hat, hate and father. In oak it isn\u2019t pronounced at all.<\/p>\n

Compare this to the simplicity of Spanish, a language in which an \u201ca\u201d and other vowels rarely change pronunciation from word to word.<\/p>\n

Laugh is pronounced larf but the similar-sounding half is not written haugh \u2013 but of course there are regional differences in accent too. Like the \u201cl\u201d in half, there are silent letters sprinkled throughout English words: the \u201ck\u201d in knife and knead, the \u201cs\u201d in island, the \u201cp\u201d in receipt, and so on.<\/p>\n

A recent poem of unknown origin, a favourite of English language teachers who want to amuse their students, contains tongue twisters such as:<\/p>\n

I take it you already know
\nof tough and bough and cough and dough?
\nOthers may stumble, but not you
\non hiccough, thorough, slough and through.<\/p>\n

Another area of difficulty that learners of English often comment on is the prevalence of irregular past verbs in English. It\u2019s simple enough to remember that the past tense of walk is walked, shout is shouted and pick is picked.<\/p>\n

But what about all the irregular verbs, like hit, read and think? For hit, the past tense looks and sounds the same as the present tense. For read, the past tense looks the same, but is pronounced differently. For think, the past tense thought involves substantial change to both the spelling and the pronunciation.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s not always a pattern to many of these irregular verbs. For verbs ending with \u201cink\u201d we have \u201cthink\/thought\u201d, but another irregular pattern \u201cdrink\/drank\u201d and a regular pattern \u201cwink\/winked\u201d. English has several hundred such irregular verbs for learners to look forward to memorising, and many of them are very frequently used: be, get, have, see, eat, and so on.<\/p>\n

Being polite<\/strong><\/p>\n

A delicate difficulty concerns how English speakers show politeness. Some languages have quite clear ways for their users to do this. In French you can use the pronoun vous instead of tu to be polite.<\/p>\n

English only has you, so that doesn\u2019t work. In Japanese you can substitute polite forms of words, so that although kuu, taberu and meshiagaru all mean \u201ceat\u201d in Japanese, the longer words are more polite.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In English we can use longer words: \u201cWould you like to consume nourishment?\u201d instead of \u201cWould you like to eat?\u201d \u2013 but it doesn\u2019t sound polite, rather a bit awkward.<\/p>\n

There are less obvious ways of marking politeness in English: use a question (\u201cCould you pass the \u2026 \u201d instead of \u201cPass the \u2026\u201d), express some doubt (\u201cI don\u2019t suppose you could \u2026 \u201d) and apologise, even for small requests (\u201cSorry to bother you, but \u2026\u201d).<\/p>\n

If subtleties aren\u2019t mastered then otherwise-fluent learners of English (or any other language) \u2013 even if they don\u2019t intend to be impolite \u2013 may unintentionally appear rude.<\/p>\n

So spare a thought for those picking up an English textbook for the first time \u2013 mastering the quirks of the language is tough (pronounced tuff).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(…) Most of us who have tried it probably feel that learning a new language is difficult, even if that new language is similar to our own. So how difficult is it to learn English and especially if your first language is quite different? The difficulty of learning a new language will depend on how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":594,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/detotunamicaenllengues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/detotunamicaenllengues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/detotunamicaenllengues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/detotunamicaenllengues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/594"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/detotunamicaenllengues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/detotunamicaenllengues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":443,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/detotunamicaenllengues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions\/443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/detotunamicaenllengues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/detotunamicaenllengues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/detotunamicaenllengues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}