Its better than spanish. Ah, all those god damn double negatives and masculine and feminine nouns. And the god damn imperfect and preterite tenses. Two types of past tenses. UGHHHH
if you know english well, or was born understanding how to speak english then other lang would seem easier to learn(to some)
It's easy because it's probably your first language. Chinese is my second language, and it was hard for me to learn it. Writing and reading sucks so much and it's super difficult, but my parents think it's the easiest thing ever. I'm also taking French in school. Hardest freaking language ever, but my teacher thinks it's a breeze. Just saying.
oh man i didn't like french >.< not that i didn't understand it, i tend to forget things i have no use for
It's not so much that it's hard, but the fact that we never use things like this. In English, it's: I jump, he jumped, we will jump. In Spanish, it's: yo salte, el salto, nosotros saltaremos. I would jump: yo saltaria I will jump: yo saltara. You see where I'm getting at? And I haven't even switched the the regular "i" for the "i" with the tilde over it. Speaking is easy for me cuz my mom's Colombian and I lived there for over 3 years, but the grammar blows. If you think English is irregular, deciding whether to use the indicative or subjunctive can depend on whether the thing you're talking about exists or not.
I live and was born in US so i speak English natively. But there is so many stupidly confusing rules you have to learn that have no use in life!!!!!!!!!!!IT F***ING SUCKS!!!!!!!!!
Learning English is all about experience. Go to an English-speaking country and stay for a year and it's almost guaranteed you'll be able to socialize without any problems, assuming you don't have any learning disabilities. If you think English is hard wait until you try learning Chinese or Russian (unless you are either Chinese or Russian), those will be nightmares =P
it does suck but you'll get used to it, some words have some letters that are silent, I Before E Except After C, etc etc etc
The problem isnt speaking english(see my other post above) its all those writing and grammar rules. nominatives, subject-verb agreement, irregular verbs .........ect are the things i hate. plus the 7th grade english class at my school is certainly no walk in the park.
... you don't need to explicitly know the grammar to write correctly. You don't need to recognize a dangling participle to know a sentence is structured incorrectly, and yes, from time to time, you might end a sentence with a preposition, but I don't know half of the obscure, arcane, and for the most part, defunct rules of the English language, but I still write better than most. It's all about getting the message across. If someone can read what you typed and understand it without a second thought, you're golden.
No kidding... Sure this post is late, but they say that Spanish is one of the easiest languages to learn. No way... English doesn't have you conjugate words into different tenses, and like he said, even 2 for past tense. And I can only remember one tense at a time, resulting in my bombing of pretty much every major Spanish test involving tenses... Sure, it doesn't have as many irregulars and exceptions as English, but WHY ARE THERE MASCULINE AND FEMININE NOUNS!!!!!!!!! Can't they all just be nouns, and every adjective ends in "o", not "a"? Bah... I hate it sometimes.
Tenses and participles and declensions, oh my! I don't know half -- less than half -- of the actual rules of writing, and yet I consider myself to be a pretty good wordsmith. Informally, I probably engage in any number of things that would get me pimp slapped by the AP Manual of Style, but I still manage to make myself clear the first time. Unless I'm being deliberately vague or obtuse. The fact is, you really don't need to know half the stuff they teach you in English class unless you're planning on getting into a debate on language with a prescriptivist. The reason English teaches you so much that seems like crap is because you first need to be taught how to learn the language, and that means you have to know what things are called so you know what your teacher is talking about when they refer to particular words and their role in a sentence. You don't need to know predecates, dangling participles, subject-verb agreements and all that nonsense in every-day life; they're just the tools you use to do the learning of the language itself. The real power of language comes not from knowing the technical details of how every sentence is constructed. The real power is in the words you choose and how you choose to use them. The great thing about English is that is has the most words of any language, with as many as 250,000 distinct words. (Granted, over 40,000 of those are obsolete.) That makes it possible to get pretty creative and colourful with language. Incidentally, English isn't even in the top 5 most difficult languages to learn. Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean are, with Japanese at the top of that list. The Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State estimates 88 weeks to learn any of these languages for native English speakers who already speak another language.
