To think no actually, English isn't piss easy for non natives

[twiney]

I'm in France and you wouldn't believe the amount of people who have this idea that English is really basic and easy, the irony being of course that they don't actually speak it.

Last night I was out with a woman who got on to the subject of helping her son with his English homework (she literally doesn't speak a word of it).
"Don't trouble yourself with complexity," she appparently told him. "In English they just make really basic and easy sentences. Keep it simple."

She then got onto the subject of English-language music, and how basic and straightforward lyrics are compared to the dense richness of French music.

I was brought up bilingual and between countries so i feel well placed to say that actually most French music is basically just poetry they've added a few instruments to.

But why do people think this? Is it true? Personally I don't see it that way, and I find that with French at least, I would consider it easier in the sense that:
A) Once you've learnt how the pronunciation works, there are practically zero variations on it. You can see a French word you've never seen before, and know how to pronounce it.
B) I find stock turns of phrase crop up again and again in French, whereas I find English "looser".

I can only think it has something to do with conjugation, or lack of feminine/masculine? There's also the fact that I rarely hear English speakers correct non natives, perhaps giving them a false sense of confidence.

What's your experience/opinion?

English is easiER to start, but it gets more and more complex as you progress. A beginner can start describing everything as "nice" to start for example, and only know a handful of irregular verbs. On that aspect, it's easier than others when you are at school. Also, most people are surrounded by English, songs and movies, so it sounds familiar which makes it easier. It's true that in many foreign schools, English is considered the easy option.

When you see the amount of native English speakers who can't spell, even on this forum, you have the proof that it's not that simple!

No foreign language can be described as "easy" if you learn it properly, but that's not the point.

English is a mingling of N European origins and Norman French origins, which gives you two words for basically everything, then we've stolen words from just about every other language we've encountered, so our vocabulary is very rich, and has become quite nuanced. We've also got very lazy with our verb structure, so that, for example, you can see the ghost of the subjunctive, but we can also get away with not using it at all, and most people wouldn't notice. This relaxation of grammatical rules actually makes the language more difficult, as so much meaning has to be derived by context and background knowledge.

And of course, how difficult it is depends on where you're coming from.

There's an interesting book by David Crystal on where all our spelling has come from. It all makes sense, but it doesn't actually help, because there are so many situations and therefore so many rules - so when you have apparent inconsistencies in rules, it's because there are two or more rules at play.

English is one of the hardest languages to learn.

But I think the issue in the OP is one of french superiority rather than anything actually to do with the english language!

I taught Esol and igcse across Europe in the noughties, and a lot of my local colleagues felt that while English is easy to grasp at a beginner's level, the problems come when you try to achieve an intermediate and advanced level (so everything above about a B1 on the common framework).

As pp say, it's the irregularity of English spelling and verbs, plus our use of phrasal verbs and idioms, that causes the problems. Again, while we aren't a tonal language, there is a certain cadence you need for English that's quite difficult to pick up.

Personally, I think English is a very difficult language if you wish to achieve native fluency. That is just not so for other languages where it is fairly achievable to be able to pass yourself off as a local so long as your pronunciation is good.

I’m a native German speaker (but grew up in primarily a German/Italian household and went to German / French schools).

The first 1-2 years of studying English were honestly rather horrible.

I actually hated the English language... And I had a whole list of complaints. (The pronunciation, the spelling => why is it laugh and not laf? Thought and not thot? Why isn’t there a polite ‘you’? And what the heck is up with awful and awesome??)

I think we also have a cultural idea that we're especially crap at languages. Which is, to a large extent, very true - we do have very low levels of second languages. But I think people often exaggerate this to imagining that everyone elsewhere speaks entirely fluent English - something not helped by mostly encountering foreign language speakers either a) in the UK, where they are likely to be part of a self-selecting and probably well-educated group who emigrated or b) in touristy places where multilingualism is an economic necessity. I regularly visit a part of Italy where almost nobody speaks more than the absolute most basic English - which is obviously fine (why should they?) but a lot of British people just don't believe such places exist. I also remember my cultural shock on my school German exchange when I realised that only the better students had been allowed on the exchange and so they weren't actually, as we had thought when they came to us first, all completely fluent aged 15 - turned out some of their class were pretty crap at a language they'd been learning throughout their entire education! Again, I had absorbed the idea that all Germans were good at languages, which basic common sense (not everyone is very intellectually able, no matter which country you're in) should have told me was nonsense.

I used to teach English as a foreign language, mostly to speakers of Arabic, and although it's easier in some ways than other languages (hardly any conjugations/declensions and no noun genders except for a ship traditionally being 'she' ;-) ) it can be extraordinarily complicated even for beginners.
We say 'I went' but the ? is 'Did you go...?, not, 'went you?' which was what my poor beginners often found hard to grasp - just one thing.

Also, question tags, which native speakers don't even have to think about. Whereas in French/German it's 'n'est-ce pas?' or 'nicht wahr?' or even in Greek 'then ine? - in English we have so many variations - didn't she? Aren't you? Don't they? etc. Such a headache for new learners.

That's just a couple of examples. At a later stage English has a vast vocabulary, more than so many languages, often with slightly different shades of meaning of two words meaning much the same thing. House/home, buy/purchase, are just two.
I'm sure I read somewhere that English is the only language that has a Thesaurus, or that needs one!

What makes English easier to learn is its ubiquity. Films, songs, even football (the ads on the pitches) are so English biased, largely because of the US. I’ve recently watched two series with subtitles on tv, one in French, the other in Spanish and it didn’t take long for me to start remembering a lot of the vocabulary I had forgotten. If that applied regularly and to songs too, I think I’d soon become pretty fluent.

Plus if, when I went abroad the common second language was, say, Spanish rather than English, again I’d have more motivation and opportunities to improve. If you speak English as a first language, and try to speak the native language, people abroad can generally tell and reply in English rather than struggle to understand your mangled Spanish, French or German.

As for learning as a beginner, I think I’d agree that it’s relatively easy to speak basic English but difficult to grasp the subtleties, because we have such a broad vocabulary.

I put myself in my 7yo ds's position since starting school. I'm amazed that he's learned what he has in 2 and a bit years, particularly as I'm forever saying when he's reading to me: "this is just one of those words that doesn't follow the 'rules' you've learned - you just need to learn that it's different, and remember that". Even to someone brought up with English all around them, it's a hard language to learn, with some seriously obscure rules. English is my forte but teaching it to a young person makes you realise that there are lots of anomalies within it that are hard to explain to a child who likes asking "but why?" !!

But I had an extremely old-fashioned English teacher that believe in the power of mindless repetition, which might have fuelled my dislike for the English language

But the vast selection of rescources (books, films, tv shows, podcast etc) are what makes English one of the ‘easier’ languages in my personal opinion.

Why is it possible to say:

I'd have thought you'd be better off asking Jane

But also

I'd think you'd be better off asking Jane

That’s true, margaret. I speak Italian (quite poorly these days, due to lack of practice) and some of my favourite times have been muddling through with my limited Italian and someone else’s limited English. Great sense of cameraderie with those encounters, IME.

It’s very dispiriting when you try and someone just answers in English, on the other hand. Different cultural norms can be a bitch. I’ve had some really crushing assessments of my Italian from native speakers and it can put you off trying again. I tend to begin every conversation with an apology for my poor accent, and as I said I’d never correct a non-native speaker of English unless they specifically asked me to do so. Even then I’d err towards being too lenient. Which goes back to giving an impression of English being easier than it is.

I studied French at university and am now living in Austria so learning German.

The main difference is that in English we have dispensed with a lot of grammatical variations which are still important in other languages. We don't have masculine and feminine nouns, we ignore the subjunctive and don't really bother with the case system. It makes it far easier at the start but harder to master.

Fewer rules make the language harder to perfect as there is less logic and the language is littered with anomalies because although we ignore rules, they are still present in certain cases. Often in English I know the right answer but can't explain why it is that way.

Spelling is another area. We got rid of the accents and ä to change the sound of vowels and instead rely on context to know how to pronounce a word.

I think the hardness of a language to lern depends massively on the other language (s) you speak. I rely more on my knowledge of French for example to learn German grammar but it shares more vocabulary with English.

twiney they don't mean quite the same thing.

Why is it possible to say:

I'd have thought you'd be better off asking Jane

But also

I'd think you'd be better off asking Jane

In my opinion (the opinion of a non-native speaker): they mean (slightly) different things.

English is absolutely one of the very hardest languages to learn. Most verb forms are irregular; it is not pronounced phonetically; and it has one of the largest vocabularies (170k odd words compared to about 100K in French).

I would agree they mean slightly different things - what a bugger to try and learn that as a non-native speaker though. (What a bugger also a bugger to learn, assuming one can be buggered to do so).

I love English in all its flexible, mixed up, word-pinching nuttiness but I’m glad I don’t have to learn it from scratch!

I don't think it's just cultural (though I'm sure that's part of it) - I also think that, in general, monolingual people tend to be more forgiving of mistakes, wherever they are, in a kind of 'well, I can't do it' way. People are much more forgiving of my terrible Italian than I have found people to be of my objectively better German (neither, incidentally, are great!). But then if I'm speaking to monolingual Italians they have no choice but to work with me if we're going to have the conversation at all; in Germany I've always been in touristy places where English is incredibly widely spoken and so they can just roll their eyes at my mispronunciation and switch to English rather than try and guess what I actually mean.

There was a similar thread the other day, with poems in of all the odd pronunciations of words.

It’s very dispiriting when you try and someone just answers in English, on the other hand.

I agree with this. Dsis was in France in the summer and took her dh and kids on a canoe. She speaks a bit of French but lacks confidence, so always asks French people if they can speak English first. The guy on the canoes obviously saw her translating the written French to dh and kids, so when she asked him if he spoke English he replied "Yes, but I'd like you to try French". She did, he understood and he gave her a massive confidence boost by telling her that her French is good and she should in future try first.

We go out of our way to find areas where spoken English is limited just so I can practice! They always appreciate the effort and we muddle through together if my words or pronunciation isn't quite right, with them trying a few words in English.

Given its irregular nature, it is logical to assume it will be more difficult. Mongrel language!? I love that facet of it; it is idiosyncratic and all the more interesting as a consequence.

I think there is envy on the part of the French who think their language should be the global, international tongue.

I'd have thought you'd be better off asking Jane

I'm offering advice that you haven't asked for and probably won't take. This is the response to "I'm going to ask Charlotte"

I'd think you'd be better off asking Jane

You've asked me for my advice and will probably take it. This is the response to "Should I ask Charlotte?"

I think :-)

@meredintofpandiculation

Well done!!! That's it!

H - Albanian first language - said that English is easy to pick up orally but reading and writing is very difficult. He struggled this morning reading our youngest a story book - Horray confused him.