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?

Twiney, I wonder if we just can’t hear our first language’s turns of phrase though (& I’m assuming your
1st language is English w French a close second?).

I’m English-Canadian & noticed a lot of turns of phrase when I moved to the UK. My older English relatives at times never seemed to utter an original thought, it was all common phrases joined up together (& only my great fondness for them prevented me from biffing them for it). Now I’m home, I can’t hear it here, though of course canadians most do it as well. But I’m a bit deaf to it. I’ve heard we start our sentences with “So .....” but I can’t hear it!

I think English is pretty hard to learn due to the irregularities. And as you said, we tend not to correct accents. Our family had a German teenager board with us for a term, and he thought he was god’s gift to the English language. He was pretty good, but was convinced he spoke English without an accent, when of course he sounded like any German and had trouble w the letters German speakers have trouble with. We tried gently correcting him when we thought it could cause confusion and he didn’t respond well.

If you are a native Finnish or Chinese speaker English is bloody easy because these two languages easily top English on the list of hardest languages to learn - grammar wise.

Speaking wise..... Finnish is so much easier to pronounce than English, because you say every single letter as it's written. There are no silent letters. You can literally read a whole book out loud to a child once you learn the alphabet and not know what you are reading.

I am not v qualified to answer this as I only speak English and can get by in French (and have studied a couple of other languages at a simple level) but I do do (weird phrasing to teach a foreigner!) the Times cryptic crossword daily.

I have to date only met one non-native speaker who even attempts this. It is the combination of complex vocabulary, idiomatic use and multiple synonyms that would make it v tough to master.

I also think that ‘register’ is tough to grasp in English.

I studied 13 languages and English and Swedish were by far the easiest ones. French on the other hand is a lot more difficult. French grammar is very complicated.

@IronCurtain - spot on with Romanian! The feminine genitive - wtf? Do you teach Romanian?

MrsSchadenfreude I only teach my boyfriend and it’s not an easy pursuit, despite his huge interest in languages. We have several wtf moments a day.

A lot of posters mention the irregularities of the English language but I found those to be easy to grasp as they tend to be an exception to a rule rather than there being no rule to begin with.

By the way this is a super interesting article about vocabulary size by language and the specifics of even addressing that question:

hope this works

The accent issue is interesting. When I speak French, everyone assumes I am Dutch - to the extent that when I lived in Brussels, people would switch to Dutch (eg in restaurants) when I spoke French. This caused further confusion, as, although I speak Dutch, I am not fluent, and I’d get the response “Oh, you’re not Flemish... or Dutch? Are you Dutch?”

In Romania, I had a friend who always had hysterics when I spoke to him in Romanian. When he had stopped laughing, he explained that it was not necessarily my torturing of his language, but that he never heard a foreigner speaking it, and it just seemed strange.

In my native language, instead of using prepositions, you will change the word instead. So instead of learning the word once you will have to learn it 14 times in singular, plust 14 in plural. Nouns, adverbs and adjectives.

So for example one small red house is 'üks väike punane maja'.
If you want to say 'Go into the small red house' you will have to change all the words and it becomes 'ühte väikesesse punasesse majja'.
To say say go up to the small red house, you will say 'ühe väikese punase majani' .
And so on. 28 times.

I think it's true what you're all saying wrt mastering English (as opposed to knowing enough to get by). I was one of the top students in my college back home in English and used to do crossword puzzles in various papers here (broadsheets only, ahem). But cryptic puzzles larrygrylls defeated me, couldn't understand the clues at all. Just seemed like a string of nonsense!

My native language is easy too - (mostly) everything pronounced as spelt, verbs only change depending on whether they're active or passive, we use specific words to indicate tenses and (my biggest bugbear with every language I've learnt) no gender associated with nouns!

@KatharinaRosalie - is that Estonian?

It is, MrsShadenfreude

English is the hardest European language to learn because learning the grammar doesn’t give you the rules to use the language.

fflonkl, I don't get cryptic crosswords either, and I'm a native speaker... they are a somewhat niche and specialist interest.

I remember the sheer delight first time I got a piece of word-play in French.

We’ll begin with box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice,
But the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn’t the plural of pan be pen?
The cow in the plural may be cows or kine,
But the plural of vow is vows, not vine.
And I speak of a foot, and you show me your feet,
But I give a boot… would a pair be beet?
If one is a tooth, and a whole set is teeth,
Why shouldn’t the plural of booth be beeth?

If the singular is this, and the plural is these,
Why shouldn’t the plural of kiss be kese?
Then one may be that, and three be those,
Yet the plural of hat would never be hose.
We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.

The masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim.
So our English, I think you will agree,
Is the trickiest language you ever did see.

I take it you already know
of tough, and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
on hiccough, through, slough and though.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead; it’s said like bed, not bead!
For goodness sake, don’t call it deed!

Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt)
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there’s dose and rose and lose –
Just look them up – and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward
And font and front and word and sword.

And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start.
A dreadful language: Why, man alive,
I’d learned to talk when I was five.
And yet to write it, the more I tried,
I hadn’t learned it at fifty-five.
And yet to write it, the more I sigh,
I’ll not learn how ’til the day I die.]

Just out of interest, people who claim English is hard/hardest. I would assume you're not a native English speaker - how many other languages do you speak or have you tried to learn, and which ones did you find significantly easier then? Because as said, I either speak or have tried to learn about a dozen, and English is in my opinion the second easiest of them.

German, Spanish, Italian...all significantly easier than English, by a very long way.

@Goldilocks I'd suggest watching TV5 ("TV cinq") to pick up spoken French. I had it on cable, for years, and then without subtitles and that worked wonders. The program "Questions pour un Champignon" was my favourite! In fact the only one I can recall now.

You said "Two people not speaking each others language but using another to talk, my only language, was pretty humbling." This happens all the time. English - the Lingua Franca of today! I particularly recall a group of Danes visiting, one asked if it was OK for them to speak Danish to us, Swedes. I said yes. You should have seen the looks my colleagues threw at me. It was not OK. No, English bridging the gap between neighbouring countries is the way to go. It actually feels better to as a foreigner speak to another foreigner in English, being more or less on the same level. Otherwise it is more crippling, the other party fluent while you feel at loss for words all the time. Can be quite taxing.

I find Finnish quite hard to learn, this is because the grammar and vocabulary is quite unlike that of my mother tongue, unlike English where the situation is reversed, them two being quite alike.

I can remember conversing with a French man. My school French wasn't equal to his native French, he couldn't speak English. We settled on Spanish as giving us an equal level of incompetence.

I'm useless at languages but DH switched languages when he was a child and can pick up a new language very easily.

People I know who have learned English have told me that it is hard because of all the 'exceptions to the rules'.

@Backingvocals I agree - Dutch is a very direct language and most Dutch people I know are very direct. I'm not sure which is cause and which is effect - or even if there is any - but it always amuses me how blunt many of them are!

I also agree that the question at the end of the sentence thing is very tricky. eg. my daughter has grown a lot this year hasn't she? Turning the sentence round and making it negative (or positive) is really hard for non native English speakers I think (don't you? ). My Dutch friends and family all struggle with it and just tend to say "isn't it?" no matter what the sentence eg my daughter has grown a lot this year, isn't it? I think in Dutch you just say "eh?" at the end (not sure how to spell it but that's the general sound).

We did grammar exercises in class, filling out page after page with those questions. Question tags. Thick workbooks. A sentence and a blank line for the question, to be filled in by us pupils.

@BitOutOfPractice

A bit like us tagging "ey" on the end, or "right?" or "innit?"

Yes, just like that OP. Much easier!

hevonbu did it drum it in to you? Sounds dull but your English is so excellent I can't help thinking it must've been worth it, mustn't it?

I think it is relatively easy to speak a little English, and very difficult to speak it well.
I teach English as a foreign language and the pronunciation, stress patterns and irregularities are really challenging. Yes, there remains only a vestigial genetive case in contrast to the full case system learners of Russian have to grapple with; and no gender of nouns and adjectives but I think languages like Spanish for example, are much easier to transition from a basic level to competency.