English language

[Nightscape]

Does anybody else think this is a messed up language?  I mean, with too many words and synonyms and too many rules that don't make sense?

Now don't get me wrong, English is my native language, but I think that the language is this big hulking beast with patchwork all over it.  The entire language needs an overhaul.

It's bad enough that almost everyone has to learn it now, it should at least be easy to learn!

[TheHammer]

Concerning the 'easy to learn' part, I may disagree with you here. Having learned (with doubtful succes) English as well as French, Spanish and Italian, and speaking German as my native one, I can assure you that English is the easiest of them all!

See, you don't have to bother with conjugating the verb (there are two different endings for all tenses!) when you ignore irregular past participle forms. I have read somewhere that in Greek, they have over 200 forms for a single verb .

Then it's also less complicated with adjectives and stuff: no male/female differences, for example. No cases (ask someone who speaks Latin) at all, not so many exceptions.

But I think you want to hear more opinions about English being 'messed up' - I can't really say anything to this, but as for German, we have some similar discussions here, there is actually a orthography reform turning all rules upside down, very annoying. And of course we have to fight against all these anglicisms trying to conquer our wonderful language  (not my thought actually, but it is a popular opinion).

English as a language spoken all over the world has its own problems I think. In every country it is spoken the people will and have start(ed) to mix their own language with English, and these new forms will then spread around of course (thanks to the internet...). I am not quite sure if that's what you meant but hope it did you any good.

[Regulus Medtner]

I don’t think it’s messed up, just awkward sometimes and not really fit for the role of universal language it kind of has today, except for its being relatively easy to learn (oh, and a  really fun and beautiful one, too, but that’s just me). Now, Greek is more suited for the task. Endless vocabulary, amazing capacity to constantly create new words (with reference to old ones and not arbitrarily) and able to convey the most minute differences of meaning with precision and clarity, really musical in nature AND able to be read and understood correctly just by following certain specific rules. English in that last respect can be very misleading and impractical sometimes (especially in pronunciation...).

[willcowskitz]

What bothers me most about English is the fragmented vocabulary - words are derived from Greek and Latin and aren't always flexibly convertible between themselves and there are too many root words (with little or no obvious roots) and the lack of harmony (spoken).

[Brian Healey]

That's interesting that TheHammer says English was easy, because I've always heard that English is one of the hardest languages to learn for a non-native. I was under the impression that it was right up there with Chinese, Japanese, and those other notiously hard languages. I think the reason is that so much relies on context, whereas in other languages, the order of the words doesn't so much matter as long as you have the right noun and verb structure.

Maybe I heard wrong. I don't know, I don't have a lot of experience with languages.


Peace,
Bri

[SteinwayTony]

That's interesting that TheHammer says English was easy, because I've always heard that English is one of the hardest languages to learn for a non-native. I was under the impression that it was right up there with Chinese, Japanese, and those other notiously hard languages. I think the reason is that so much relies on context, whereas in other languages, the order of the words doesn't so much matter as long as you have the right noun and verb structure.

Maybe I heard wrong. I don't know, I don't have a lot of experience with languages.


Peace,
Bri

That's very true.  I've found, especially after having lived in New York City for a few months, that English falls under three general categories: good English, bad English, and I-just-learned-English English.

[Troldhaugen]

Having spoken French, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, and Danish throughout my life, I find English relatively straightforward to learn in terms of pronunciation , grammmar....etc (although slangs, idioms could be complicating at times). I think East Asian and Scandinavian languages are among the hardest  of all.   

[jgoo]

English is just fine. Minimal verb conjugation (drop the "to" when not in infinitive form, add an "s" to the end for the third person singular in the present tense, all other tenses and moods have the same endings for each person (-ed, -ing, -en) etc.), no male/female agreement or number agreement rules for adjectives, easy to speak (I may be biased because it's my native language but a lot of people I know who have it as a second language speak it very well and didn't have much problem learning it).

The only real difficult part of English is learning to accurately read and write it. There aren't many words that are actually spelled as they sound. Many silent letters, for example, many letter combinations that have multiple sounds (such as "ough") etc. However, people sometimes do have problems with irregular verbs, especially "to be", the most irregular verb of the English language. (When new to the language, who would think that "am", "are", "is", "was", and "were" are forms of "to be"?)

So, IMHO, for speaking and understanding what you hear, I think that English is very easy. When it comes to reading and writing, it can be very difficult. You just have to memorize all of those rules. It gets much easier after a while.

[liszt1022]

I took a "History of the English Language" class and learned the development of the language from Indo-European and on. It really cleared out a lot of confusion and you learn so much about why the language IS so messed up. It's the fault of:

Peasants
the French
the English courts
the Middle English scribes
and
the people who made the first dictionaries

all in their own special way.

[Nordlys]

Does anybody else think this is a messed up language?  I mean, with too many words and synonyms and too many rules that don't make sense?

Now don't get me wrong, English is my native language, but I think that the language is this big hulking beast with patchwork all over it.  The entire language needs an overhaul.

All living languages are like that. They are constantly influenced by other languages, neighbouring or culturally dominant ones. For example Norwegian has changed a lot since viking times, at different times being influenced by French, German, Dutch, Danish, and English.

They tried to make perfect artificial languages, like Esperanto, which should be easy to learn and good as an international language, but people prefer to learn living languages.

I think it is easy for young people to learn english today, because it is encountered everywhere (Hollywood-movies, popmusic, internet, and as an international language abroad).

Having spoken French, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, and Danish throughout my life, I find English relatively straightforward to learn in terms of pronunciation , grammmar....etc (although slangs, idioms could be complicating at times). I think East Asian and Scandinavian languages are among the hardest of all.

What is your native language?
I actually think Norwegian is quite easy to learn. It is a germanic language, but with much simpler grammar than German (the grammar being somewhere in between German and English). And the prononciation is straightforward (not like english...)

[willcowskitz]

English is one of the trickiest languages when it comes to pronounciation. Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Estonian are practically very easy to pronounce, unless you're a native English speaker and too used to it's different pronounciation rules and above all, exceptions. Swedish and Norwegian are also grammatically and structure-wise easily approachable for English speakers. Japanese is very easy to pronounce, at least for Finnish speakers because both contain lots of long vowels and similar tones are produced when speaking (some people can even confuse the languages with each other). If you want to learn difficult languages, try Hebrew (all those consonants are a real strain, not to mention the writing), Hungarian or Finnish. Pronounciation-wise, slavic languages are especially interesting with all the different "s" sounds you have to learn to produce and distinguish from each other. In Russian there are 7 different "s" sounds, in Hungarian there are 8 (including joined consonants) and in Polish... 10, 11? ...and even native Polish speakers don't really master their "esses" perfectly. Despite (or partially because of) that Slavic languages are very beautiful when spoken.

[trunks]

Agreed 100%.
If you make it a rule out of the following -

1. Small pigs are called piglets.
What about small bulls?

2. Feet are to foot as teeth are to tooth and geese are to goose.
Ok what are beek, reet, reef, leek . . . ?
Plural forms or book, root, roof, look . . . 

3. If Mouse => Mice and Louse => Lice
Then House => Hice and Blouse => Blice

. . .

[i_m_robot]

self are proof english not so hard language

try talk like this with other language and you will hardly be understanded

[thalbergmad]

self are proof english not so hard language

try talk like this with other language and you will hardly be understanded

Some of us struggle to understand you in English old boy.

[Torp]

I've often wondered about this.  Is any language really any harder or easier than any other language?  How could you ever test a hypothesis that set forth that one language was more difficult than another?  I mean, afterall, 5 year olds of all languages speak with roughly the same literacy in their native tongues, right?  If English, or Russian, or Spanish, or fill-in-the-blank______, were more difficult wouldn't that mean that children would learn to speak the more difficult language later (assuming a comparable level of innate intelligence between the children)?

Or is the question really, given a certain native language, which language would be the most challenging to learn to speak as a second language?

Just rambling some questions, I don't really know the answer.

[Daevren]

To me the english language seems pretty simple, straightforward and flexible but not very elegant, beautiful or balanced.

My native tongue is Dutch. The dutch language is so confusing its very hard to master as an adult. There are lots of rules but every rule had lots of exceptions, all of a different nature.

But I know that some languages are more complex. German isn't really easy, same with latin. And I heard russian is a pregnant dog.

The way humans learn languages is really complex. People are still doing research. But in the end all languages have an universal grammar system. So really all languages are largely the same except that have small variations in some areas. Of course this makes a huge difference for us. 

[paris]

i love learning new languages...

croatian is pretty awkward to foreign speakers...hm our grammar confuses poor people 

i'm learning deutsch but i don't like it so much cuz it's harsh to speak... last year i started learning french, and i like it much more. although, french has easy grammar but it's hard to  learn pronpunciation.
generally, roman languages are 'musical' and have fluency

i'm finishing with my latin this year, it was interesting when we were learning bout roman habits, mythology, adages...but those declinations and grammar stuffs were at least boring 

with english is biggest problem, for me, vocabulary, part with phrases, idioms, and slang.

other languages which intrigues me most are those who have different symbols for letters, like chinese, arabic...i started some urdu alphabet, but it's so awkward cuz they write from right to left   
i already learned half of their alphabet 

[chozart]

although English has some weird things to it like being really specific about almost everything, at least it's easy. i confidently say it's the easiest language I have learned, among 4 and some dialects. i also imagine it to be far easier than many many others. imagine how specific some of them can get.. I'd never be able to explain some of the stuff in even my own language, nor would I myself probably be able to understand it if I weren't a native to it. At least English is easy to pick up, regardless of some of the logic used in some of its aspects.

[abell88]

I've often wondered about this.  Is any language really any harder or easier than any other language?  How could you ever test a hypothesis that set forth that one language was more difficult than another?  I mean, afterall, 5 year olds of all languages speak with roughly the same literacy in their native tongues, right?  If English, or Russian, or Spanish, or fill-in-the-blank______, were more difficult wouldn't that mean that children would learn to speak the more difficult language later (assuming a comparable level of innate intelligence between the children)?

Yes, children attain the same level of spoken literacy...but spelling lags in English and I think Danish (maybe???)  as there are so many exceptions.

I've heard that English is one of the easiest languages to learn to speak, but that it takes 10 years to learn to speak it well.

[trunks]

Asian languages are in general more difficult to learn (as a second language) than European. And the most difficult Asian language of all has to be Chinese. In Chinese we do not have alphabets. Each and every word is a unique character. We learn these characters from tender age, that is why we don't find it difficult (for the very same reason a first language is always easy to learn while a second language is always difficult).

[asyncopated]

I love the idiosyncrasies in the English language, what's wrong with them?  I'm from Asia as well, Singapore specifically.   Here, we speak mostly a horrible, incomprehensible, bastardized form of English.  So much so that one sees ‘speak good English’ ads sprawled across public buses all over the city.  I don't have anything against local slang per se, but do think these develop mainly due to a lack of command of the language.  Mind you, Singaporeans are not the only ones guilty of this. 

Anyway, back to the language.  When I was younger, we were taught in class that if you have a hyphenated word, like mother-in-law, the correct from for the plural is to place the 's' behind the word mother and not the phrase.  So

‘Mother-in-laws’ is wrong but,
‘mothers-in-law’ is correct.

A good friend who sat behind me whispered, "If you ever have to say the phase 'my mothers-in-law' doesn't it mean that you have more than one wife?”

It's the little silly things that make the world tick (or tickle).


al.

[Bouter Boogie]

At least the English language is much more fun than the Dutch language 

[silva]

you should check out George Orwell's (author of 1984 and Animal Farm) essay on the English language and its politics

https://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html

very interesting read

- Silva

[BoliverAllmon]

I think the English language is extremely easy. what other language can you half-way speak correctly and no one knows the better?

boliver