As someone who has learned four different languages and studied a dozen more, English is on the harder end of the spectrum to grasp phonetically. The nice thing about English (and other Romance languages) is the alphabet. Compare that to Chinese, with a laundry list of characters to absorb or Arabic which omits a bunch of vowel sounds, and you experience a lot of trouble.
But compare English to Spanish or German and you’ll find it to be unusually confusing and difficult. Pronunciations, secondary meanings to certain terms, and the haphazard grammar all make English a game of learned reflexes rather than logical progressions.
That’s not special to English, but it is more pronounced in what is effectively a mongrel outcropping of assorted Western European dialects.
The thing with English is you just have to learn phonetics by hearing, not by reading. It’s quite simple actually. It only has a very limited amount of language-specific sounds, and you just learn the written and spoken forms of each word individually.
The really nice thing about English is that everything’s prepositions not cases, there are no grammatical genders and half of the words are just Latin. If you know any other romance language, you can just re-use all the latin-based words you know and you’ll be mostly fine. You only have to be aware of a handful of false friends and that’s it.
I don’t think that English has more words with secondary meanings than other languages or anything like that.
I, in fact, do speak German, Italian, Spanish, English and a bit of Welsh. German is my first language, so can’t say how that is to learn as a second language, but English was by far the easiest to learn of these languages. Sure, it’s the least phonetic one of these, but that’s really the only disadvantage it has.
The thing with English is you just have to learn phonetics by hearing, not by reading.
Sure. And you could say the same about Chinese, which is a fairly simple language to learn if you never want to be literate. But as so much of our communication is via text, the literacy angle is an insurmountable part of language learning.
English spelling is easy enough that in 95% of cases you can match up the spoken word with the written word.
How’s the percentage of that for Chinese?
In fact, if you want a language where it’s actually hard to know how a word is pronounced if you only ever see it in the written form, you gave yourself the answer.
I never implied those problems are special to English, but that English is not “THE easy mode language” due to those problems, plus many others I didn’t mention
Only someone who has never learned a second language thinks that this is difficult or somehow special to English.
As someone who has learned four different languages and studied a dozen more, English is on the harder end of the spectrum to grasp phonetically. The nice thing about English (and other Romance languages) is the alphabet. Compare that to Chinese, with a laundry list of characters to absorb or Arabic which omits a bunch of vowel sounds, and you experience a lot of trouble.
But compare English to Spanish or German and you’ll find it to be unusually confusing and difficult. Pronunciations, secondary meanings to certain terms, and the haphazard grammar all make English a game of learned reflexes rather than logical progressions.
That’s not special to English, but it is more pronounced in what is effectively a mongrel outcropping of assorted Western European dialects.
The thing with English is you just have to learn phonetics by hearing, not by reading. It’s quite simple actually. It only has a very limited amount of language-specific sounds, and you just learn the written and spoken forms of each word individually.
The really nice thing about English is that everything’s prepositions not cases, there are no grammatical genders and half of the words are just Latin. If you know any other romance language, you can just re-use all the latin-based words you know and you’ll be mostly fine. You only have to be aware of a handful of false friends and that’s it.
I don’t think that English has more words with secondary meanings than other languages or anything like that.
I, in fact, do speak German, Italian, Spanish, English and a bit of Welsh. German is my first language, so can’t say how that is to learn as a second language, but English was by far the easiest to learn of these languages. Sure, it’s the least phonetic one of these, but that’s really the only disadvantage it has.
Sure. And you could say the same about Chinese, which is a fairly simple language to learn if you never want to be literate. But as so much of our communication is via text, the literacy angle is an insurmountable part of language learning.
English spelling is easy enough that in 95% of cases you can match up the spoken word with the written word.
How’s the percentage of that for Chinese?
In fact, if you want a language where it’s actually hard to know how a word is pronounced if you only ever see it in the written form, you gave yourself the answer.
I’d be curious to know if that’s actually true.
If you know your radicals? We’ll say “also 95%” just to be annoying.
But how do you learn the radicals? Same way you learn all the standard English pronunciations. Repetition.
I never implied those problems are special to English, but that English is not “THE easy mode language” due to those problems, plus many others I didn’t mention