As someone who has studied multiple languages: English is one of the most complicated languages for non-native speakers to learn. By comparison Mandarin Chinese is actually considered to be easier to learn.
Having taken both of those languages I can confirm that this is actually the case, although the one thing English does have going for it is that it has a limited number of characters in the alphabet.
Problem with English is, pretty much every rule of the language has an exception, and some have several. (Borrowing so many words from other languages hasn’t helped that.)
yeah, I’ve got a friend from hungary and hearing her pronouncing some of our place names is a treat. loughborough was a particular favourite. but thats what you get when your language is a couple thousand years of stealing words from other people, having words forced in by invaders or just spelling becoming corrupted over time
To say nothing of the additional mangling ancient people of noble birth made of the language to set themselves apart from the commoners. The English most people speak today is an imperfect melding of what was essentially two different dialects (Noble English and Common English), which is why a lot of things have different words that mean the same thing, especially in regards to food.
Full English is hard language. But there are lot of people working hard on dumbing it down to version everyone on planet can learn. (“There are 20 millions of British who speaks the English as you do, but there are 200 millions of Russians/Chinese/Indians who speaks the English as I do” was the joke I think …)
As someone who has studied multiple languages: English is one of the most complicated languages for non-native speakers to learn. By comparison Mandarin Chinese is actually considered to be easier to learn.
Having taken both of those languages I can confirm that this is actually the case, although the one thing English does have going for it is that it has a limited number of characters in the alphabet.
Problem with English is, pretty much every rule of the language has an exception, and some have several. (Borrowing so many words from other languages hasn’t helped that.)
yeah, I’ve got a friend from hungary and hearing her pronouncing some of our place names is a treat. loughborough was a particular favourite. but thats what you get when your language is a couple thousand years of stealing words from other people, having words forced in by invaders or just spelling becoming corrupted over time
To say nothing of the additional mangling ancient people of noble birth made of the language to set themselves apart from the commoners. The English most people speak today is an imperfect melding of what was essentially two different dialects (Noble English and Common English), which is why a lot of things have different words that mean the same thing, especially in regards to food.
Full English is hard language. But there are lot of people working hard on dumbing it down to version everyone on planet can learn. (“There are 20 millions of British who speaks the English as you do, but there are 200 millions of Russians/Chinese/Indians who speaks the English as I do” was the joke I think …)