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?

Add a comma mered and its meaning changes again:

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

I speak several languages... And I'm sorry to disappoint you OP I found English easy to learn in comparison with French and Italian. So, from a classroom perspective English is easy.
However the complexity of any language isn't learned in a class room, but if you speak, read, write and live it. That's when it becomes more difficult.

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"

Couldn’t it also be a response to... ‘oh, you’ve already asked Charlotte? I would have thought you’d be better off asking Jane...’

?

I think people sometimes confuse the prevalence of English/ fact that so many people speak it with it being easy.

There's also a sort of international English, comprised of 2000 basic words that a lot of institutions etc get by on. Quite different from the English that might be spoken in the UK.

French grammar is hard. But French students are taught grammar- in the UK we haven't been for a long time. Most people would know a gerund if it hit them in the face (including myself there). Makes it hard to learn another language if you don't have the tools to break down a language.

I taught English in primary schools in France for a year and I definitely encountered this attitude from several of the French teachers there. The best one was a woman who told me I pronounced the English alphabet wrong (!) and insisted that 'suitcase' is a synonym for 'pencil case', which is what she had taught her class before I arrived.

Wouldn't know*!

Why isn’t there a polite ‘you’? Someone help me please - Portuguese - polite "you" is third person, takes third person endings. Familiar "you" is second person (singular and plural, though plural has dropped out of use). Am I right that polite "you" in French is in effect 2nd person plural (vous) and "tu" is second person singular? And that's what we do too, except that we only use the polite plural "you" and have stopped using the familiar "thou"?

This showed up on FB the other day, itscabout the difference of 'that' and 'which' in a sentence.

m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10155936074417298&id=278862032297

*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"

Couldn’t it also be a response to... ‘oh, you’ve already asked Charlotte? I would have thought you’d be better off asking Jane...’*

Wouldn't that be "...I would have thought that you would have been better off..." ie a past tense "would have been better off" in place of the present?/future? "would be"

mered

Yes. German, French, Italian... they all have a ‘polite you’ (although they construct it differently...)

And then there was English. ;)

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.buzzfeed.com/amphtml/lukelewis/what-british-people-say-versus-what-they-mean

This always amuses me

Paeisienne the queen actually does own all the land in Britain, everyone else only owns an interest in the land either fee simple (indefinite) or leasehold (time limited)-ironically this system was introduced to England during the Norman conquest.

So this was introduced to England, not Britain. The queen does not own all of the land in Britain.

mered Yes, you're right. I think it's rather a shame that we've lost 'thou'.

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.

They must be into dense lyrics to try and make up for the shite music. Has there ever been a decent French popstar?

mered

I honestly don’t know.

But I think it depends on when / why you’d be better off.

If you’d be better off because Jane is the one that will be at work tomorrow (something in the future) or whether you would have been better off (the state of being better off has already occurred or is currently still occurring).

But as I said, I’m not an native speaker... idk.

Paeisienne the queen actually does own all the land in Britain, everyone else only owns an interest in the land either fee simple (indefinite) or leasehold (time limited)-ironically this system was introduced to England during the Norman conquest

You know thats not actually true though right? It hasn't been for a very long time.

Twiney, I can't say I know, except that the first is slightly less forthright than the second - hedged around with just a smidgeon of doubt.
Another shade of meaning for learners to contend with - and the verb construction of the 2nd - I would have thought - is the complicated 3rd conditional, which I will confess to never having heard of until as a relatively new teacher I had to teach it to my intermediate class.

I had to look it up in our 'bible' - the grammar for EFL teachers, which spells out things native speakers never even think of, even if they've studied other languages, as I had.
We taught the 3 conditionals like this - classes consisting largely of young govt. employee males not particularly well off!

If I win the lottery, I'll buy a car.
If I won the lottery, I'd buy a car.
If I had won the lottery, I would have bought a car.

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

This is definitely a thing. English speakers all speak it so differently, that we're extremely forgiving of mispronunciation (even that's wrong - different pronunciation, which may or may not be mispronunciation depending on your accent!) - much more than many other languages I've had to deal with where if I don't pronounce something exactly correctly they have no idea what I'm saying.

I really pity people trying to learn English - Scots, Americans, Welsh, Indians, Singaporeans, the English from North to South - so many countries speak it as a first language, and we all sound so differently when doing it!

BlazingPaddles

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.

They must be into dense lyrics to try and make up for the shite music. Has there ever been a decent French popstar?

Erm...nope! The UK and the US dominate when it comes to current music. And the language predominantly spoken is English!
Amazing!

As a non-native speaker, I found English to be far easier to learn than, for example, Russian.

To begin with, I didn't have to learn a new alphabet so I could at least have a go at reading / pronouncing words without needing to remember new symbols. Secondly, English was everywhere when I was growing up, in movies, music and after some years on the internet. It was easy to engage with the language in its native forms. Thirdly, learning English has become such a necessity that there is a vast array of resources available to suit different learning styles.

For context, my native language is Romanian. It has a stupidly archaic grammar derived from vulgar Latin. It has phonetic pronunciation but almost everything else is irregular - no fixed order of the words in the sentence, no standard plural forms, reflexive verbs that don't exist in English, a long list of additional pronouns etc. Add to that cases, conjugations and genders and it becomes a bit of a minefield. Even speaking another Latin-based language doesn't help that much as at least 30% of the vocabulary has Slavic origins. But what makes it so
much harder to learn is the lack of educational resources and easy exposure to the language. It's a tiny language, spoken by a handful of people and there is very limited need for it.

Mastering any language is difficult, especially a foreign language. But in the grand scheme of things learning English is more accessible to non-natives than a lot of other languages, in my honest opinion.

Found it.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/3112171-English-language-nonsensical-and-anomalies

A great post from the thread

13/12/2017 20:11 FadedRed

English pronunciation test

If you find it tough going, do not despair, you are not alone: Multi-national personnel at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters near Paris found English to be an easy language ... until they tried to pronounce it. To help them discard an array of accents, the verses below were devised. After trying them, a Frenchman said he'd prefer six months at hard labor to reading six lines aloud. Try them yourself.

English is tough stuff

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation -- think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough --
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

(Apparently excerpted from The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité.)

It has a stupidly archaic grammar derived from vulgar Latin. It has phonetic pronunciation but almost everything else is irregular - no fixed order of the words in the sentence, flexibility of word order is facilitated by the latin base - if the function of the word in the sentence is indicated by the word ending, then you can shuffle the words around happily. We have to say "the cat sat on the mat" not "the mat sat on the cat". latin would have the cat in nominative case, the mat in dative or ablative, so it was clear what was sitting on what no matter which way round you put it.

if the function of the word in the sentence is indicated by the word ending, then you can shuffle the words around happily. We have to say "the cat sat on the mat" not "the mat sat on the cat". latin would have the cat in nominative case, the mat in dative or ablative, so it was clear what was sitting on what no matter which way round you put it.

This is true, but in practice nearly all inflected languages do have conventions around word order, even if they're not technically necessary (I don't know about Romanian). People think in Latin you can put the words in any order you'd like because that's what they tell beginners - it's true that it will make sense any way, and that that gives you a huge scope to play with word order, but it's not true that your Latin will be equally stylish either way, and also changing the word order changes emphasis.

I think it's probably easier to get going in English because of the lack of agreeing with masculine and feminine and all that lark. But the massive vocabulary (largest in the world and it's not just in dictionaries - I saw somewhere that native English speakers use more words in everyday speech than speakers of any other language), mad spelling and use of nuance which is a mystery to anyone who isn't British make it really difficult.

My colleague's Dutch wife recently wrote an email to their English family which said "Come at 3pm to this party. Please bring some lego". He was horrified and rewrote it as "It would be great if you could come at 3pm. Little Jim is really into Lego at the moment so anything along those lines would be gratefully received". Made me laugh. She couldn't understand what all the faff was about but his version is very clear to me - just do it!

When I taught English as a foreign language what surprised me when hearing it through a non native speakers ears for the first time was how difficult the equivalent of n'est-ce pas is in English. In French it's just one phrase for everything. In English it's:
Isn't it?

Haven't you?

Don't we?

And then the irregular ones - Aren't I? instead of Amn't I? Shan't we? instead of Shalln't we?

Of course it also depends on your native language which foreign languages you will find easier. As a native speaker of an obscure little language not related to any major European ones, I still maintain that English is one of the easiest languages I have tried to learn.