poblequadrat Wrote:No, that is not true at all. First because English has got a staggering amount of vowels and that takes a long time to master.

That's odd, seeing as millions of three year olds master them just fine. You keep making bold assertions that don't match up with reality. That's why I just responded to the general idea of your post, instead of addressing each point you made directly: it would've just been a long list of "Where are you getting this from?".

Stansfield123 Wrote:

poblequadrat Wrote:No, that is not true at all. First because English has got a staggering amount of vowels and that takes a long time to master.

That's odd, seeing as millions of three year olds master them just fine. You keep making bold assertions that don't match up with reality. That's why I just responded to the general idea of your post, instead of addressing each point you made directly: it would've just been a long list of "Where are you getting this from?".

Oh, don't be silly. For a non-native whose language has around 7 vowels, or a lot of them but with a simpler system (German has 17, but the vowel system is simpler because there are minimal pairs where quantity is more important than timbre - meaning for someone who just wants to distinguish any minimal pair, German has 8 vowels with a long and a short version, plus the schwa; Italian has 7; Spanish has 5) English has a lot of sounds that are difficult to master. The vowel system of English is very complex by any standard. 3-year olds naturally pick up any language regardless of difficulty provided the environment is right. That was a very silly comment that hasn't got anything to do with the matter at hand.

You didn't address the general idea of my post, because the general idea of my post didn't involve comparisons to Japanese nor claimed that English is difficult just because of its vowel system. I don't believe I make "bold" statements: English IS a mishmash of a language due to its complicated genealogy; English phonology IS very complicated and this DOES make comprehension of spoken English not as easy; English morphology IS very easy; languages with heavy use of prepositions DO present a challenge. These are my claims and they aren't very bold because English is what it is - you can't claim that its vowel system is easy nor that its verbs are terribly complicated. Now, what does this imply for language learners? It depends on who they are and what their mother language is, but on the whole, there are many languages which are simpler than English even for the kind of people who wouldn't really have much trouble learning it. That's my point and I think you're inferring from this that my attitude is that English is the most impossible language in the world or something. I'm just listing its complex and its simple points, that's all.

Please go on with the long list; either you want to debate or you don't, right?

Everyday Japanese politeness is easy.. you speak in 普通形 and then at some point end in です/ます and that's it. This is how most people here talk normally, semi-casual. I'm using this kind of Japanese with everyone, unless I have to use Keigo when speaking to a customer, but right now, I'm doing a job where I very rarely have to.

The politeness levels are overrated, and how indirect you have to be is something you'll find out naturally. No need to learn that - if it's even learn-able.

I've often said that I'm glad I'm a native English speaker, given that English is not easy to learn and at the same time is such a critically important world language.

I would HATE to be someone living in a non-English-speaking country struggling to learn English because I needed it for e.g., business purposes.

English is a walk in the park as a European. How tough a language is depends on one's mother tongue anyways. For Japanese people, it might be hard, yeah, but not for Euros. Don't even have to learn it properly, it just sinks in.

andikaze Wrote:English is a walk in the park as a European. How tough a language is depends on one's mother tongue anyways. For Japanese people, it might be hard, yeah, but not for Euros. Don't even have to learn it properly, it just sinks in.

There are a lot of European languages that do not have many if at all similarities to English (aside from the new-age terms like internet). If you're talking about any of the "big" European languages I'd agree.

For some of us basic concepts that define the language need to be taught from the scratch. Articles, prepositions etc.

andikaze Wrote:English is a walk in the park as a European. How tough a language is depends on one's mother tongue anyways. For Japanese people, it might be hard, yeah, but not for Euros. Don't even have to learn it properly, it just sinks in.

That's probably true of "Germanic" countries, but the English level in Romance-speaking Europe tends to be very bad despite the great similarities in vocabulary and overall structure. Especially France and Spain - doesn't really take much to confirm that in those countries English doesn't "just sink in". I don't know the stats but if you're interested I'm sure a short Google will confirm what I'm saying.

Of course (as is the case in Japan...) this has more to do with the national education system than with the language itself, but knowing the language school business in Spain and France, English is anything but a "walk in the park" there.

English has a ton of cognates originating from French. While the French might not admit it, most are excellent speakers. I'm not familiar with Slavic languages, but Germanic and Romance mother tongues are a good starting point.

We not only have a lot of international vocab in common, or cognates, or even some grammar, but we share a similar cultural background and many of our saying exist as is in other languages, too.

Japanese is not that bad when it comes to grammar, a horror when it comes to vocab (until you got the Kanji down, then it gets easier), but "natural expressions" are unlike anything European.

The only sensible reason I've come up with why the romance based countries suck at English is that a) the French are hostile towards the English language and b) the Italian and Spanish simply do not give a damn about the English language.

Italian especially is so close to English it makes the germanic-romance division seem completely made-up. I see more familiarity with English and Italian than English and Swedish or English and German.

andikaze Wrote:English has a ton of cognates originating from French. While the French might not admit it, most are excellent speakers. I'm not familiar with Slavic languages, but Germanic and Romance mother tongues are a good starting point.

We not only have a lot of international vocab in common, or cognates, or even some grammar, but we share a similar cultural background and many of our saying exist as is in other languages, too.

Japanese is not that bad when it comes to grammar, a horror when it comes to vocab (until you got the Kanji down, then it gets easier), but "natural expressions" are unlike anything European.

I know, and I recognise as much in my post, but my experience is that most French people are not excellent speakers (most can't really speak English at all other than some very basic exchange: my name is X, the station is there, I'm a proctologist, I like spaghetti).

The cultural background thing is an interesting one. Language-wise, it's close enough that there aren't any difficulties (an American trying to learn an European language is going to find more of a culture barrier than vice versa). But if we were to talk about society, it's a bigger difference than it seems. That's for another topic, though.

poblequadrat Wrote:3-year olds naturally pick up any language regardless of difficulty provided the environment is right.

Of course they do. Because 3 yos are magic.

poblequadrat Wrote:That's my point and I think you're inferring from this that my attitude is that English is the most impossible language in the world or something.

Inferring? You literally said that learning to pronounce English is ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE. I don't need to infer it. You said it.

Stansfield123 Wrote:

poblequadrat Wrote:3-year olds naturally pick up any language regardless of difficulty provided the environment is right.

Of course they do. Because 3 yos are magic.

poblequadrat Wrote:That's my point and I think you're inferring from this that my attitude is that English is the most impossible language in the world or something.

Inferring? You literally said that learning to pronounce English is ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE. I don't need to infer it. You said it.

3 years old aren't "magic". They are growing up and their brain is in language acquisition stage. Anyway, a 3 year old will master any language without even thinking about it if he is immersed in it, but not if he takes classes the way an adult student would (which is something a 3 year old probably can't do anyway.) Don't be obtuse just for the sake of it.

Yes, correct English pronunciation, meaning distinguishing all minimal pairs with more or less correct timbre 100% of the time, is almost impossible, and most non-natives don't achieve it. It's common to find non-natives who can't distinguish "put" from "poot", or even "putt" from "pot" (in a weird mixture of a pseudo-British, or more precisely pseudo-Southern, "putt" and a pseudo-American "pot"). Some others will keep this distinction but pronounce "pot" as "pawt" (which is a legit pronunciation in some working class accents, but in the non-native this isn't matched by the rest of the vowel shift where "aw" should also become more closed and "oh" should be turned into "ow"). Some have trouble distinguishing "rad" from "red" (also a legit pronunciation - if you're a Kiwi.) The "oh" and the short "o" sounds, as well as the short "i"/"e" sound, have a pattern of neutralisation in non-tonic positions which is not consistent and has to be learned word by word (for the o sounds, sometimes it's "oh" and sometimes it's a schwa; for the "i" sounds, sometimes it's still "i" and sometimes it's a schwa, although for Americans it tends to be a schwa always.) In comparison, most non-natives will be able to distinguish all the minimal pairs of Spanish, Japanese or German without much effort, even though the timbre might be off. The problem with English is that the vowel system is so complex that a wrong realisation of a vowel can easily entail the loss of a minimal pair, while in simpler languages as long as you keep the sounds of the main vowels separate and vaguely similar to the native pronunciation you can distinguish any word.

Also, I'll repeat that its complex phonology, and its wide range of accents, makes understanding spoken English not as easy as it should - non-natives find it hard to go beyond understanding middle class North American accents only, or Received Pronunciation at public announcement speed. It's not impossible to go beyond this, but in comparison to other languages, English requires a lot of effort here.

This doesn't make English the hardest language in the world. It's just one of its hard points, and I'm listing it, just as I'm listing its extremely easy morphology.

Another very easy point of English is that the written language isn't terribly different from the spoken language. French is very difficult here, for example.

Anyway, despite its very hard and very easy points, my overall point is not that learning English is an incredibly grueling task nobody can pull off, but that if you were to spend 2 years learning Italian you'd speak better Italian and/or have an easier time than if you spent 2 years with English. English is hard relative to many other big languages.

To conclude, English is just as hard as Japanese.

An Asian (especially coming from a symbol-based language) learning English would find it very hard and very illogical.

An non-Asian learning Japanese would also find it very hard and very illogical.

Therefore, most debates on which language is harder is bullshit and depends on the person.

poblequadrat Wrote:Another very easy point of English is that the written language isn't terribly different from the spoken language. French is very difficult here, for example.

English spelling is HELL and makes very, very little sense. French spelling seems difficult to many, but is actually mostly regular - most people are never taught about the rules, that's all (a lot of letters don't get pronounced, but this is not random - as a native I have never had to check the pronunciation of an unknown word; my English partner, however, mispronounces a lot of English words because she's never heard them, only read them). I agree going from pronunciation to spelling in French is tricky, though, but I don't think it's any worse than English.

Here's a poem for those who think English spelling makes sense http://www.ling.gu.se/~hansv/berra3/tough.html

Most of it seems completely arbitrary. Yes, you have rules, but then all of those have exceptions, and there are often exceptions amongst the exceptions. A + l makes "a" (long a) as in "calf", but not in "falcon" (of course "all" doesn't follow the a + l rule either, and neither does "w + a", which can give you "wo" as in "war" or a short a as in "quagmire"). You have blood and flood, and mood and good and food (I've got a book with about 200 pages of those if you're interested).
A lot of function words are pronounced differently whether they are accented or not (think about "are" or "our", or "he" which loses its "h" sound in certain positions). This makes understanding spoken English very hard for many people (the amount of stuff I ask people to repeat for me is insane, and I am fluent!).
There are rules as to where the stress accent is in a word, but once again, you also have a long list of exceptions to memorise (no such thing in French, and no, the stress is not "on the last syllable" as textbooks tell you - where the hell did they get that idea from?! - it's usually at the end of a clause, and even then, it's flexible, and a matter of "sounding right", not being understood). Unstressed syllables are reduced to a shwa, short i or short u in pretty much all instances (I didn't use any phonetic symbols as things are obviously more complicated in reality, but you get the gist: unstressed syllables all sound the same for most non-natives). So when you think you're hearing "he is learning Japanese", what you are really hearing is something like "(h)izle-nindjepneez" (excuse the barbaric transcription of RP). (I met some RP speaker who was convinced there was a "r" sound at the end of "dear", but not of "idea", once. He was really confused when I showed him the IPA transcription for these words - no "r" sound in either) For a lot of non-natives, processing this into a meaningful sentence takes a lot of practice. Let's not forget English is rich in regional accents (much more so than French, for historical reasons), to which you have to grow accustomed one by one. (Of course, French pronunciation is not easy for English native speakers either, but at least it's mostly predictable.)

I studied English (including a good dose of linguistics) for two years at uni (phonetics was one of my favourite subjects). We all started pretty much convinced our pronunciation was alright. Then we realised our Californian teacher couldn't understand much of what we were saying, and that we had been mispronouncing the most basic of words ("are" was one of our pet peeves). It took me a lot of active studying, and a year of full immersion, to get to the point where I am no longer ashamed of speaking out loud, although I still make silly mistakes, and still can't pronounce "hand" or "hierarchy" without sounding strange. A lot of non-natives wildly overestimate their ability to pronounce English properly (tip: if you don't know your phonetic alphabet, chances are your pronunciation is bad) and the ability of other people to make sense of their bad pronunciation (a misplaced accent is often enough to baffle your interlocutor), and a lot of natives wildly underestimate how irregular English pronunciation/spelling are.

If you have been warned of the whole pronunciation issue before you start learning English, however, I'm not sure it's a big problem. You "just" need to check the pronunciation of every new word as you go (not great for extensive reading) and spend a lot of time listening to various accents. It's not hard per se, but it sure requires some discipline. Unfortunately, this doesn't match the current ideology for language teaching in the EU (i.e. throw bits of sentences at your students without any explanation and expect them to get better).

/rant and endless parentheses over/

I've probably just rehashed the same old stuff in this post, but I had to get it off my chest. English spelling is traumatic.

Heron Wrote:

poblequadrat Wrote:Another very easy point of English is that the written language isn't terribly different from the spoken language. French is very difficult here, for example.

English spelling is HELL and makes very, very little sense. French spelling seems difficult to many, but is actually mostly regular - most people are never taught about the rules, that's all (a lot of letters don't get pronounced, but this is not random - as a native I have never had to check the pronunciation of an unknown word; my English partner, however, mispronounces a lot of English words because she's never heard them, only read them). I agree going from pronunciation to spelling in French is tricky, though, but I don't think it's any worse than English.

Here's a poem for those who think English spelling makes sense http://www.ling.gu.se/~hansv/berra3/tough.html

Most of it seems completely arbitrary. Yes, you have rules, but then all of those have exceptions, and there are often exceptions amongst the exceptions. A + l makes "a" (long a) as in "calf", but not in "falcon" (of course "all" doesn't follow the a + l rule either, and neither does "w + a", which can give you "wo" as in "war" or a short a as in "quagmire"). You have blood and flood, and mood and good and food (I've got a book with about 200 pages of those if you're interested).
A lot of function words are pronounced differently whether they are accented or not (think about "are" or "our", or "he" which loses its "h" sound in certain positions). This makes understanding spoken English very hard for many people (the amount of stuff I ask people to repeat for me is insane, and I am fluent!).
There are rules as to where the stress accent is in a word, but once again, you also have a long list of exceptions to memorise (no such thing in French, and no, the stress is not "on the last syllable" as textbooks tell you - where the hell did they get that idea from?! - it's usually at the end of a clause, and even then, it's flexible, and a matter of "sounding right", not being understood). Unstressed syllables are reduced to a shwa, short i or short u in pretty much all instances (I didn't use any phonetic symbols as things are obviously more complicated in reality, but you get the gist: unstressed syllables all sound the same for most non-natives). So when you think you're hearing "he is learning Japanese", what you are really hearing is something like "(h)izle-nindjepneez" (excuse the barbaric transcription of RP). (I met some RP speaker who was convinced there was a "r" sound at the end of "dear", but not of "idea", once. He was really confused when I showed him the IPA transcription for these words - no "r" sound in either) For a lot of non-natives, processing this into a meaningful sentence takes a lot of practice. Let's not forget English is rich in regional accents (much more so than French, for historical reasons), to which you have to grow accustomed one by one. (Of course, French pronunciation is not easy for English native speakers either, but at least it's mostly predictable.)

I studied English (including a good dose of linguistics) for two years at uni (phonetics was one of my favourite subjects). We all started pretty much convinced our pronunciation was alright. Then we realised our Californian teacher couldn't understand much of what we were saying, and that we had been mispronouncing the most basic of words ("are" was one of our pet peeves). It took me a lot of active studying, and a year of full immersion, to get to the point where I am no longer ashamed of speaking out loud, although I still make silly mistakes, and still can't pronounce "hand" or "hierarchy" without sounding strange. A lot of non-natives wildly overestimate their ability to pronounce English properly (tip: if you don't know your phonetic alphabet, chances are your pronunciation is bad) and the ability of other people to make sense of their bad pronunciation (a misplaced accent is often enough to baffle your interlocutor), and a lot of natives wildly underestimate how irregular English pronunciation/spelling are.

If you have been warned of the whole pronunciation issue before you start learning English, however, I'm not sure it's a big problem. You "just" need to check the pronunciation of every new word as you go (not great for extensive reading) and spend a lot of time listening to various accents. It's not hard per se, but it sure requires some discipline. Unfortunately, this doesn't match the current ideology for language teaching in the EU (i.e. throw bits of sentences at your students without any explanation and expect them to get better).

/rant and endless parentheses over/

I've probably just rehashed the same old stuff in this post, but I had to get it off my chest. English spelling is traumatic.

I agree with all your points and made similar ones myself!

What I meant was the written language is more or less similar, not ortography - meaning sentences are constructed in a similar way in middle class speech and in texts, and the words you use are largely the same. There isn't a 100% match in any language, but in French for example the gap between the way people write and the way people talk is relatively big, meaning textbook French is less useful than textbook English. I don't know if I'm explaining myself well - I mean a transcription of some middle class English speaker can pass off as a text written by someone who doesn't write very well, but a transcription of some middle class French speaker is full of stuff nobody would ever write.

I don't like how there are sounds in foreign languages that we think don't exist in English but actually do, then we alter the pronunciation of foreign words to accommodate this.

For example:

The name Goebbels (propaganda minister of Nazi Germany) is, by English speakers, usually pronounced "gerbles", but it's actually pronounced "g + oo as in 'book" + bles". The umlaut "o" is a sound that exists in English, but when English speakers see it, they freak out, and have to pronounce it another way.

Camreeno, I agree with your general point. But you have the umlaut "o" wrong.

Camreeno Wrote:I don't like how there are sounds in foreign languages that we think don't exist in English but actually do, then we alter the pronunciation of foreign words to accommodate this.

For example:

The name Goebbels (propaganda minister of Nazi Germany) is, by English speakers, usually pronounced "gerbles", but it's actually pronounced "g + oo as in 'book" + bles". The umlaut "o" is a sound that exists in English, but when English speakers see it, they freak out, and have to pronounce it another way.

That's just standard practice I think in any language, i.e., you anglicise foreign words to make them fit in with English sound patterns, notwithstanding that English speakers could in fact pronounce them the same as in the foreign language. It's not "freaking out" or anything, it's just what English speakers do. They don't like foreign sounding words in English. No language does.

For instance, there was an American athlete whose last name was "Benoit" and someone on TV said that no, it's not pronounced "Ben Whah" it's pronounced "Benoyt". So they Americanized an originally French name. Americans COULD say Ben Whah but that would sound "French" so they say Benoyt. The athlete herself prefers "Benoyt". The fact that she herself preferred "Benoyt" seemed to irritate some people (probably America hating Europhiles).