My experience of learning several Asian languages as a native English speaker is kind of the opposite - the initial learning stage is very hard and it took me a long time to get to a point where people would understand me at all. But once I got over the initial hump, things progressed from "basic" to "intermediate" quite smoothly. (I never stuck around for long enough to get from "intermediate" to "advanced" though, so who knows.)
Certain languages are so specific that as soon as someone says one wrong thing, everyone switches to... English. Happens all the time in every other language that I know anything in. Someone shows up who gets a der/die/das wrong, or they can't do a soft Danish D, or they muck up a tone, and everyone else looks at each other and reply in, of all things, foreign accented English.
Sometimes I point this out to mollify friends who complain about English linguistic/cultural hegemony. The flip side is that, e.g., my French colleagues are much more able to insist upon standards in their mother tongue.
I find that the main thesis of this post is in agreement with my experience, been using English for 20 years and haven’t explored all the galleries and tunnels inside the language.
1. English has a very simple, pre-defined sentence structure. Run-on sentence are discouraged. The language has almost logical decisions regarding the use of the verb “be”. Words are rarely skipped because they are implied. By contrast Russian is much more contextual and free flowing. “I love you”, “you I love”, and “love I you” are all valid sentences with slightly different meanings. “To be” is often skipped. “I hungry” is valid because what else would you put between those two words other than “am”?
2. English has almost no conjugation. The only word changes that happen. Are for present to past or past perfect tenses (go/went/gone). By contrast in Russian you end up conjugating loads of words depending on the relationships between the object and the subject based on direction, action, possession, and gender.
3. English has nine tenses plus the infinitive. Russian has 3+1, which encapsulate the meaning of the 9+1 in English with implied context.
4. English used articles the/a/an to indicate specificity. Russian has no such concept.
5. Word munging is uncommon in English. When a new word is coined it is mostly atomic (app, tweet, selfie). You rarely can take two existing words and combine them with a prefix, a suffix, an ending and get a new word that is grammatically correct. In Russian “protoplanotraincycled” would be a word you could coin and use on the fly.
Those are just some of the more glaring examples of differences. Aside from the extra/more specific tenses and the articles, Russian contains all the complexity of English. Therefore as someone who knows Russian, I think it’s easier to learn English. This is like if you know Haskell you probably have an easier time learning Basic but not the other way around.
Where the drudgery of English comes in is vocabulary. Anyone that tells you that the SATs are not biased towards native speakers is full of putrescible waste. I used to play this game when I was in high school where I would hand a sizable English/Russian translation book to a friend and tell them to pick any Russian word and I could translate it to English. I had a nearly perfect success rate. The vocabulary just isn’t full of obscure $5 words. And before you object that this was simply because the book didn’t contain all the words in usage, not so: the Russian language is just a smaller language where words’ meanings are changed with prefixes and suffixes more than by using entirely different words.
In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”? Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”? The usual answer I hear is that it’s because it makes the language more beautiful and precise. I think it makes it inflexible and inconvenient in the same way that it’s easier to have 26 letters combined in arbitrary patterns than 5000 kanji that each represent one or more things.
P.S.: this is why cursing in English is so simple and stunted while in Russian I can have a conversation with someone using nothing but the word “dick” and it would be not only perfectly understandable but also quite expressive.
P.P.S.: “dick off the dicks over the dick and re-dick them dickwards” is close but not close enough. Russian is a nightmare to learn, 0/10 would not recommend.
You have to thank the British and the social class system they have invented. A person who can exacerbate a matter by virtue of defenestrating something (or someone) is at least of the middle class social status, and by listening to their speech accent in person, you will also be able to reason about how posh was the school they – naturally – attended (low class people went to a school but did not attend it). «Exacerbate» vs «make worse», «defenestrate» vs «throw out of the window», «attend a school» vs «go to a school» are examples of social register words that are specific to a particular social status of the person or a social group they belong to. Middle to upper class people tend to use more words of French and Latin origin to stand themselves apart from people of a lower social class who tend to use more words of the Anglo-Saxon / Germanic origin.
Social register embedded at the language vocabulary level is not unqiue to English (for instance, Korean, Thai, other SE Asian and some native North/South American languages also have multiple registers that require switching to the most appropriate vocabulary depending of how old, how regal, how well known etc the receiver of the speech is), but the clear indication of socioeconomic background is likely a rather unique trait of the English language.
This is the thing about English. Everyone can learn intermediate English, but there's a long tail of vocabulary that comes from other languages. Often you find there's an English word, a French work, and a Latin word for something. You'll then discover that there's some subtlety of meaning between them. For instance, if someone has only figuratively been booted out of a position (politics), they've been defenestrated. You'd never say they've been tossed out the window.
Part of me suspects the French and Latin imports are to do with the elite who wanted to check if someone had been educated at the right places.
In English, the short, common words are the oldest ones, from Old English and Anglo-Saxon origin, the language of everyday people. The long, flowery and poetic usages came later, via French, Italian and Latin, the language of the French invaders from 1066.
You see these two distinct forms a lot in Shakespeare. Indeed he popularised many of the borrowings. Here is one great example from Macbeth:
"Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red."
Back in 1606, when Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, only the best educated could understand "... will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine". So Shakespeare finishes with "making the green one red", which everyone got.
* multitudinous - from Latin "multitudo"
* incarnadine - from French "incarnadin", via Italian and originally from Latin.
* red - from Old English "read", similar root as the German "rot" and Dutch "rood".
* green - from Old English "grene", similar root as the German "grun" and Dutch "groen".
So short words = old, Germanic; complicated words = newer, Latin or French/Italian.
That all said I found Finnish far easier, consistent and logical, even though it's not even in the same Indo-European family.
Prequel. Tweetstorm. Brexit. Clusterfuck. Omnishambles. Freegan. Romcom. Stagflation.
> Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”?
The word usually appears in its noun form, defenestration, for which there isn’t really a handy alternative. You can’t really talk about The Throwing-out-of-the-Window of Prague when discussing the Thirty Years’ War, for example.
> “dick off the dicks over the dick and re-dick them dickwards” is close but not close enough
“The fucking fucker’s fucking fucked” is perfectly grammatical and comprehensible English, if somewhat colloquial.
3. 9 is an odd number to pick, most people agree there are 12 or 16, but you have (multiply as appropriate) past, present, future, simple, future-in-the-past, continuous, perfect, perfect continuous, indicative, imperative, subjunctive, active, and passive forms.
Russian on the other hand has 2 grammatical tenses (past and non-past), and 2 aspects (perfective and imperfective), as well as a couple of forms constructed using auxiliaries (immediate future, conditional). It also has gerunds and participles, and all of this before we even start thinking about verbs of motion.
4. Russian does have the concept of specificity in some cases - in particular there are some cases where the genitive can be used instead of the accusative to indicate indefiniteness.
Definitely 0/10 for recommending learning Russian, except as an exercise in masochism (10/10).
How much of Russian's vocabulary is "native"? My understanding it that English's vocabulary is pretty messed up because it's a mongrel language: Germanic substrate with substantial portions replaced or augmented by medieval French, with lots of Greek/Latinate vocabulary for "educated" topics. That's made even worse because it tends to adopt words complete without translating foreign spelling systems (notable recent example: Pinyin). Things would be a lot simpler if the vocabulary had evolved from the original Anglo-Saxon substrate.
Going back to an earlier point re English speakers understanding beginners/non-natives, I find Polish to be the opposite — I imagine it’s similar with Russian? Examples of errors that cause Poles to look at me like I have two heads:
1. Mistakes in declination: granted changing an ending can dramatically change the meaning of a noun/adverb/adjective, but the ability to infer the intended meaning seems to be largely absent.
2. Mispronunciation of syllables: neglecting to pronounce an accent, for example “mnóstwo” (plenty) vs “mnostwo” (meaningless).
3. Using a wrong conjugation with verbs or slightly mangling the conjugation, e.g., “napisałem list” (I wrote a letter) vs “napisem list” (meaningless).
4. Not breaking up a word correctly —- it’s not always obvious where one syllable ends and another begins, e.g., pronouncing “zadzwonić” (to call) as “zadz-wonić” vs “za-dwonić”.
5. When not accenting the correct syllable (usually second to last in Polish but I understand there’s no general rule in Russian).
My best guess as to why there is little natural tolerance for mistakes is because of lack of immigration. Poland is nearly entirely homogenous, and the biggest immigrant population is Ukrainians, who also speak Slavic languages.
Anyway, personally, I still find it fun to learn, and I look forward to the day I can confidently wear this t-shirt: https://www.amazon.com/Speak-Polish-Whats-Superpower-Shirt/d...
As for the needles redundancy in vocabulary in English, this letter, which was discussed on HN recently, sums it up perfectly:
https://theamericanscholar.org/writing-english-as-a-second-l...
You would love French (coincidentally these words are of french origin). I learn (or at least remember to use) words nearly every day.
That's... Not how vocabulary develops. English is a rich language in large part due to the conquest by the French - much like Norwegian is a rich language due to conquest by the Danish.
Although "defenestrate" is probably more like "tweet" than "computer" - I believe it was a bit of a "fashion statement" at the time.
Sort of. This is a somewhat modern thing. There is various punctuation--parentheses, em dashes, and semicolons in particular--that let you construct fairly long and complex sentences. But the modern style, certainly for basic communication, is to mostly break things up with periods. (To the point where it's sometimes OK if the segments are sentence fragments.)
George Orwell wrote a great essay about this, worth a read:
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Defenestrate, though, is a joke word. You can't say defenestrate without tongue firmly in cheek.
Perhaps you just need an education in high quality English swearing? Although I’m informed by my partner that Spanish is a much better language to swear in than English, if you have the choice.
Most of what you say above about English boils down to this: English doesn't compose words from parts. And so, without conjugation (in general, grammatical inflection), you need to have different words to represent different versions of the same concept. That's where the gigantism of English vocabulary comes from and where the use of the auxiliary verbs (to be and to have), comes from. The later are needed to slightly tweak the meaning of words to make them express different concepts; and, sometimes, you just need to invent a new word to say a new thing.
So for instance you go from simple "I eat" to more complex "I have eaten" to the cumbersome "I have been eating" and "I would have been eating" or, heaven forbid, "I would have had eaten". In Greek -and, I bet, in Russian or any language that allows inflection- these variations on the basic concept of eating can be expressed by verb terminations, although the occasional auxiliary verb or particle is also used: "έφαγα" (I have eaten), "έτρωγα" (I have been eating), "θα έτρωγα" (I would have been eating) and "θα είχα φάει" ("I would have had eaten) [granted, "τρώω", is an anomalous verb and its different forms sound like different words altogether... but they are composed in the same way as er omalous words, "κοιτάω", "κοίταγα", "θα κοίταγα", "θα είχα κοιτάξει" for "looking" rather than "eating"].
Then there's the thing with gendered nouns, that are absent in English but present in many other European languages. For example, to say "a male dog" in English you have to - well, do what I just did or add a pronoun ("he-dog", I don't know how this practice is called); respectively "she-dog" for female dog. In Greek you say "σκύλος, σκύλα, σκυλί" (skyl-os -a -i) for male, female and neuter (i.e. when gender is not important).
This makes English a language of many small words combined in different ways to give new meaning to utterances. It does really remind of ideographic writing as opposed to an alphabet.
But let's talk about what our languages lack that English has - you say that English has articles to indicate specificity. Most Slavic languages lack those and so native speakers of Slavic languages stand out when they use English. Instead of "the program has a bug", "progam has bug", instead of "search a list of integers", "search list of integers", etc.
In Greek again, we have a single word to indicate the position of an object "σε", as in "_στο_ τραπέζι" ("_on_ the table"), "_στην_ κουζίνα" (_in_ the kitchen), "πάω _στη_ θάλασσα" ("I'm going _to_ the beach") and "_σε_ δείχνω" ("I'm pointing _at_ you"). For me at least, after 15 years of living in the UK and using English every day, the correct use of thse different location-indicators (particles?) is still the last frontier that I haven't fully conquered and I find myself making mistakes when using them. "In the page" or "on the page"? "To the house" or "at the house"? Leaving things unsaid and relying on concept is all well and fine until you need to speak in a language that makes the ommitted information clear. Then you're in trouble and you realise you actually didn't have such a clear idea of the unsaid, after all.
>English has a very simple, pre-defined sentence structure. Run-on sentence are discouraged. The language has almost logical decisions regarding the use of the verb “be”. Words are rarely skipped because they are implied. By contrast Russian is much more contextual and free flowing. “I love you”, “you I love”, and “love I you” are all valid sentences with slightly different meanings. “To be” is often skipped. “I hungry” is valid because what else would you put between those two words other than “am”?
You make many points that I'm not sure I follow. Most of it boils down to "English is rather analytical, Russian is rather synthetic", which is of course correct but doesn't really mean much.
Chinese is even more analytic than English, Spanish is significantly more synthetic than either of them. What can we extrapolate from that? Not much.
Regarding the copula "to be" it's an other arbitrary attribute of a language. Some English dialects actually allow it to be dropped, in sentences like "he stupid". Japanese is also zero copula as are many languages from many language families: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_copula , I don't really think it means a lot when it comes to the difficulty of these languages.
>2. English has almost no conjugation. The only word changes that happen. Are for present to past or past perfect tenses (go/went/gone). By contrast in Russian you end up conjugating loads of words depending on the relationships between the object and the subject based on direction, action, possession, and gender.
>3. English has nine tenses plus the infinitive. Russian has 3+1, which encapsulate the meaning of the 9+1 in English with implied context.
Again, what's the argument? If anything it sounds like Russian is easier then?
Russian has verb aspect (perfect and imperfect forms) which is a rather big hurdle for us western learners not used to memorizing verbs in somewhat arbitrary pairs. You also have a huge mess of verbs of motions that are some of the most common ones and require a lot of practice to get right. идти/ехать/ходить/сходить/зайти/пройти... I get PTSD just thinking about it. However Russian conjugations are for the most part rather simple. Meanwhile Portuguese has 12 synthetic tenses (including 3 subjunctives for your pleasure), not counting the compound ones with ter/haver. Aspect is expressed through different tenses, not through different verbs like in Russian. What do we conclude from this? Again, not much IMO.
>5. Word munging is uncommon in English. When a new word is coined it is mostly atomic (app, tweet, selfie). You rarely can take two existing words and combine them with a prefix, a suffix, an ending and get a new word that is grammatically correct. In Russian “protoplanotraincycled” would be a word you could coin and use on the fly.
Just give up. Give in. Give it back. Take me on and attempt to take me over. Take it up with the linguists if you won't take my word for it. That's my take. It's a bit silly that I have to undertake this argument. We should really take it for granted that is is not true.
Some languages like Russian and German like to build compound words, in modern English and French it's a bit less common and productive. Again, so what?
Note that many English word have this compound structure, it's just often less obvious because they've been borrowed from latin or French so it obscures it somewhat. "впечатление" and "impression" for instance have exactly the same structure (в + печать + ~ение", "in + press + ~ion"), it's just probably less obvious to a native anglo than it is to your average drug because the English word is a direct loan from french. "app" is short for "application" which has exactly the same structure as приложение.
>Aside from the extra/more specific tenses and the articles, Russian contains all the complexity of English.
And English contains all the complexity of Russian. It's just expressed differently. I defy you to find an idea or concept in Russian that couldn't be expressed in English, Catalan, Arabic or Chinese. They would just sometimes be expressed differently.
If you're talking purely from a grammatical perspective then I disagree. English tenses are more varied than Russian ones, especially in the past and in the subjunctive. "If he had been there, he would've known". I've seen many Russian speakers with a high level of proficiency in English who still routinely make mistakes in these types of constructions.
>Where the drudgery of English comes in is vocabulary.
лекарь/врач/доктор, состояние/условие, перестать/остановить, вдруг/внезапно/неожиданно, прожить/выжить, идти/ехать/езжать, революция/переворот/восстание, международный/интернациональный, русский/россиский, шофёр/водитель. That's just out of the top of my head.
Interrestingly English and Russian share a similar trait here: English has many doublons like freedom/liberty which are from germanic and latin roots respectively. Russian does the same thing but with slavic and western european roots (generally german and french, nowadays also routinely english).
These faux-synonims that translate to the same thing in your language but carry sometimes important distinctions are always tricky, and in my experience they exist in every language. English has "do" and "make", French has only "faire" but English only has "know" while French has "savoir" and "connaitre".
English has "to put" while Russian has "положить" and "поставить". Russian loves to use very specific verbs where English would just use "to be": находиться, стоять, лежать, висеть and a few others. Similarly Portuguese has "ser", "estar" and "ficar" which can't usually be used interchangeably.
Anyway, I could go on. My TL;DR is that the concept of a language being objectively easier than an other is usually very shortsighted and just demonstrates a certain bias caused by the speaker's own language. Spanish is generally considered to be a relatively simple language by native English speaker, yet it's not grammatically simple. Chinese is vastly more analytic than even English, most learners will tell you that its grammar is usually very easy to grasp, yet it's often considered one of the hardest "mainstream" languages to learn for westerners.
The idea that a language like Russian would be harder to pick up or easier to master than English is laugable to me, as a non-native speaker of either. Russian is riddled with unpredictable stress patterns, irregular declensions and subtle use of word order (“I love you”, “you I love”, and “love I you” only mean the same thing superficially, mastering the nuance is where it gets tricky). English has complicated spelling rules, a mish mash of vocabulary from various origins in common use, conjugations that are only superficially simple (the forms are simple, the usage isn't). It also has phonemes like "th" which are rather uncommon and are hard to pronounce for most non-native speakers.
As for Russian's advanced stuff: after две you put feminine adjectives in the nominative plural and the noun in the genitive singular. But you can also put adjectives in the genitive plural if you want, but it's less common. Unless the stress position in the noun is different between the nominative plural and the genitive singular, in that case native speakers are more likely to use the genitive of the adjective.
That's just one random factoid I have in the back of my brain for having studied Russian. I could go on for a long time.
The notes in the article were interesting, but I was puzzled by the one about the present continuous tense, which does exist in Spanish. Also, the usage is the same as in English, although the use of simple present for present continuous is common in casual speech, and impossible in English (just because there are rules doesn’t mean people follow them).
In Spanish, word order is more fluid than in English--greatly facilitated by the fact that the person (1st, 2nd, 3rd...) of a verb is an ending rather than a separate pronoun. You can quite acceptably start sentences with subject, verb, direct object, even indirect object.
And while there are more rules than in English, there is also a much greater dependence on context to understand basic meaning. If you use loismo, 'lo' can refer to: you, he, she, it. If you don't pick up on a sometimes subtle contextual marker, you can quickly be talking at cross-purposes. The need for context also results from the much smaller vocabulary in Spanish, so meaning has to be interpolated by context or remain imprecise. (As a visual demonstration, look at any Spanish-English dictionary and see how much wider the English-to-Spanish section is than its counterpart.)
Your view that spelling = correct pronunciation is not as ironclad as you make it out to be. It has exceptions: Mexico and Texas being a prime examples--the x being pronounced like a jota.
I agree overall that Spanish has a clearer grammar that is more widely applied, but I don't think it's nearly as clearly defined as you make it out to be.
But phrasal verbs... how can I really process that make out is somehow, intuitively, connected to kissing? What about putting out? How can a house burn up but also burn down? Putting off, setting somebody up, giving up? I will always feel more comfortable using postponing, framing and surrendering respectively. (I don't really use them more often to fit in [hey, that one almost makes sense!], but internally most phrasal verbs always feel artificial.)
For the record, coming from Spanish I feel the pain of native English speakers having to cope with to be as both ser y estar, but to this day I still have some trouble with do and make.
For Spanish natives, the "his/her" relationship word when referring to family members can cause problems, since the "his" refers to the other person, whereas su/suya in Spanish refers to the main noun. e.g. "hermana suya" - the "suya" is female because of "hermana" (or "su hermana" the "su" is neutral), whereas in English "his sister" the "his" is male because the other person must be male, the gender of the sister doesn't matter.
I knew someone who came to the US from Latvia. His observation was that in English, first you cut the tree down, then you cut the tree up.
For me the most difficult is pronunciation, and having so many exceptions.
According to Spanish grammar, what would be considered the Spanish analog of the English present continuous is formally classified not as a tense, but a periphrasis.
So saying that Spanish has no present continuous might be true in some pedantic or stilted sense of the word or in a technical context, but it's not very useful otherwise. For all practical purposes, for speakers and learners, Spanish has present continuous.
However I'd disagree that the article's premise is unique to English. I've been learning Japanese for the past few years, and while it's definitely more difficult to learn than English for someone who's coming from another European language, I think the long tail of being native-like is equally infinite. It's just based on different things. Examples would be は vs が (this is a beginner-level topic as well, but comes back in a different way much later), sentence-level pitch accent, the fact that writing in formal language is basically the world's most elaborate game of madlibs, etc.
And much respect from me. I wouldn't learn Japanese if my mother tongue is European language.
But some things are pretty elusive or just require a great deal of memorization to sound natural, like which counter words are the correct counter for the given noun, or the proper pitch accent patterns and intonation to apply to words and phrases, and speaking with the different levels of formality. Plus the huge hurdle of learning a ton of Kanji.
Sounding out, e.g. place/people names, in Japanese is difficult and sometimes impossible if they use a one-off reading of the kanji.
Likewise understanding something like は vs が to the level of a fairly advanced non-native speaker is not that difficult. Especially now that there are actual good grammar resources that don't explain things in the bizarre way that the traditional textbooks do. At that point you can _understand_ everything, and explain yourself in a way that you will always be understood.
However once you know all those things there's a whole different category of issues that separate you from native speakers. Case in point: this 331-page book [1], written in Japanese, only about は vs が. Clearly if knowing that が is always the topic etc was enough to pass for a native, this book would not exist.
As I said, this is in no way unique to Japanese. There's a difference between speaking correctly and speaking at a native level. Most are happy with the first, and that's ok - it's mostly an academic exercise once you go beyond that.
In my opinion this perspective more likely reflects your comparative lack of exposure to Japanese than to English. For example, you mentioned wa and ga as an example of an actually clear concept (albeit foreign), but in speech these particles may be dropped, and choosing what to drop also adds subtle meaning to what is communicated.
i always explained to people that complained about learning german being hard, that i felt that german is hard at the beginning, but once you are over the hurdle, it gets a lot easier, whereas english is easy at the beginning, and it keeps getting harder.
learning german is like climbing up a steep road followed by a shallow incline, whereas learning english is a not so steep road that just keeps going up and up and up.
This is how language develops, so I wouldn't feel bad about it.
My wife have been learning Turkish using Duolingo and a Turkish learning platform for the past couple months, and she can hold her end up in basic conversation. We have many expat friends who have been learning Turkish for a year or so and they can communicate pretty well.
Turkish syntax is wildly different than English syntax, and pronunciations are throat based rather than tongue based. There are lots of synonyms and parallel meanings in everyday use. Moreover there are not many resources to learn Turkish from. Yet, people start speaking broken Turkish enough to communicate complex ideas within a year.
Think about these phrases:
* I go store now
* I hungry
* I wash car later
* I cook food grill tomorrow if no rain
These all immediately sound like a "foreigner" speaking, yet are completely understandable. Many other languages, relying on conjugations and implicit subjects & objects are way more inaccessible to new learners!
I think humans are the fault tolerant in language understanding, not a language. (Or in a different meaning of fault tolerance, like used in information theory, I would even wager that a more regular language will have more of it, because of some “parity checks”. For example, a disappearing subject will still make a sentence understandable because a suffix makes if contextually guessable, eg a gender)
He called out a name, looked up and saw 20 hands in the air.
He was very surprised because due to the way it was written it should have been only one...
A pity that it has a super complex pronunciation, tonal system and writing system to go with the extremely straightforward grammar.
Grammar is simpler, but the need for tonal agreement makes the vocabulary more complex. You can't just go to a "store". You would go to a food-store or a one-thing-store, or a store-store.
Old English was a Germanic language primarily. After 1066, the court language of England became French and remained so for centuries. It was in this period that the Middle English transformation happened.
The fascinating thing about this is that the language became much more regular in that period and, more importantly, it dropped a lot of what I as a native English-speaker at least consider pointless grammatical cruft.
For example: Old English had 3 noun genders (male, female, neuter; this being the norm for European and Semitic languages). Middle English lost that (other than male and female for people). Old English had 5 cases. By comparison, modern German has 4, Latin has 6, some Eastern European languages have more. The concept of case has almost completely disappeared from English (pronouns and the Saxon genitive notwithstanding).
It's fascinating because it seems what keeps languages unchanging is a ruling class. It's a bit like the philosophical view of grammar as being descriptive (my view) vs prescriptive. It's almost a model for conservatism being the resistance to change.
As a native English speaker I've found it difficult to learn other languages not just because of the ubiquity of English but because other languages have concepts that English just doesn't, like in German where adjectives and pronouns have to agree by case, number gender and article of a noun (eg "the" vs der/die/das/den/dem/denen/der/des). That structure just seems like such pointless cognitive load, at least to learn. I'm sure it's zero cost if you grew up with it.
But it does seem like it makes English easier to learn. Obviously there are some complexities in English (eg adjective order and the tenses).
And before anyone mentions Asian languages for simple grammar let me just point out: no clear word separators and the writing system in general (although this varies too).
English is not my native language, but I've been using it for decades. Still have to look up pronunciation. OTOH, my native language Malayalam (and other Indian languages) doesn't really have the pronunciation problem. They're just read as they are written.
Compared to, say, Italian, sure, especially coming from another language using the Latin alphabet with nearly equally consistent and mostly similar mapping between sounds and writing (say, Spanish).
Compared to languages where the primary script isn't even phonetic, though, I don't see it.
English pronunciation inconsistencies are really a product of how many loan words there are, when they entered the language (ie they tend to become more regular over time) and what language they came from (eg you see consistencies in words of Latin origin vs Greek origin).
Also, at least the vowels are written in English (unlike, say, Arabic or Hebrew, generally speaking).
A lot of the languages we learnt in India have a script that's spoken exactly the way it's written. The words contain all the information on how to pronounce it and there are no exceptions. This seems to carry over when we try to learn English (mostly to the everyone's amusement hah).
A difficult pronunciation implies that a language has difficult sounds that non-native speakers can't pronounce (regardless how those sounds are spelled, or even if the language has a writing system at all).
Just a personal anecdote, my native language is Hungarian, and I have been studying English from pretty early on in primary school. And I was really terrible at it, I assume in part because of the “rules” that has more exceptions than applicable cases. And the language “clicked” much later on, when I accumulated enough of the language that I could “hear” whether a given sentence sounds right or not.
This is in stark contrast to my (failed) attempt at learning German, where even though I know like 3 words all together, I could form quite complex sentences because the language is so regular. I didn’t like learning all the rules, but it “clicks” much faster if they are consistent.
So my experience (as a layperson) is that a language has to be “compiled” and one must hear what is correct to be able to speak it to any reasonable extant - and in the learning phase, sentence forming is more like being “interpreted”. And perhaps a more “dynamic” language is more troublesome to compile.
Otherwise this description is pretty correct, but it omits an important part. Middle English was highly influenced not by Anglo-Norman (the dialect of French spoken by the Norman nobility who conquered and settled in England), but also by the Old Norse spoken by the Vikings who conquered and settled the Danelaw before them.
English has gotten about half of its vocabulary from Anglo-Norman (either in French or Latin form) and this is truly a tremendous influence. It is interesting to note, however, that Anglo-Norman mostly supplemented — not replaced! — native Old English words, and often provided a more aristocratic alternative to them. Thus the peasants who raised chicken, cows, pigs, calves and sheep for meat used Old English words to refer to the animals, but the richer classes who actually ate the meat used Anglo-Norman words to refer to it: poultry, beef, pork, veal and mutton.
Old Norse, on the other hand, probably doesn't comprise more than a small percentage (2-5%) of Modern, English vocabulary, but the parts it affected are much more core to the language, and it often replaced the Old English word, which often had a very similar sound: e.g. sister (Old Norse: systir, Old English: sweoster), egg (OE: ǣġ, pronounced 'ey'), sky (ON: ský, OE: heofon - which became restricted to 'heaven'). Even the plural pronoun "they" comes from Norse (ON: their, OE: hīe).
The loss of grammatical gender and case was probably almost complete by the 1066, when William the Conqueror invaded England. The Middle English that we start seeing a little after the Norman conquest is already missing most of the case and gender endings, which led linguists to believe that this change happened earlier, but was not reflected in the conservative writing. As you say, what keeps language unchanging is the ruling class, but this is ONLY true for the written language, which can be policed. The nobles and clergymen can't very much execute every single peasant who drops a grammatical case. But once the Old English ruling class was replaced with a ruling class who only cared about preserving French, and the writing standards for Old English lost hold, the preexisting changes started surfacing in writing.
As to why Old Norse affected Old English grammar so strongly while it had a smaller impact (in sheer size, if not importance) on the vocabulary than French, there seem to be two factors:
1. Contact between Old English and Old Norse was much higher than contact between Middle English and Anglo-Norman, since the Viking migration brought in both lords and peasants, and intermarriage was common. Language contact was especially a daily thing around the border area, which happened to be just around London. This turned out to be important, since other English dialects took more time to lose the grammatical endings, but once became the capital, the London dialect became the more important during the 14th and 15th centuries, once the royal court gradually started replacing French with English, since the English of the kings and court was most influenced by the London dialect.
2. The two Germanic languages were mutually intelligible in vocabulary, but their grammatical endings were strikingly different. The easiest way for English and Norse speakers to understand each other was to ignore the grammatical endings, and thus they lost their meaning.
In my experience English tends to be more "forgiving" and robust to non native mistakes for basic communication and the time to one's first fully correct sentence (self made) is shorter.
Sounds like an outrageous claim done by a monolingual ;)
These are the languages with the biggest barriers (tonal + alphabet in the case of Mandarin and weird case system in the case of Hungarian).
So no, those are the worse examples you could have picked. French could work, or maybe Japanese with a romanicized alphabet could work.
Heck, pick Latin, simplify the declensions, simplify the spelling towards ecclesiastical pronounciation and you might end up with something close to Italian.
If you run those considerations through all possible language pairs it's easy to see that these are the main factors that influence difficulty. Grammar, vocab, and pronunciation are a distant second.
There are some specific things that make it "easier" to learn: Latin alphabet with no accents, no genders, small conjugation tables, few tenses, very "relaxed" grammar. In this way English is a subset of rules already understood by other speakers.
What also needs to be mentioned, though, is its expressiveness. There are many objectively "easier" languages than English. For example: Afrikaans has a very simple grammar, being essentially a "stripped" Dutch; Spanish has a much smaller vocabulary. But all humans talk about the same things one way or another. A language being "simpler" means there must be other ways to communicate those more complex things. It's often done using very specific and nuanced rules based on context and culture.
English, on the other hand, can be mostly learnt in a book. There's not much culture to learn as English culture has already been exported widely around the world. You're much less likely to end up in a situation where you have no idea at all how to express yourself using the rules you've learnt.
At a minimum, Dutch and Spanish, among European languages, are also generally recognized as having a present continuous/progressive tense. Though this is somewhat arbitrary:
In English, the sense of the present continuous can be subsumed by the simple present, too, the present continuous emphasizes the continuous nature, but is not essential to communicate it.
And French has a construct that serves a similar emphatic function (être <conjugated in simple present> en train de + <infinitive>)
So this construct that communicates the exact same thing is not a present continuous tense but the english (to be <conjugated in the present tense> + present participle) construct is a present continuous tense; a fairly arbitrary distinction as to which productions that are applied to verb roots to form an expression which conveys a particular semantic combination of tense (time/location), aspect, mood, etc. is considered a grammatical tense and which productions that serve that purpose are instead considered idiom or something else that isn't a grammatical tense.
It's just a form of gerundio. As an Italian speaker, that's actually one of the easiest English forms to learn.
I remember I was surprised when I learned English at school, because they seemed to make a lot of emphasis on the present continuous and past continuous, and I found them trivial: they work exactly the same as in Spanish, i.e., at least off the top of my head, every English sentence analogous to "I am/was eating" can be translated literally into Spanish directly as "Yo estoy/estaba comiendo" without a second thought, and vice versa. It's not something where a native Spanish speaker learning English would make mistakes, even from a very basic level.
On the other hand, from the Spanish point of view it's much, much easier to make mistakes with the present simple, because there are many things that you can say with the present simple in Spanish but not in English. For example, to ask someone what they are eating in the present moment (not in general), in Spanish you could use both "¿qué estás comiendo?" and "¿qué comes?" (the second being more common in informal speech) and you could answer both "estoy comiendo kebab" and "como kebab". In English the first versions work ("what are you eating? I am eating kebab") but the second ones don't ("what do you eat?" "I eat kebab") and it's a super common error to make for beginner/intermediate learners, but almost no emphasis was made on that because we were busy doing a lot of exercises about writing sentences in present continuous.
I guess it was an effect of using British books written for a global audience (not tailored specifically to learners coming from Spanish) and the teachers following the books without questioning or adapting their methodology.
io sto mangiando - eu estou comendo
io sto leggendo - eu estou lendo
lei stava facendo - ela estava fazendo
I was learning Italian some years ago in a class where others students were all English speakers, and it felt like cheating as the grammar was basically the same, just the words changed a bit, so I was having a much better time than anyone else! But when the teacher spoke fluently to me in Italian, obviously I would suddenly realize my Italian was still very poor and I had a lot to learn.
EDIT: by the way, the author must have meant that other germanic languages don't have "gerundio"? Looks like all Latin languages do.
Something I'm fond of saying when the office life goes the Full Dilbert.
Huh? We have the same construction in Spanish, which is another European language. "I read" -> "[yo] leo"; "I am reading" -> "[yo] estoy leyendo".
I typed the following out in reply to a similar and now deleted comment about German having "Ich bin am essen" etc.:
It's not a boring detail and you're missing the point.
In the examples given in French, German and Spanish, the primary verb is "to be". That is to say, you are primarily expressing your current state. The tense is present. You are expressing your current state and in particular what you are currently doing.
In English, present progressive is a first-class tense. When I say "I'm eating a sandwich", the primary verb is "to eat". I'm telling you my current state as a side effect only. The correct translation in French would be "je mange un sandwich". If the sentence was "I can't come because I'm eating a sandwich", the translation would probably be different.
We also use the same tense to express future or an intention, e.g. "I'm going to town tomorrow", and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_continuous
It's odd to to see people disputing the uniqueness of the present progressive tense in English. It's very well known amongst scholars and teachers. It's one of the very first things anyone learning English has to learn and, conversely, one of the first things an English speaker needs unlearn when learning a foreign language.
I actually remember being misled by the myth of the uniqueness of the English present progressive when learning Spanish. I'd keep trying to avoid the use of the present participle unless the relevant event was really in progress right now. But it's really easy to find examples where this is not the case. See e.g. the headline here ("how often are you singing?"): https://www.biobiochile.cl/noticias/espectaculos-y-tv/tv/201... Or try a Google search for "these days I'm trying to": https://www.google.com/search?q=%22estos+dias+estoy+tratando...
I'm not sure I understand the uniqueness. In Spanish this would be, in the context of a conversation:
"Qué estás haciendo?"
"Estoy comiendo un sandwich"
Note this is idiomatic and the most common way of saying this, I'm not forcing it.
"Comiendo" (from "comer", "to eat", is the -ing form in Spanish, and it's widely used).
A common one is that they'll type something like "I didn't understood what he said". I can see their reasoning here: "understood" seems like the correct word to use when talking about a past event. Sadly, I don't know enough about my own native language to explain to them why they should be using the word "understand" instead.
If you want to learn more about English and be able to help people in these cases, the best way is to learn a foreign language. I recommend French or German and get the corresponding "English Grammar for Students of..." book, i.e. for French: https://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Grammar-Students-French-Lea...
These books are excellent. You can read it in a day. You won't be that close to being able to speak French (as you won't know any vocabulary for a start), but you'll suddenly appreciate the grammar of your own language. It will even make you appreciate programming languages more. It's a truly enlightening experience. All the second-language European speakers you meet will know this stuff already.
It's just a bit hidden in English because the conjugated form is identical to the infinitive so often.
"Understand" is an an infinite verb. "Understood" and "did" are finite ones. Each clause can have only one finite verb (its head) so "did" and "understood" cannot both occur in one. Put another way, "did" only takes an infinite verb as its argument.
My understanding is that all commonly used spoken languages are basically organically evolved and not designed?
For an overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...
And a recent experiment: https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/projects/eplus-...
> The tests were completed by the pupils who learned Esperanto and a control group of equal size and same previous language learning experience, who did not. They showed that the children who participated in Multilingualism Accelerator classes had considerably higher scores than those who didn't.
He's trying really hard, but it's like nails on a chalkboard listening to him. It's worse than a bad computer text-to-speech converter.
Hungarian is one of those languages where it is shockingly difficult to learn to a level where you're intelligible at all, and learning to be fluent as an adult is borderline impossible. I've never met a person who has managed it.
For comparison, I once came across some Dutch primary school teachers on holiday that were more fluent in English than most native speakers that I know. They had a bigger vocabulary and used more complex sentence structures than I was used to from the typical locals. They had a mild, barely detectable accent.
Not all languages are equal!
One mark of high-level fluency is being able to casually confuse "less" and "few" and say things like "more better" just like a native English speaker does.
I've been learning dutch, and teaching my children to read (english, native language) The one thing that struck me is how impossible it is to "sound out" english. That is use the letters to make a stab at what the word will sound like.
Unlike dutch, the written word is only a slight guide as to how its supposed to sound.
I can't spell for shit in english, but I can spell quite well in dutch.
One of the simplest words, "read", has two correct interpretations that can sometimes even exist in the same sentence, with its pronunciation purely being based on context. There's an entire poem[1] about pronunciation in English that's near impossible to read for anyone but native speakers.
In my experience, speaking English is something you can learn about as quickly as you can learn any language, depending on how close your native tongue is to its language family. There's a few rules about how to structure a sentence, but overal, it's not a language that's particularly difficult to learn.
Reading becomes a challenge. If you don't know how a word is pronounced, you'll often mispronounced it the first time you read it.
When it comes to writing, you may as well be learning Chinese or Japanese; nobody in their right mind would write "thorough" and "tough" like they are written if they would come up with a writing system today.
I think the problem with English is that it's been written down without a proper reform for so long. Pronunciation changes over time, but if the written word doesn't change with it, you end up with a mess that's only making things difficult for kids and foreigners.
I'm not saying English is the only language with problems, though. If you're learning Dutch, you've probably run into the impossible "de" vs "het" problem, a remnant of when the language still had masculine, feminine and neuter. I've argued with other native speakers which articles feel more natural compared to which noun, only to find out the dictionary says both are allowed. Luckily, there are some rules (many of which are vague and full of exceptions), but most native speakers won't be able to tell them to you. Every language has its challenges.
Also I bet most native English speakers wouldn't be able to pronounce most of those words correctly. Many are obscure words that rarely come up in conversation (I only know them because I watched a lot of British TV as a kid). And for the longest time I thought awry was pronounced “Aw ry” until I heard someone say it as “a wry”. The word “hagiography” has two hard g’s instead of just one. And recently I learned that the word “mercantile” in Chicago Mercantile Exchange is pronounced mercanteel rather than mercan-tile (like floor tile).
English is full of shibboleths.
I am guessing rote learning without many complex rules is easier for most people?
PS. The biggest gap in my English that is obvious in my daily life is that I cannot for the life of me understand half of ZZ Top lyrics. Can native English speakers understand ZZ Top lyrics, e.g. "Poke Chop Sandwich" or "Two Ways To Play"?
That said, English is also a very abused language. Sadly these days, correcting someone leads to 'oh it's a living language and use determines definition', and more sadly, dictionaries play along with this idea.
This both makes the language harder to understand, and impossible to master IMO.
However, even the slightest mispronunciation in -their- tongue just hits a brick wall. I suspect it’s because so few have to deal with poor to intermediate speakers (excepting children) that their brains just can’t cope with imperfection.
Nothing is more accessible than English, and there is absolutely mountains upon mountains of pop culture from the Anglosphere which no other language comes close to matching except for Japanese.
If you have access to people that speak the language, access to native media, and there is lots of stuff on that language that interests you, then it's easy.
If you want hard vs easy you could move to Antarctica and try learn Kimbundu.
[0] Though this is interesting too. "Natives" of English may be more invested in this distinction than those of other languages. Native vs non-native dynamics are very different in English too.
English is humbling. You are still learning words in middle age. You are still learning pronunciations in middle age. It just never ends.
One of the best examples of the convoluted mess of ambiguities and exceptions in English: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581841
It's particularly frustrating when English-speakers arrogantly make fun of other languages (like Chinese/Japanese) as if English doesn't have its share of stupid shit.
