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 teacher...doesn’t see. Doh.

I do find French much more 'flowery' - English is more to the point and direct.

@crackerjacket

I actually see French as a very logical and precise language!

Pronounciation - no rules apply! Regional accents REALLY vary.

But this is true for most languages. I don't know a single language which has not got massively varying accents.

I taught English as a foreign language in France to French students and some of them found it incredibly hard. Mostly due to the fact that in French they have one tense for simple past and in English we have two. Such as 'he did' versus 'he was doing,' past continuous. Also so many irregularities in English, as others have said. One student told me, 'I could learn this if the rules stayed the same, but each time I apply a rule you tell me it's an exception!' I did get his point.

cracker

English is potentially rather blunt, yes. Which makes being polite rather challenging imo... (Could you / Would you mind / Wouldn't you consider / This might possibly be....)

I found English ridiculously easy to learn but I think it's mostly because I was really interested in it and motivated. I think it's also easier to learn in countries where one is exposed to it constantly, such as Scandinavia. English is on tv, on the radio, people read English websites/use English when live gaming etc, so even if you don't actively study it you will pick it up. My dad is in his 60s and has never learnt English at school (or anywhere else) but can still hold a conversation with my British husband, and that's all down to TV and films.

I remember reading somewhere that in some countries such as France there are/were regulations on what percentage of, say, all tv programmes have to be in French. This was to ensure French would remain the majority language (I think!). Please correct me if I'm wrong as can't remember the details, but I guess learning English would be harder in France as there would be less exposure through media.

Haha. I studied French for nine years in school but found it really hard and can't remember much now, but I learnt Swedish for about four years and can still speak it ok. I also learnt Spanish for a year and can still speak it better than French, however, having knowledge of French probably helped there. I suppose what I'm trying to say is every learner is different.

From my experience, a lot of it is down to British politeness. (I hope I don't cause offence when I explain myself, I don't mean to): In other countries, if you were struggling or mispronounced a word or said a sentence incorrectly they would point it out and/or laugh/make fun of you whereas here, if someone is talking in really broken English and you can barely understand them, you will do your best to accommodate them. Maybe this is why people around the world boast that English is the easiest language to learn but will then say or type something like "My feets are hurting much today".

Backingvocals, I was amused at the Dutch party invitation!

I have found Scandinavians to be very 'direct' in a way that can sound over blunt or on the rude side to Brits - it's just the way they say things, but it can give a negative impression. I guess the Dutch are similar.

Further south, I remember thinking how 'off' it sounded when a Greek speaking child said to me (in English). 'I want water,' when we would expect our children to say, 'Please can/may I have...'.
But I knew she was simply translating directly from the Greek, where i don't think it would sound 'off' at all.

GETTING, I am that person. If I go to a bar back home I will just say "beer" and get my beer and that's how it works. It took me ages to remember to say please in the UK but I got there in the end.

I think English can be easy to learn the basics of (no cases, little inflection) but as you progress it gets harder. A lot is based on idiom, there are many exceptions to the rules and the spelling is all over the place. My dad said he mostly learned English by reading extensively. A Finnish friend of mine said that if you get English, you can have a lot of fun with it (think puns and 'I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue' type wordplay).

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

Johnny Hallyday ?

I quite like Nolween Leroy, cute music imo. My little sister likes Cœur de Pirate...

*nolwenn

I've heard English is very hard to learn actually.

I'm currently learning Swedish.

I used to teach mfl in both Adult Education (those were the days, no tests, no exams) and Secondary. When in Germany I am usually presumed to be native speaker, and depending on what I was wearing , the same used to go for France, although I rarely go there now.

Some teaching colleagues were native speakers and had lived here for years. Their English was (usually) excellent - but it was obvious within 30 seconds that not their native language. The same applies to English teachers in Germany (and France, in the past at least).

So to me pronunciation seems to be the main stumbling block. Whether it's because we don't like to correct, perceiving that as rude, or whether it's because it can be attractive (Arsene Wenger?) or whether it is too difficult to 'get your tongue round it', your guess is as good as mine.

My German friends find 'Smith's Crisps' difficult. And 'squirrel' in any language seems a challenge .

I'm a non-native speaker who learnt English at a very young age (mother tongue is Asian language not used much outside immediate geographical area). Our teaching methods (then!) were very structured so I did learn about grammatical rules and would have known what a gerund was back then.

I've since learnt French, German and Arabic and without a doubt English was the easiest. But then I could be saying that as I learnt those languages as an adult and found the rules difficult to process (interestingly I found German made much more sense than French).

I did find rhyming slang baffling when my (English) DH first introduced me to it though. And once failed to finish a crossword as had no idea what bangers and mash meant!

I also think your starting point influences how hard you find a language. If you a native French speaker, Italian is going to be quite easy. But Italian for a Brit not so much.

YANBU. It's swings and roundabouts with languages. I teach French and German but am always pointing out to my students (adult or child) the difficulties in the equivalent grammar points or phrases in English and how hard it must be to learn them as a non-native speaker.

The irregularities of spelling and pronunciation alone must be a nightmare. I was teaching German modal verbs the other day and it became very apparent to my students how weird the tenses are in the equivalent English verbs. Past tense of 'I may'? Future tense of I can? Bonkers.

Meant to say, I'm currently trying to teach myself Japanese (just for fun ), having only ever learnt European languages, and it's mostly really hard, but certain things are astonishingly simple compared with English, French etc (no real tenses, no different verb endings for different people, no gender-based adjective agreement - it's a revelation!).

"Why isn’t there a polite ‘you’?"
The polite form of 'you' in English is 'you'. It's the familiar 'thou' and 'thee' that are no longer used.

Of the languages I understand ( no claim to fluency) I find Spanish the easiest, French not too bad once you learn the irregular verbs, German deceptively easy, until you dig into the grammar.
The advantage of English as a first language is that you can understand at basic level a lot of others as you recognise the routes of a lot of the words, or English has just directly absorbed the word, even for non-European languages such as Hindi.
I would say English was relatively easy to speak well and be understood, but a lot relies on inflection or nuance that a native speaker would recognise, but a non-profit native speaker wouldn't.
I didn't learn grammar at school, it wasn't taught in the 70s but using the cat example. The cat sat on the mat, to me is past tense, on the mat, sat the cat is present. Both correct ( with an additional comma) but slightly different meaning.
The market one - I don't go to the market is completely different to don't go to the market. I would hear the latter as a warning.
As PP said, we have multiple words for the same thing from different linguistic routes. Fowl and poultry, swine and pigs, houses and dwellings. Also plurals can be illogical, frogs, mice, geese, oxen....

Would also add I can often tell where someone learnt English and if their teacher was a native speaker or not, which I find quite fascinating.
Certain accents such as American, Irish, Australian are very transferable it seems and override the native accent of the speaker.

I'd say it's not certain accents but all strong accents.

I lived and worked in Paris for over a year and another nanny I worked with was astonished to find out she had an accent while speaking English- and American one. She'd been taught by American teachers at an international school, and kept it up watching American tv and films with subtitles. She thought she sounded exactly the same as me, with my midlands/southwest acccent. She also got annoyed when seeing I wrote something like colour or flavour and I had to introduce her to American and English differences.

In my limited experience it did seem the attitude to learning English or another language, by a native French speaker, was very different to my own. I took French at secondary, it was just another lesson to get through. Truly wish we learnt it younger here! But the French people I spoke to who had learnt English saw it more as a really useful tool, a subject more in line with maths for someone who aimed to do a maths degree.

Unfortunately I learnt very little French while there, Paris is not a good place to practice, attempts were usually tutted at or just ignored. I spent a year doing my best to learn from books but to no avail, my job was specifically to speak English and I had no tv there so a real shame.

I did however come to be more grateful to be an English speaker. Witnessing my French boss use English several times to communicate with Italians while we were there was very interesting. Two people not speaking each others language but using another to talk, my only language, was pretty humbling.