bottaslicious:

seeing posts that say english is a difficult language always get my wheels rolling because. well. no

it depends so much on your background tho? like if your native language has similar vocabulary it has its pros and cons, like you can determine what words mean but also will confuse them from time to time, same with grammar. HOWEVER since people see english everywhere and it’s an universal language in general it’s not that difficult to pick up a few phrases even if you wouldn’t know anything

the only thing that really is difficult to master is the vocabulary since it’s so vast and develops faster than most languages. and if your language has no similarities with english then it’s going to be a chore to learn. but is it one of the most difficult languages to learn??? from my point of view, no.

lists of the most difficult languages are usually topped with the ones that don’t use latin alphabets, but are also widely spoken (korean, mandarin, russian etc). the ones with latin alphabets that are ranked the most challenging are often finno-ugric (finnish, estonian and hungarian since they’re the “widely” spoken ones of that family) and for a reason; i’m a native finn with a huge vocabulary and certainly better with all the rules of grammar and other shit than an average speaker – it doesn’t mean i know how it works. my entire knowledge of how to use finnish is basically “i’ve read a lot of books and speak this language so this is how sentences should work and look like? i guess” and goddammit, i’m not even sure if we ever properly tackled this in school. i’m convinced the reason why we read so much was just because it’s the only way to learn the language correctly – oh yeah, spoken finnish versus standard finnish? two totally different things. if you’re not a native and know only one you won’t understand the other. don’t even get me started on the dialects. to properly understand this, i started learning english independently at the age of 8 and mastered it by the time i turned 12, my teachers considered me “basically native” and now i’m going to start teaching it at 20 years old.

that large vocabulary english has? it’s difficult to estimate how many words there are exactly, but the bravest guess is three quarters of a million. 750 000 is a lot, yeah. you know what the bravest guess of finnish is?

infinity.

english speakers love to go “oh english is difficult bc words can be nouns and verbs etc etc! :)”. yeah. uh. take a look at finnish and you’ll realise that’s the definition of easy; nouns and other nominals can have over 2200 forms. verbs have over 10 000. use them incorrectly and you fuck up your sentence.

this turned out way longer than i intended and doesn’t really even have a purpose??? idk just wanted to note that perspective and background has everything to do with what languages are difficult to learn

I have (almost) never heard an ESL speaker say English is hard to learn – certainly not anyone who’s a native speaker of a European language, even ones unrelated to English. One of the main reasons native speakers think it’s so hard seems to be the orthography, and homophones, but they’re just vocab items that people can learn like any other. I feel like it’s very easy to make yourself understood in English just by sticking words together – it doesn’t have to be grammatical, and if you have the right meaning (and approximate pronunciation) people will understand.