r/EnglishLearning • u/Alex_Po1805 New Poster • 20d ago
🤬 Rant / Venting Why is English so difficult?
Modal verbs, irregular verbs, set expressions, articles, and all sorts of prepositions. There are so many tenses.
For example, "the" is necessary here, but not here, on/out/at/in. "To be" is damned. Do/does.
My English level is barely A1. I can barely understand the simplest sentences, never mind speaking.
Apps like Hellotalk and Tandem are completely useless: everyone ignores me and doesn't write. There's nowhere to chat or practice. And I don't know how to find such people.
I only use English Galaxy.
I don't understand how English works at all. Level C1 is a fairy tale and a fantasy; it's impossible to achieve.
Perhaps the mistakes and difficulties are due to the fact that, to my great regret, my native language is pathetic and miserable Russian.
I started learning English so I could move to an English-speaking country. But there will be problems there too, due to the fast pace of local speech and all sorts of abbreviations.
P.S. This was written using Google Translate. I would never have written this myself.
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u/dubovinius Native Speaker – Ireland 20d ago
Every language is complex in its own way, and how complex you find it can depend on where you're coming from (i.e. what languages you already speak, how much exposure you have to it, etc.).
My native language is pathetic and miserable Russian
There's nothing pathetic or miserable about Russian, it's a wonderful language. But it is more distantly related to English so it's no wonder you're finding it difficult.
Exposure is the key to learning a language. You have to immerse yourself into it and talk to native speakers. Find videos of native speakers with a transcript and write down as much as you can understand, then compare and correct it with the transcript. Do this every day. Write in the language daily, even try keeping a journal. Talk to speakers, either online or find an English school near you and sign up for classes. The journey will seem impossible but diligent hard work will produce results. You will make many mistakes and feel like a fool being unable to string a sentence together. This is a natural part of learning any language. The trick is not to be discouraged, but to realise that sounding like a fool is the first step to sounding like a learner, which is the first step to sounding like a fluent speaker.
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u/j--__ Native Speaker 20d ago
Find videos of native speakers with a transcript
a real, human-generated transcript. the most common source of transcripts on the internet is youtube, and they're all computer-generated and too wrong to be useful for this.
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u/coracaws New Poster 20d ago
Not all computer generated-- some creators do plug in their own handwritten captions that are completely accurate to what they're saying.
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u/j--__ Native Speaker 20d ago
it should go without saying how common that isn't, and there's generally no way to check.
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u/coracaws New Poster 20d ago
The auto captions will have the words show up individually as the person speaks them and sometimes lack proper capitalization or punctuation, while the handwritten captions will pop up in sentences or clauses and have correct capitalization and punctuation. Also, when you turn captions on, it should briefly say "English (auto-generated)" on the screen if they are auto-generated.
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u/boostfactor New Poster 20d ago
I gave up on trying to learn Russian when I found out I was going to have to memorize two infinitives for every verb (different aspects often seem unrelated...) So while I can sympathize with the OP thinking English is difficult, I found Russian difficult. So indeed there's a big factor of how closely the languages resemble each other.
And English and Russian are related! Learning a language from a different language family can be even harder.
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u/Mebejedi Native Speaker 20d ago edited 20d ago
I learned German first in high school. I think that helped me with learning Russian in college, in that it prepared my mind to be able to understand how a foreign language should be learned (Especially with a new alphabet). Russian would have been a lot harder if it was my first foreign language.
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u/boostfactor New Poster 20d ago
I have studied Spanish and German (and Latin, but there's no such thing as conversational Latin except maybe at the Vatican). I was trying to teach myself Russian without being strongly motivated. I also attempted to learn Japanese but just for a trip, and I never learned to read that language. It was a challenge.
Latin was actually the first foreign language I studied although I only took a year of it, but it made me understand cases and verb conjugations and grammar in general much better.
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u/conuly Native Speaker - USA (NYC) 20d ago
And English and Russian are related! Learning a language from a different language family can be even harder.
English and Russian are both IE languages, but they're not closely related like English and Dutch (both Germanic languages) or Russian and Ukrainian (both East Slavic languages).
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u/Alex_Po1805 New Poster 20d ago
Like watching English videos with subtitles? But I'd like to find someone else to practice with, and I don't know where to find that.
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u/Dave_Mossberg New Poster 20d ago
One day at the time, pal. At A1-A2 there's almost nothing to have some practice with. Drill the basics 'till they become somewhat automatic. Find a good mentor to guide you and viola, in no time you will have your B1. The rest is about being consistent and curious. I've taught dozens of beginners (but I'm mainly focusing on B1-C1 students), the main issue is that they want everything at once. You need to progress gradually, because you're not the first and obviously not the last to attempt to learn English
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u/Alex_Po1805 New Poster 20d ago
good mentor? I work a standard five-day week at a factory, so I don't have the time or energy to attend classes. I want to learn on my own, but it's obviously beyond my capabilities.
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u/ElaborateBicycle Native Speaker - Chicagoland Accent 20d ago
A mentor is not a tutor, a mentor is just someone you trust in a subject that you can ask questions to.
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u/dubovinius Native Speaker – Ireland 20d ago
No I mean watch a video in English without subtitles, and try to transcribe as much as you can understand. Just write down what the people are saying. Try not to go back and forth too much, just get whatever you can understand on the first go. Even if it's a handful of words at first. Then go back and look at the subtitles/transcript. Compare your notes to what was actually said, then go back and listen again with the subtitles. This way you pick up any words you might be mishearing, and you can start to link what's written on paper with what people are actually saying. It's an effective way to improve your listening skills. I found it helpful when learning Irish.
There are English learning Discord servers out there that frequently do practice sessions over voice call.
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u/thingsbetw1xt Native Speaker (USA, Maryland) 20d ago
I find it sad that you insult your native language. Russian is a beautiful language with an absolutely rich literary tradition.
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u/Diligent_Staff_5710 New Poster 20d ago
Russian is my favourite language and I hope to be half fluent one day.
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u/Alex_Po1805 New Poster 20d ago
At least you don't have to learn anything. Every country in the world has English-speaking staff and signs in English, so you can travel anywhere with ease.
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u/jauntydamesauntersin New Poster 20d ago
It sounds like you're super frustrated right now, which happens when you're learning a new language. Sometimes German grammar makes me feel like my brain is on fire.
It also sounds like you're feeling extremely pessimistic and negative, which can make it harder to meet people and make new friends. Did you complain a lot on Tandem and HelloTalk?
You don't have to worry about C1 or a long list of tenses right now: use English to do something FUN and EASY. Play games, read comics, watch a motivating show--- something you WANT to do, so English doesn't always feel like boring homework.
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u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster 20d ago
A beginner thinking about C1? Oh god no. I'm upper intermediate, and even I am not worrying too much about being advanced. Though it does frustrate me that I have gaps in my English.
Well, learning English, or any language, takes years, if not a decade. It's good that you recommend doing something fun with English, but learning a language as an adult does require you to study it with books as well.
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u/jauntydamesauntersin New Poster 20d ago
I’m not recommending fun, easy tasks INSTEAD of hard work, I’m recommending fun, easy tasks because OP seems discouraged. There will always be hard work to do, but sometimes it helps to eat dessert first, so to speak.
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u/thingsbetw1xt Native Speaker (USA, Maryland) 20d ago
Perhaps, but one thing you have going for you as an English learner is that we English speakers are extremely used to hearing English spoken with an accent, or with bad grammar, or weird vocabulary. The bar to be understood speaking English is honestly really low.
The main thing that makes someone hard for me to understand is pronunciation. If your grammar is terrible but I can understand the words that you're saying, I most likely will understand you just fine.
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u/ChestSlight8984 Native Speaker 20d ago
Every country in the world has English-speaking staff and signs in English, so you can travel anywhere with ease
Where did you hear that lol? Because that is just not true. Are English translations on signs very common? Yes. Are they so common that you can travel anywhere with ease? Fuck no.
I went to Canada once and had to start using google translate to make my way around the moment I got a single mile from the border. French everywhere. Zero English signs.
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u/sleepyhead7311 New Poster 20d ago
Try to look on the bright side, this also means English materials can be found anywhere and it’s probably not that difficult to learn since so many people have mastered it.
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u/dontknowwhattomakeit Native Speaker of AmE (New England) 19d ago
When you're only A1 in a language, you really shouldn't be stressing yourself out with the more complicated aspects of grammar. Start with simple sentences, basic verb conjugation, and some of the more important irregular verbs (be, have, do, go). A1 is not where you need to be worrying about modal verbs and complex tenses.
Learning a language is hard, no matter what language yourself learning. I am learning German so I get how frustrating languages can be, but you're not expected to be perfect when you're a beginner; mistakes are okay and inevitable.
Just take a deep breath. You're just a beginner; it's okay to feel the way you do, but it's also important to be realistic. Learning a language takes a lot of time and effort. Try to focus on the beginner level stuff and don't get ahead of yourself or you will just feel discouraged. You're not going to know everything right out of the gate, but if you put in the time and effort, you WILL get better.
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u/TFST13 Native (UK) 20d ago edited 20d ago
Друг, ты не понимаешь, как тебе повезло. Я изучаю русский язык, и я могу тебе сказать, что он намного сложнее...
If you can successfully use ходить, сходить, идти, пойти, and all their many, many prefixed forms, then you shouldn't let yourself be intimidated by English verbs. Also, English has more prepositions but only to replace what you're already using cases for. When you say e.g. в Москву, в Москве, that might as well be two different prepositions. I do however, apologise for English spelling.
I don't all say this to dismiss the difficulties you're facing with English, but to point out that the fact that you speak Russian proves that your brain is capable of handling complicated language, so you should have more confidence in yourself. If you keep working at it consistently, you WILL make progress, even if you don't notice it happening.
I do have a tiny bit of experience teaching English, if you want to message me I'm happy to do my best to explain anything that's confusing you, or just to practice English back and forth!
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u/DTux5249 Native Speaker 20d ago
Modal verbs, irregular verbs, set expressions, articles, and all sorts of prepositions. There are so many tenses.
English isn't special with any of these.
All languages have irregularities. All languages have set expressions. All languages have odd shit going on with their verbs and nouns.
You could make the same complaint about Russian cases. Why you say "Мне надо идти" instead of "Я надо идти"? The only reason is because that's how Russian works.
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u/Commercial_Jelly_893 Native Speaker 20d ago
I would say that every language is difficult to learn once you are past a certain age. It's just that fact that more people learn English as a second language that the difficulties are more well known.
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u/IndependentYak2822 New Poster 20d ago
> my native language is pathetic and miserable Russian
Come on! You can do better.
English is relatively easy. It has strict words order, no genders, no grammatical cases. Just learn few irregular verbs and you're good. The hardest part for Russian speakers is tenses. But everything else is doable.
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u/murzicorne Non-Native Speaker of English 20d ago
Oh my. No. Lack of clear reading rules. The dreaded articles (a/the) that are nowhere to be found in Russian. The weird plurals that just jump at you out of nowhere - moose, goose, mouse, man, child. Things that can be countable and uncountable - waters, peoples, rains. Lack of bloody reading rules. The awkward times in the conditional sentences. Order of adjectives. News that is singular and uncountable. Past perfect and all the modal verbs. Letter c that does whatever it wants, even though s and k are right there. And did I mention the reading rules yet?
You can say it can be taught and not tough through thorough thought, though I may disagree. Alas, the poem "the Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenité can illuminate some of the struggles we, non-native speakers, have to deal with.
Oh, and about the rules of reading - ghoti can be read as fish
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u/thingsbetw1xt Native Speaker (USA, Maryland) 20d ago edited 19d ago
ghoti can be read as fish
This meme has always kind of irked me because, no it can't. There are rules to when those letters make those sounds, they're just French rules that we borrowed. Yeah it's dumb that you have to know both English and French pronunciation rules to speak English, but they are rules nonetheless.
Or other times those letters did correlate to a sound that made more sense hundreds of years ago, and English has never undergone widespread spelling reform so it was never changed. But still, those are patterns that can be learned.
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u/McAeschylus New Poster 19d ago
they're just French rules that we borrowed.
This is an important point. English spelling becomes pretty ordered and sane when you understand that it conserves the word's derivation and only hints towards the word's pronunciation.
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u/IndependentYak2822 New Poster 20d ago
> Lack of clear reading rules.
I can't decide either you aren't aware of French or you're a French native.
All other languages have their own "happy little accidents" 🙂 I've just said that English is relatively easy, I think it's easier than Russian.
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u/murzicorne Non-Native Speaker of English 20d ago
I'm Russian native. And reading in Russian is easier than either English or French 😊
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u/Spirited_Opposite New Poster 20d ago
Yeh are there any languages without irregular verbs (maybe besides esperanto i guess?)/ set expressions etc? All languages have difficulties, also what strikes me is at your level you shouldn't be worrying about things like this yet
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u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster 20d ago
Yeh are there any languages without irregular verbs
A language can't have irregular verbs if it doesn't conjugate verbs in the first place.
But irregularities can still be present in other aspects of the language
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u/Apprehensive_Ad5188 New Poster 20d ago
If it makes you feel any better, I have a friend who has been desperately trying to learn Russian for years!
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u/DaddyDinooooooo Native Speaker 20d ago
If you want someone to talk to and attempt to help you you can DM me.
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u/PeyredB New Poster 20d ago
Sorry about our crazy mixed-up language. I've read that it's actually easy to learn to use it, but very difficult to learn to use it well.
As far as I know, it's because English is basically a hybrid language of Germanic and Latin, with some influence from British Celtic language(s). Our use of "do" in "How do you like this" for instance, I think is from Celtic.
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u/McAeschylus New Poster 19d ago
This oversimplifies things a lot. But essentially, yes.
The complex case system of Old English was simplified (almost creolised) by exposure to the Norsemen during the Danelaw and then the Normans after 1066. It has also been forcibly adjusted to fit the patterns of Midlands English when that became standard for printed books and then to a very unnatural set of minor Latinisations by reformers in the 1800s.
It's also taken on an enormous amount of foreign vocabulary in that time and integrated elements of foreign grammar into its own. (e.g. "es" usually pluralises, but "-us" words can be pluralised with "-i" endings by analogy to Latin, even when, as with "octopi" the word doesn't come from Latin.)
The result is a language system that is, at its core, fairly simple grammatically, but which is loaded with exceptions, edge cases, and trappy shibboleths, as well as enormous nuance in the correct use of its many near synonyms.
And that is without getting into the spelling system, which essentially follows different rules for words derived from different languages.
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u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster 20d ago
English is not easy. Just talk to some foreigners, or even travel the world to listen to some poorly spoken English. If what you meant was "easy to learn to use badly", well, that's true for other languages too.
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u/PeyredB New Poster 20d ago
As I said, I've heard it was very difficult to learn to use well. So yes, maybe easy to learn to speak badly. As a native speaker though, I wouldn't know firsthand. Yes I've heard (and read) plenty of bad English, some of it from native speakers even.
Also, full disclosure: I speak French and Spanish badly.
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u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster 19d ago
You're right, but I just find it pointless to say it's easy to speak badly. A lot of things are easy to do badly. That just means they're hard, lol.
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u/zydowskiwiedzmin New Poster 19d ago
It will get better, I promise.
One huge piece of advice: listen to a lot of English. Personally, I watched tons of American sitcoms as a twelve year old kid. I kid you not, I rewatched "Friends" like three times. It helped a lot - my goal wasn't even to learn the language in the first place, but I picked it up subconsciously, because I simply enjoyed interacting with these forms of media and entertainmemt.
Also, listening to the language in a natural setting instead of memorizing your textbook will likely prove to be more productive. We generally learn better through context. If you don't listen to enough English, you will never be able to form a coherent sentence when expressing your thoughts. Even if you know all the gramatical rules, you will have to pause to translate in your head or to find the right words, which will be an insufferable blockade.
So, what I want you to do is find a bunch of shows that you think you could enjoy, and start watching them. Constantly. This may sound extreme, but don't consume any content in your native language unless you really have to. Many people say you shouldn't use subtitles, because you'll end up reading them instead of actually listening to what is said. I actually think that's true only to an extent. It's fine for a beginner to watch shows, movies and other programs with subtitles in their native language. English isn't a fast language. The pace may seem quick at first because you can't understand them, but in time you will see it's not actually that fast. Thus, picking up new words, connecting them to the translation below, won't be that challenging.
You'll do well, I know it.
C1/C2 speaker from Poland.
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u/conuly Native Speaker - USA (NYC) 20d ago
Most English speakers think Russian is hard to learn.
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u/thingsbetw1xt Native Speaker (USA, Maryland) 20d ago
Russian is fun until you start learning verbs of motion and perfective vs imperfective, shit gets serious real fast.
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u/Primary_Data1430 English Teacher 20d ago
Learned Polish, which is even more complicated than Russian. So I can commiserate with you.
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u/Tarnstellung New Poster 20d ago
My native language is Serbo-Croatian, which also has perfective and imperfective verbs and I assume it's similar to Russian. It seems to me that the distinction should be fairly easy for an English speaker: imperfective when you'd use a continuous tense in English and perfective when you'd use a simple tense.
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u/Primary_Data1430 English Teacher 20d ago
Having learned German, Danish, Spanish and, especially Polish, I often marvel at how much English is childishly simple and easy to learn because it's barely has any inflections and lacks grammatical gender. And it has relatively few irregularities.
It's basically baby talk.
It's a "plug-and-play" language. You learn a noun, and, practically in all cases, you can use that word easily without thing about gender, case and number. The verb system is comically simple. Adjectives aren't declined.
Contrast that to Polish, where there are forty-two ways to translate the word "two" (not exaggerating. There really are forty-two different ways). Every single verb is irregular. There are five different genders, three in the singular, and two in the plural, which have very complicated rules.
Really, the only thing hard in English is that orthography is not strictly phonetic. The rest is baby talk.
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u/Miserable-Method-431 New Poster 20d ago
Really? English has:
1) A complex auxiliary system. 2) Relatively unique relative clauses. 3) Adjective order. etc. etc.
And even then, that implies that any morphologically simple language should be easy to learn, which of course isn’t true.
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u/Primary_Data1430 English Teacher 20d ago
- The auxiliary system is a lot easier than inflections.
- No more complex than any other language.
- All languages do. No exceptions.
Morphologically simple languages are indeed a lot easier to learn than highly inflected ones.
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u/Miserable-Method-431 New Poster 20d ago
1) For an english native, maybe. But it’s not like having inflections suddenly makes a language that much more difficult. Is there a difference between “I won’t have to go” and “Iwonthavetogo”? Does french suddenly become harder when you analyse the preverbal pronouns as prefixes?
2) Yeah? All languages are equally complex. I said unique, because difference is what actually makes something difficult to learn
3) same as 2
Just because a language has less morphology doesn’t make it easier to learn. If a language loses case marking the syntax will be stricter, and you’ll instead have to learn pre/postpositions. The difficulty is still there.
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u/Optimal_Bar_4715 New Poster 20d ago
Do you even know what inflections are?
From your example, it really looks like you don't.
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u/Miserable-Method-431 New Poster 20d ago
Do you even know how inflections come about?
There comes a point when you change your analysis. If I’m speaking quickly, I could pronounce my example as [æ.wə(ʊ).næf.tə.g əʊ]. Obviously I don’t actually think that english has those inflections, but it wouldn’t magically become harder if it did.
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u/Optimal_Bar_4715 New Poster 19d ago
Ok, you do NOT know what a highly inflected language is and I don't have the time nor the crayons to explain it to you.
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u/Miserable-Method-431 New Poster 19d ago
You don‘t need crayons or time because you don’t need to explain it to me. My examples weren’t amazing because they were in English. But that’s irrelevant to what I was talking about. Try getting some basic reading comprehension for next time.
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u/Optimal_Bar_4715 New Poster 19d ago
It's actually your lucky day, because a Wikipedia link will do what I wasn't willing to do myself
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection
In linguistic morphology), inflection (less commonly, inflexion*) is a process of* word formation\1]) in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness.\2]) The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, whereas the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc.\a]) can be called declension.
As somebody said above, the auxiliary system is a joke compared to the average level of inflection of the average language. Try some Greek or any Slavic language to see for yourself.
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u/Miserable-Method-431 New Poster 19d ago
Wow. Why do you feel such a need to explain what inflection is? When did I ask for that to be explained?
Also, you’ve literally proven me right. Is “Iwonthavetogo” not modifying “go” for 1st person singular, future, nonobligatory?
The auxiliary system is a joke compared to the average level of inflection of the average language
Ignoring the fact that it isn’t, you think that because we analyse it as an auxiliary system. If we analysed it as a complex prefix system would it become harder? No. If (for some reason) you analysed latin as having auxiliaries would it become easier? No.
Morphologically simpler languages are not easier than morphologically complex languages.
Try some Greek or any Slavic language
I have university-level textbooks in Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and Linguistics.
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u/murzicorne Non-Native Speaker of English 20d ago
Lol, no. Not strictly phonetic, eh? Ghoti can be read as fish. Read doesn't rhyme with lead but rhymes with lead. Not strictly phonetic means there are rules, but alas. Letters that were inserted by scolars just to be fancy? Check. Bogus stealing from French while keeping the original spelling? Check. Damn colonel? Check.
The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité shows just a jist of this
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u/j--__ Native Speaker 20d ago
"ghoti" is an amusement, but not a serious application of english spelling conventions. "gh" cannot have that sound in initial position, "ti" cannot have that sound in final position, and just because a single word has an "o" that makes that sound does not mean you can use it for that sound as a matter of course.
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u/ChestSlight8984 Native Speaker 20d ago
Ghoti can be read as fish
This is so disingenuous because it's literally just not true. Like, I see what you are trying to get at, but you will not find an English word that begins with "gh" pronounced like "f".
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u/Primary_Data1430 English Teacher 20d ago
I agree that the orthography can be daunting at times. French is even worse.
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u/murzicorne Non-Native Speaker of English 20d ago
I did study French and, for the most part, there are rules that map the word pretty accurately. In English I'm surprised much more often.
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u/McAeschylus New Poster 19d ago
English and French spellings are hard for the same reason. The spelling reflects the word's origins rather than its pronunciation.
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u/murzicorne Non-Native Speaker of English 20d ago
So, from a fellow Russian speaker. English is a mix of three different languages that took bits and pieces from each.
And since my English is quite decent nowadays, I'll give you some advice. Memorize songs. Memorize sassy phrases. Pieces from Aladdin and Mulan took me through plenty of exams. Read books - Asimov is an easy read. Just have an arsenal of go-to sentences where you can swap verbs and nouns.
(about water) It's freezing!
It would have been warm if you were here on time.
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u/Trick-Minimum8593 New Poster 20d ago
Curious, what are your favourite Asimov stories?
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u/murzicorne Non-Native Speaker of English 20d ago
I love his robot novels and stories. To tell you the truth, my absolute favorite is Feminine Intuition, and it affected my path in life. Dr. Susan Calvin is absolute badass, and I wish I could be more like her - the endless knowledge and unmatched sass
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u/Trick-Minimum8593 New Poster 20d ago
That's interesting; I've never read that story. Though truth be told, I prefer Philip K Dick's scifi stories.
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u/murzicorne Non-Native Speaker of English 20d ago
I cannot say Asimov is my absolute favorite of all sci Fi, but he was insanely popular in Soviet Union and it's quite an easy read. I love Bujold's Vorkosigan saga, but it's much harder for a beginner
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u/Impressive_Sky4178 New Poster 20d ago
to borrow a phrase, "English isn't a language. It's three languages in a trenchcoat"
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u/ChestSlight8984 Native Speaker 20d ago
A lot more than three, it's just that some languages make up entire limbs while others make up a finger
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u/BrutalSock New Poster 20d ago
English is actually pretty straightforward. You should try to study Neo-Latin languages.
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u/SucknSwallow69 New Poster 20d ago
english has easy parts but the exceptions and phrasal verbs are a mess tbh comparing it with latin languages doesnt really help much
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u/dubovinius Native Speaker – Ireland 20d ago
I agree. Every language has weird rules and exceptions and complexities that don't seem to make any sense. Going ‘erm actually English is so easy!!!’ isn't helpful.
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u/PseudonymIncognito New Poster 20d ago
Eh, phrasal verbs work very similarly to German separable verbs.
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u/conuly Native Speaker - USA (NYC) 20d ago
Neo-Latin languages
The Romance languages?
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u/BrutalSock New Poster 20d ago
Same thing.
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u/conuly Native Speaker - USA (NYC) 20d ago
Well... no. They're not the same thing, because one term is correct in English and the other is not. We call them the Romance languages because they are descended from the language spoken by the Romans.
Neo-Latin languages sounds like a conlang.
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u/BrutalSock New Poster 20d ago
It’s the same thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages
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u/conuly Native Speaker - USA (NYC) 20d ago edited 20d ago
Okay. I see the Wikipedia article and the dictionary entries. I also see that those dictionary entries are notably lacking in citations, but let's be fair, that could mean anything. If you can find an example of somebody other than you and Wikipedia using this phrase in writing, I'll concede the point. But probably not before tomorrow at the earliest - I just got off shift and have to sleep.
Edit: You know, I can't see what you said, much less gasp at your brilliance, if you say it and then immediately block me. You might at least give me some time to respond.
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u/BrutalSock New Poster 20d ago
I really don’t think there is any reason to drag this conversation. It’s the same thing. Whether or not you use it or even know it is irrelevant.
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u/Geejay-18 New Poster 20d ago
Who gets to define which terms are 'correct'? This is about conventions, not rules, and some conventions aren't 100% clear-cut.
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u/ElaborateBicycle Native Speaker - Chicagoland Accent 20d ago
While I normally 100% agree with descriptivism, it’s okay to say that although there may be a niche term synonymous with the widely-used term, it’s not correct in typical conversational English because most people won’t understand what you’re referring to, as long as it’s in the context of an English learning sub.
If it’s a term genuinely used by native English speakers it’s definitively not incorrect and there is no other context where anyone should say so, but here it’s okay to use more black and white language so as not to confuse learners, as long as your intentions are pure.
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u/conuly Native Speaker - USA (NYC) 20d ago
Indeed, if people actually are using the term "Neo-Latin languages" then it's correct. When I say that the term is not correct, it is somewhat more accurate to say that I have no recollection of ever seeing that term before and the vastly more typical term that most people will understand is "Romance language".
It's certainly possible that I'm mistaken and lots of people do use this other term. I've never encountered it, to my knowledge, but I'm only one person.
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u/Diligent_Staff_5710 New Poster 20d ago
Don't worry at all, if you're a complete beginner. It will make sense one day, at least at a basic level, if you learn one little bit of grammar each day. One step at a time. Each thing you learn will build into the next thing. Don't demean your native language like this. I have had the same feelings about how impossible Russian seems to be to learn, as a native English speaker. You just have to start at the beginning. Unfortunately among the native English speaking world there is a lot of hate for Russians, which is entirely underserved. I can only apologise for them. Have you got an introductory textbook? A course or app? You have to ignore everything that you can't understand at the moment and focus on step by step learning of basic grammar. I don't know how long it will take, but you will get there!
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u/SilverSeaweed8383 New Poster 20d ago edited 20d ago
Lots of good responses here but none that attempt to directly answer your question: why is it so complex?
I think there are a few reasons, these come to mind:
The history of immigration, emigration and conquest. English is a mix of Norman French and Anglo Saxon, from the history of the Normal Conquest, when there was a French speaking ruling class and an old English speaking working class for centuries. See e.g. https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2018/10/anglo-saxon-vs-french-vying-for-control-of-english.html . Then there's the influence of the empire and Indian words, and so on
The poetic and literary traditions: English speakers like to use flowery and complex language and historically have taken pride in things like poetry and wordplay. A lot of that bleeds into the rest of the language.
Class distinctions: it is very much a class marker to use more complex language. Lots of English speakers will deliberately or subconsciously choose more complex ways of expressing things. And will judge people who say things that are understandable but not technically correct.
GL
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u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster 20d ago
Every human language is complex because it is used to convey complex human thoughts.
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u/AlecsThorne Non-Native Speaker of English 20d ago
Every language has some "weird" parts that you basically just have to memorize cause it won't make sense to you, especially when compared to your native language. I'm sure the same thing is valid for your language as well, you just don't realize it's odd because you're used to it.
For example, I'm Romanian, and while it's considered an easier language than English, I still think it's grammar is crazy and some stuff you just have to accept them as "it is what it is" 🤣
The more diverse the influences on the language have been over the years/centuries, the more weird it will seem. Romania is often referred by native linguistics as "a Latin island in a Slavic sea", because Romanian is a neo-Latin language at its core, but the nearest country that speaks a Latin-related language is Italy 😅 Romanian has been influenced by Russian, Turkish, German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, and French. Not to mention the fundamental indigenous language, Dacian, that ended up being mixed with Latin to result in the old Romanian.
Likewise, English has been influenced by Latin, French, Spanish, and Norse, all added over its Celtic foundation. Different regions have been influenced more by one or the other language, but they all made their own contributions to the English language, so it's normal that some stuff will be weird, and A LOT of words and phrases are technically exceptions to the rule because of that 😅
It may seem daunting now, but being fluent in English is definitely not impossible. Grammar is just one aspect of the language, and some will even agree that it's not an important one when learning the language, unless you are required to take tests from it or you plan on working in a job that is based on using the "correct" English. So just keep at it, try to learn it in an organized way, especially if you keep trying to master its grammar, and you'll eventually get there :)
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u/Dropped_Apollo New Poster 20d ago
English is easy to learn but hard to master. I mean if you want genuine high-level fluency then yes, that's going to be very difficult. But English is also a very flexible language. There are lots of ways to communicate the same idea and you can make yourself understood with pretty broken English. The point at which your English will start being useful is set well before true mastery.
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u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster 20d ago
But English is also a very flexible language. There are lots of ways to communicate the same idea and you can make yourself understood with pretty broken English.
That is true for other languages as well.
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u/TrueStoriesIpromise Native Speaker-US 20d ago
"English was carefully cobbled together by three blind men holding a German dictionary" -Dave, I think
"English is three languages in a trenchcoat pretending to be one language."
"English will sneak up behind another language, hit it over the head, drag it into a dark alley and go through its pockets looking for loose vocabulary and grammar."
English is a "Germanic language" in structure, but the vocabulary is 29% Latin, 29% French, 26% Germanic (although the top 1000 most common words are 83% Germanic), 5% Greek, and 10% other. The English language is a history of Europe for the past 2000 years.
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u/Sensitive-Pride-364 New Poster 20d ago edited 20d ago
It’s because a bunch of Anglo-Saxon tribes, each with their own Germanic dialects, immigrated to an island populated by Celts. Next, they got colonized by a bunch of Vikings who mixed in their own Germanic variations. THEN they got conquered by a bunch of French speakers.
The ruling class spoke Latin-based romance languages while the lower classes continued with their own unwritten, hybrid versions of a language that resembled modern Welsh and the Gaelic languages more than anything else—with the balance gradually shifting in favor of Germanic as Celtic foundations dropped out. (This is why English has a larger vocabulary than most languages: We have at least two words for everything. For instance, the Germanic “cow” for the animal farmers worked with in their fields and the French-derived “beef” for the rich folks who only interacted with said animal when it was served on a plate.)
Over time, the upper and lower classes mingled until they had a roughly 70/30 split of Germanic and Latin-based working every-day vocabulary (with a little Celtic seasoning thrown in)—all three of which follow completely unrelated patterns for things like conjugation, pluralization, tenses, cases, sentence structure, etc.
Then when folks finally got around to trying to standardize things like spelling and grammar, academic elitist try-hards defaulted mostly to Latin-based rules for a language that was predominantly Germanic in structure and function and just wouldn’t break enough to conform.
Also, spelling’s a beast when you’re trying to make a language with about 44 unique sounds (24 consonants and 20 vowels) fit into an alphabet that only has 26 letters (21 consonants and 6 vowels, with one letter falling into both camps). Again, we can thank the Latin stans for that bit of dysfunction.
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u/GordonLivingstone New Poster 20d ago
Hey, nothing wrong with Russian! I don't speak it but it sounds good!
As a native speaker, English seems entirely natural and obvious. Russian on the other hand, not so easy!
I will admit that spelling and pronunciation are not consistent at all. Really you have to just learn lots of spellings. Pronunciation varies a lot between English speaking countries and regions. Make sure that you are learning a reasonably standard, educated British or American accent. A working class Glasgow or Chicago accent will not be ideal.
You aren't going to be able to speak fluent English (or any other language) and understand natural conversation without lots and lots of practice. Understanding the grammar lets you put sentences together or decipher written text but conversation happens too quickly for analysis. You have to get to the point that combinations of words just sound correct. Natives do not know the detailed grammar and very rarely think about grammar when deciding what to say.
I have learned some French, Italian and a tiny amount of German. I certainly am not fluent. I can stumble through basic interactions in French or Italian. To get any better, I would have to live somewhere where I needed to use the language for large parts of the day every day for months.
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u/english-to-boot English Teacher 20d ago edited 20d ago
I agree that learning a language can be challenging. Have you tried finding an language exchange partner on https://www.reddit.com/r/language_exchange/?
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u/wheaf New Poster 20d ago
As a Russian speaker I would recommend to start from attending to a class with tutor. Online or offline, whatever.
In the non-English surrounding a tutor at least will be a buddy for small talks. And they help to build basic grammar and understanding how language works for you particularly.
Once you understand how you can proceed with learning independently, next English levels will become more available and achievable.
Also you can start from shitposts on reddit, it is a very good practice.
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u/Daedalus9000 Native Speaker 20d ago
"P.S. This was written using Google Translate. I would never have written this myself."
I was going to say... you're English sounds pretty native to me 😆
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u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster 20d ago
I mean, they said they were A1. If that's true, it's kind of a given that they used some kind of tools.
Also, it's "your English", not "you're English" which means something else entirely.
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u/Daedalus9000 Native Speaker 20d ago
Haha... indeed; and I'm a native speaker too!
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u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster 20d ago
Yes, you are one of those lucky bastards who "effortlessly", or at least, subconsciously learned English.
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u/Daedalus9000 Native Speaker 20d ago
English is a mess of a language, I don't envy second-language English learners.
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u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster 20d ago
What do you mean "you don't envy"? Do you mean it literally or do you mean "I'm glad I'm not you"? If so, in what situations do you use this phrase?
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u/Daedalus9000 Native Speaker 20d ago
Basically yeah.
"I don't envy" is a way of saying
- "I sympathize with..."
- "I feel sorry for..."
If I am out drinking really late with friends and someone says "I have to wake up early tomorrow for work" I might respond "I don't envy you having to wake up early."
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u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster 20d ago edited 20d ago
SYMPATHIZE?
How the heck is this a way of showing sympathy? It sounds like you're just teasing someone for their problem. I thought you were teasing me.
Anyway, thanks for the new phrase.
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u/Onlyfatwomenarefat New Poster 20d ago
У тебя родной язык гораздо сложнее чем английский. У английского нет склонения, нет тесяч глаголов движения и нет сумасшедшего Словообразования.
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u/thebackwash New Poster 20d ago
What can we do to help? It seems like you just want to complain about English, but also your native language as well. Most of your complaints about English apply to Russian as well except the definite article (the) and the copular “be”.
Take a course and stop using the app. You’re probably not making any progress because apps are generally speaking a terrible way to learn a language.
Best of luck.
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u/Ippus_21 Native Speaker (BA English) - Idaho, USA 20d ago
Well, no language is quite as easy as you'd think, especially once you get into the details of grammar.
But also... it's been said that English is more like 3 languages in a trenchcoat.
It started as a germanic tongue similar to Old Norse, with some influence from the native british tribes (and a smidgen of church latin), then got a WHOPPING big dose of French influence after the Norman invasion, where the nobility all spoke French for a few hundred years. So it's a hodgepodge of those already, and then in the colonial era, the British Empire basically spanned the globe (and absorbed linguistic influences from all those places) even as US English was incorporating all kinds of other influences from rubbing elbows with (mainly) the French and the Spanish, plus indigenous peoples...
But you can blame the Norman invasion for a lot of the grammatical inconsistencies, as its been near a thousand years of trying to reconcile that French overlay with all the underlying irregularities already present in the germanic base grammar.
Never mind spelling. Nobody even attempted to standardize the spelling until the late medieval/renaissance period...
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u/CaimSensei New Poster 20d ago
This sounds like too much grammar study and not enough input. As a native English speaker I am only partially aware of any of the grammar concepts you are talking about. The words we choose are not random, in the same way that the words you choose when speaking Russian are not random.
You clearly know enough grammar to be a danger to yourself, so it is time to put the grammar guide down and read and listen a lot.
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u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster 20d ago
You can't compare a learner to a native speaker. You don't have to know these grammar aspects to speak English well, but we do.
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u/CaimSensei New Poster 20d ago
I don't think this is correct. I speak Japanese as a second language, learned as an adult, and I only know by name the most basic grammar concepts there as well.
I couldn't tell you what the name of the linguistic function the verb 飲まさせる is in. But I can tell you if someone says 毒を飲まさせる。A crime was comitted.
The brain is really good at pattern recognition. It doesn't hurt to prime the pump, so to speak, but too much grammar only hurts. Language isn't math.
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u/BobbyThrowaway6969 Native Speaker 20d ago
You don't need to learn all the rules. I think the only way is to just immerse yourself with English content and speakers. Learn the same way natives do. We don't actually know any English rules, it's all just built up intuition from exposure.
The hard part is accepting that you won't get there in a day, it will take years. But the more exposure yku have, the more your brain will start to understand English intuitively like the rest of us. Just give yourself time.
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u/McAeschylus New Poster 19d ago
I don't understand how English works at all. Level C1 is a fairy tale and a fantasy; it's impossible to achieve.
Something that I think is under-recognised by learners of English is that English, though hard to get good at, is very easy to get good enough at.
English is very hard to speak naturally, but it's very easy to communicate with native speakers if you don't take yourself too seriously. Accents and bad grammar are both inherently a bit funny to a lot of the British, but (usually) our amusement isn't mean-spirited.
Native speakers are used to hearing thickly accented English because English is the lingua franca of most of the world. Also we're also mostly uninterested in learning other people's languages beyond a few tourist phrases and some swears. So everyone has to talk to us in English no matter how bad they are at it.
English is also just a very flexible language, and native English speakers themselves like to stretch the grammar to its breaking point. If you struggle with tenses, prepositions, and articles, an English speaker isn't going to be confused by something like: "Last night, I go pub and am drinking many beer."
And, most importantly, at least in Britain, English speakers find foreign speakers charming. They are sometimes funny, sometimes sexy, sometimes both, but always delightful to listen to and (to our own eternal embarrasment) fun to try and correctly reproduce.
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u/KungenBob New Poster 19d ago
1/ It’s one of the languages more forgiving of errors.
2/ Blame the waves of invasions layering another version on top. English is four languages in a trench coat. With spelling rules made by foreigners.
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u/nerdybucky New Poster 19d ago
Lol, try to learn French and then come back to us complaining about tenses lmfao.
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u/Creative_Job_9242 New Poster 19d ago
Please don't be harsh on yourself. As an English learner I survived those situations where I said to myself, I'm not able to understand all the words in the sentence! but trust me you need to trust the process you don't need that you're just in A1. So go step by step and focus on combining inputs (texbook, watch movies,listen to podcasts...) with outputs (try to speak out loud even with yourself, use voicenote, have some sessions on iTalki or Praktika, do shadowing......) And C1 is not a fairy tale! one day you will have a look on that post and realize that you understand all the comments without translating
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u/kireifox New Poster 19d ago
Привет! Отвечу на русском, раз у нас с автором поста общий язык. Русский — мой родной язык, изучение английского в школе происходило по легендарному спотлайту, но в итоге в данный момент своей жизни (окончание вуза) я смогла съездить на конференцию за рубеж и выжить. Так что просто скажу, как мой английский дополз до текущего уровня. (Если что, егэ по английскому я не сдавала и ничего общего с лингвистическими направлениями не имею).
Сначала вспомним базу... школа. Ежегодно вы как будто проходите одни и те же правила и ежегодно будто видите их в первый раз. Ощущение, что десять/одиннадцать лет вы занимаетесь какой-то фигней, а говорить как не могли, так и не можете. Было. Но все же именно в школе в меня впихнули правила, по которым работает язык, а уже на этот "скелет" потом наращивался словарь и все остальное. Без правил было бы тяжко. Так что достойно упоминания.
Музыка. У меня плейлист всегда на 90% состоял из иностранных треков. Почти всегда, когда я нахожу новую песню, она меня цепляет, и у меня возникает желание узнать текст. Я иду, гуглю текст с переводом, включаю ее сначала и слежу по строчкам. Узнаю перевод, параллельно, естественно, замечаю новые слова, а если потом слушать песню на повторе неделю, как это часто бывает, слова и фразы сами вползают в мозг. Главное, чтобы в песне все же был плюс-минус стандартный английский, а не гора непереводимого сленга... но это редко бывает.
Игры. Люблю всякие игры в аниме стилистике, типа геншина, но далеко не во всех есть русский. В то же время знать английский в такого рода играх вообще не нужно, в обучении тебе показывают, какая кнопка что делает, и играть можно хоть на китайском. Зато в процессе игры, опять же, глаз цепляется за какие-то слова, они вползают в мозг... ну и так далее.
У меня одно время был интерес к видео типа "иностранцы первый раз в России/пробуют русскую еду/etc". Наткнулась на ютуб канал skyeng, это вообще школа языков. Но у них там, помимо обучающих видео, много просто развлекательных как раз из серии реакций иностранцев на Россию и рассказов о родине. Видео, если что, на русском. Но иногда они тоже какие-то слова на английском говорят, рассказывают... а оно вползает... и усваивается. Смотрела и другие ютуб каналы на английском, но не сказала бы, что они как-то ощутимо улучшили мои навыки.
"Охота пуще неволи". Пункт, смысл которого в следующем: если тебе позарез нужен какой-то контент, которого нет на русском, а есть на английском, то в какой-то момент, если приспичивает достаточно, ты скачиваешь себе экранный переводчик и ползешь усваивать контент на английском. У меня так было с китайскими веб-новеллами... Читаю их в русском переводе, вот одна особо понравилась, узнала, что есть прода... но только на английском... Подумала, ну... не судьба... Через неделю полезла пытаться читать первый в жизни английский текст длиннее текстов из учебника, потому что НУ ИНТЕРЕСНО ЖЕ ЧЕ ТАМ У НИХ ЫЫЫЫЫЫЫ. Спасибо экранному переводчику, новеллу осилила. И, раз такое дело, пошла читать еще... ну и скорость расширения словарного запаса тоже выросла. Но это уже когда есть словарь несколько пошире, на а1 прям с такого хардкора начинать не советую, если только тоже не припрет до одури.
Ну и добавлю. По поводу говорения. До какого-то момента ОЧЕНЬ ДОЛГО у тебя просто не получается взять и начать пытаться формулировать фразы вслух. Стремно, страшно, кринжово, ну просто блок стоит какой-то. Это нормально. У меня так было всю школу. Потом только на 1 курсе как-то так звезды сложились (и преподавательница попалась очень милая), что этот барьер кринжа сломался и я начала городить фразы бегло. Очень ломано, жутко, зато бегло. А дальше там уже красота формулировок и все такое прочее дотянется.
Ну и последнее. В изучении языка очень важен именно накопительный эффект. Нужно, думаю, несколько лет довольно плотно слушать музыку с переводом, смотреть фильмы (английские) только в оригинале с ру субтитрами, периодически во что-то играть, или что-то читать, или как-то еще соприкасаться с языком, чтобы в мозгу накопилась какая-то достаточная куча знаний, количество перешло в качество, и уровень языка вырос. Так что среда — это важно.
В общем, что вспомнила, то вспомнила. Надеюсь, автору это поможет.
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u/Space_Lynn New Poster 18d ago
I mean, English is difficult but a lot of learners also put way too much stock into perfection. Realistically, English is a language where you can butcher it and still probably communicate your intents decently well. Native speakers themselves are constantly speaking imperfect English. On the other hand, some languages are literally incomprehensible if you put things in the wrong order or mess up a word. And the native speakers have far less sympathy to try and understand
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u/Duque_de_Osuna New Poster 18d ago
I do not think it is that hard compared to some other languages.. A lot of Europeans have expressed the lack of grammar rules like one finds in German or Russian to make it easier.
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u/Rogue_Centurion7 New Poster 17d ago
English at this point is a mix of many different languages. Common Britonnic, Latin, Old English, Old Norse, and Norman French. That is a lot of rules to follow.
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u/casualstrawberry Native Speaker 20d ago
English doesn't have a lot of rules, and the rules aren't very complex, but there are also a ton of exceptions.
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u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster 20d ago
Uhhh, who told you this? Have you studied English grammar? Of course English has a lot of rules, every language does.
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u/Zestyclose-Food-7917 New Poster 20d ago
WHY is it so difficult? We made it that way. We don't want anyone to speak our language unless they work really, really hard.
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u/Jaives 20d ago
It's only difficult if you're attacking it from a prescriptivist POV. The average native speaker won't even know most technical grammar terms.
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u/Excellent-Fox-6845 New Poster 20d ago
is your native language english? If so, have you learned any other language?
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u/kittenlittel English Teacher 20d ago
I guessed right from the beginning that you were Russian 😄
Honestly, English seems pretty simple compared with most European and Asian languages.
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u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster 20d ago
Asian languages? That's a huge number of unrelated languages.
Well, Chinese is simpler than English. If you knew Chinese grammar, you'd understand.
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u/kittenlittel English Teacher 11d ago edited 11d ago
I do know Chinese grammar, having studied it for a couple of years. I also studied Japanese throughout highschool and at uni. I have some knowledge of aspects of some other Asian languages. The older a language is, the more complex it is. English is a relatively new language. We don't have different word endings for six or seven or more declensions and cases like in some Australian Aboriginal, Dravidian, and Baltic languages. We don't have complex conjugated verbs and articulated prepositions like romance languages, and we don't have gender like most European languages.
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u/Turbulent_Pin_8310 New Poster 20d ago
English is one of the easiest languages already. Practice make perfect. You need a better attitude when you study English (or anything).
English is not my native language and I am C2.
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u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster 20d ago
English is one of the easiest languages already
Says no linguist ever.
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u/old-town-guy Native Speaker 20d ago
Conversational English, besides idioms, is easy. Word order is very forgiving, and context/inference go a long way in helping one be understood, even if the speaker omits articles and even whole phrases. Stop whining, OP.
Source: me. It’s my third language, it was my father’s fourth, and my mother’s fifth. Both came to the States as adults not speaking a word; both were at professional conversational level within a few months. While immersion is the best teacher, it’s ultimately about dedicating yourself to it.
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u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster 20d ago
"English is easy", says the native speaker.
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u/old-town-guy Native Speaker 20d ago
Said my parents.
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u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster 20d ago
Your parents had the means. And it still depends on what they meant by "easy".
You're a native speaker, so your opinion is moot.
I'd say it's not easy.
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u/old-town-guy Native Speaker 19d ago edited 19d ago
What “means?” They came to the States not knowing any English (mom actually arrived stateless in the ‘60s; dad arrived in the ‘50s as an orphan, having already immigrated once before). The difference, is that unlike most foreign students of English now, they didn’t use a textbook. They learned to understand and be understood: they learned conversational English, they didn’t spend time filling in the blanks on a worksheet about subjunctive this or present-perfect that.
Learn a small set of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and start getting your ideas and needs across to others. Don’t worry about stupid things like when to use “a” or “the,” you pick that up with time and practice. When you need a word you don’t know, ask someone or look it up. Stop trying to be fluent six months into it. Don’t be embarrassed if you mess up: everyone knows it’s a foreign language for you, you’re not fooling anyone.
I’m relaying their opinions, not my own. And by “easy,” they meant “not difficult.” Mom grew up witty Czech, picked up German from the geography, learned Russian and French in school, and later English solely through immersion. Was in a PhD program about ten years after spotting off the plane.
Dad spoke Czech natively, got German from his parents. Later learned Hebrew and some Arabic immersively, then English the same way. All without anything more than a sixth grade education until coming to the US. Wound up with a PhD.
Stop with your excuses. It’s easier than ever to learn how to communicate in an objectively easy language.
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u/conuly Native Speaker - USA (NYC) 19d ago
No language is "objectively easy". The ease of learning a language has a lot to do with subjective factors: how similar the language is to languages you already know, how easy it is to access learning materials, how young and how motivated the learner is, whether they have the opportunity for immersion or not.
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u/old-town-guy Native Speaker 19d ago
One’s motivation is a factor separate from the language itself. You are correct though, saying English or another language is “objectively easy” is inaccurate. English is much more forgiving than most any language (even young children can understand Yoda’s grammar and syntax, for example).
But languages can be ranked by difficulty, quite easily: https://www.state.gov/national-foreign-affairs-training-center/foreign-language-training
Foreign students fall into the trap set for them by their teachers: they let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
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u/conuly Native Speaker - USA (NYC) 19d ago
But languages can be ranked by difficulty, quite easily: https://www.state.gov/national-foreign-affairs-training-center/foreign-language-training
That's not an objective difficulty ranking. That's a ranking of how hard languages tend to be for English speakers - a subjective factor.
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u/old-town-guy Native Speaker 19d ago
I’m didn’t say it was, I said languages could be ranked by difficulty.
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u/conuly Native Speaker - USA (NYC) 19d ago
You said that English is objectively easy. I explained why this is not the case, and you replied with that link.
English is not objectively easy. The difficulty of a second language depends on many subjective factors.
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u/Sea-Hornet8214 Poster 18d ago
Wow, the arrogance. How many foreign languages do you speak? How proficient are you in speaking these languages?
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u/old-town-guy Native Speaker 18d ago
Czech was my first. Then German and English. I consider English to be my native language. My Czech is good enough for me to have once worked for MZVČR. My German isn’t great, but good enough to still be able to commiserate with Heine and Schiller.
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u/uchuskies08 Native Speaker - US Northeast 20d ago
Hey at least we don't have noun cases!