10 Reasons English is Ridiculously Hard

[@MichaelPhillipsatGreyOwlStudio]

Every judgmental person who criticizes non-native speakers learning English needs to watch this video. English is pretty rough. The basics are okay. In some ways, the language is simple, but the lack of logic and consistency is maddening.

[@malokeytheallaround]

After studying new languages, I will now never ever judge anyone for their broken English.

[@eugenec7130]

I fully agree. The exceptions to the rules (irregulars) and inconsistency in English are at the top of the world.

[@ChineduOpara]

@@malokeytheallaround Facts! Now that i am learning Spanish, I am FAARRRR more empathetic to my ESL students!

[@laurencefraser]

@@eugenec7130 turns out, in many cases, they're not actually Irregular (though some certainly are, but that's true in many languages) so much as the rules are badly formulated or explained. English is more logical and consistent than most people give it credit for... It's just hidden by the fact that English is also a lot more Complicated than people give it credit for. (Spelling suddenly makes a whole lot more sense once you understand how English stress works, for example... Too bad stress isn't actually Marked anywhere (probably the biggest failing of the English writing system, really) and native speakers aren't generally even taught that it's a Thing.)

[@xXJ4FARGAMERXx]

@@laurencefraser He Sings, He sung He Rides, He Rode He Slides, He slode? He -slided- , He _Slid_ He Goes, He go? He goed? He Gid? He _went_ Colonel = Kernel??? I've always pronounced like "Colony" but instead of -y at the end it's -el; /kɑlənəl/ One has a /w/ sound?? Why?? Shouldn't it be pronounced a bit more like "Own"? 1, 1st 2, 2nd 3, 3rd 4, 4th 5, 5th . . . 10, 10th 11, 11st? 11th . . . 20, 20th 21, 21th? 21st irregular prefixes, too. probable, improbable Capable, incapable. Ok so in-/im- = opposite of, right? Flammable = Inflammable? That's the same thing! English as a spoken language is 90% regular. But as a written language? It's more like 70% consistent.

[@kevinb2208]

As a dyslexic native English speaker, learning English spellings as a child was torturous. When I started learning German, it was a bliss. German is so phonetic in comparison and far more logical.

[@MaoRatto]

English has a bad habit of retaining historical spelling from different language families. As a native English, French has a worse writing system... Japanese for me was straight forward but got to remember the ideograph + sound.

[@_the_ordinary_otaku_2325]

German is pretty straight forward. It's probably the reason why it sounds so harsh. :D

[@x0xTHLover4Lifex0x]

Yes German is amazing. It's always pronounced the way it's spelled

[@x0xTHLover4Lifex0x]

@@_the_ordinary_otaku_2325 depends on who is speaking it 😂

[@_the_ordinary_otaku_2325]

@@MaoRatto It also depends on the dialect xD

[@hrmIwonder]

The order of English adjectives is a beautiful example of how so much stuff is subconsciously acquired and how we do NOT consciously apply rules while speaking. No one could consciously apply that complex of a rule without have a 20 second pause in their speech.. Makes you wonder if any of language can really be explicitly learned, or if it's all subconsciously acquired.

[@dianadevlin3717]

Good point

[@richdobbs6595]

If I was a writer, especially a writer of science fiction, this seems like a great opportunity to mess with! Maybe just change the rule a bit, or completely turn it topsy-turvy.

[@elainechubb971]

Yes and no--sorry to waffle! One acquires one's native language almost subconsciously, with a lot of input from a parent or older sibling, who'll often gently (I hope) correct a mistake. But acquiring another language in school, often over the age of 10 or 12, involves a lot of rote learning. I learned French for 7 years starting at age 11, Latin for 6 starting at age 12, German for one year (intensive) at age 16, followed by Old English and Middle English in university. All these languages have quite complicated grammar rules, such as gendered nouns, with case and number suffixes, complex verb systems with different conjugations, and so on. There is really no getting around consciously learning vocabulary, spelling, grammatical forms, word order, syntax, at least absent total-immersion courses! (Just as in learning one's native language, there are needed lessons in all of these aspects--little kids do not automatically speak intelligibly just through listening to their families and friends.)

[@prestonage]

@@elainechubb971 Most second language teachers and linguists tend to agree that SLA (Second Language Acquisition) is done nearly entirely subconsciously, including grammar rules. This was promoted by Stephen Krashen. There has been criticism to the theories (a good synopsis of which can be read here: files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ669741.pdf), but it boils down to his theories being unfalsifiable, not remotely that they've been proven to be incorrect. The irony of this is that the entire idea of falsifiability being a tenet of science was put together in philosophy of science by Kuhn, which holds that the scientific method is whichever one works best at the moment, but could and likely will be improved upon in the future. For linguists and L2 teachers, Krashen's theories are the best we've got.. for now.

[@slowanddeliberate6893]

When we are babies and know no language, we can easily pick up the language we are exposed to by our parents and the culture of the region by hearing phrases said over and over again, and then repeating them. This process is, at first, subconscious before we start going to school.

[@Aakkosti]

Q and queue are pronounced the same because it’s q’s turn to get pronounced; ueue are in a queue waiting for theirs.

[@fukpoeslaw3613]

☻

[@xXJ4FARGAMERXx]

Seriously though, if you want to know why the other letters are there, then here's why: Q is a letter. Qu is pronounced /ku/ because 's value is /k/ and 's value is /u/ Que is pronounced /kjuː/. Why? Shouldn't it be pronounced /kuɛ/? Well, that's because the is silent. "Well if it's silent then why is it there??" Well, the job of the silent -e is to turn the short vowels into long vowels. Example: "Cut" = /kʌt/ but "Cute" = /kjuːt/ The silent -e turned 's value from /ʌ/ to /juː/ "Rat" = /ræt/ but "Rate" = /reɪt/ The silent -e turned 's value from /æ/ to /eɪ/ "Not" = /nɑt/ but "Note" = /noʊt/ The silent -e turned 's value from /ɑ/ to /oʊ/ See? If a one vowel letter word doesn't end in a silent -e then you pronounce the word with a short version of the vowel, e.g. "Bit" = /bɪt/ but if it were to end with a silent -e then it would use the long version. e.g. "Bite" = /baɪt/ Ok, so the -e turned Que from /ku/ to /kjuː/ because the long version of is /juː/ Great, Next! Queu, how would that be pronounced? I personally say /kuɛu/, but you do you. Next! Queue, why is that /kjuː/ and not /kuɛuɛ/ ? Well, because the last -e is silent, and the first is silent. Why? Look at words like "Antique" and "pique" and then tell me. They could just as well be spelled "Anteqe" and "Peqe" but I digress. With those silent letters out, "Queue" becomes Qeu, and how is Qeu pronounced? Well, 's value is /k/, 's value is /i/, and 's value is /uː/. Saying /kiu/ with 2 syllables is hard, so what they did was make a digraph and pronounced it as /juː/ , such as in Europe /juːrʌp/ , and with that the new pronounciation instead of /kiu/ is /kjuː/! That's why!

[@Liggliluff]

This joke is weird since it doesn't make sense. Every word spelt phonetically will have all the sounds queued up and pronounced in order. This isn't something unique to "queue"

[@LanguageCrafter]

bah-tun-dizz

[@fukpoeslaw3613]

@@Liggliluff it doesn't make sense because it's a joke 🤷‍♂️

[@gianlucalombardi7928]

I'm 49 years old, and recently I discovered a passion for English and language learning in general. I studied English at school for three years, and I learned nothing but an endless list of useless grammar rules. So I used to hate English. As you correctly pointed out, it's complicated to memorize grammar rules or the other subtleties of a language, and in my humble opinion, it's even detrimental to the process of acquisition of a language. I've been studying English with the comprehensible input method for two years and not only my command of the language is skyrocketing but I have a lot of fun by reading and watching any kind of contents without the necessity to memorize those stupid grammar rules. So just by reading and listening all my spare time, eventually, I will use them naturally and without thinking. Last but not least, by studying English for some strange reason I'm learning a lot about my native language too (I'm italian by the way) and I love it.

[@eugenec7130]

Learning English is like playing soccer to me. First they fix so many rules in the game, but just as you start to kick the ball towards the goal posts, they (the native English speakers) shift the posts. So it ends up like a game played by the barbarians, no rules. I studied English because it was a language widely used in technology, but personally I hate English. I have spent at least 3 times more time to study English than Chinese (which the native English speakers complain as a hard language).

[@hotlinesanzensekai7084]

Ottimo, anch'io ho imparato l'inglese così e provo a fare la stessa cosa per migliorare il mio italiano.

[@gianlucalombardi7928]

@@hotlinesanzensekai7084 da come scrivi mi sembra che il tuo italiano sia già ottimo. Complimenti

[@gianlucalombardi7928]

@moonrise dreamer Thank you, I really appreciated your comment. Actually, my speaking skill is not as good as my reading and my listening skill. And I make a lot of mistakes too. But I don't care much. I think that learning a language is not a contest, but I dare say is more like a long stroll in a beautiful environment. I mean, I don't care if I'm still not fluent, eventually, I will be... In the meantime, I enjoy the journey

[@donttryitjohn364]

@@gianlucalombardi7928 You write very formally. It's not a bad thing but it is probably best you tone it down a bit especially when conversing with native speakers. Wish you the best 👍

[@flixx82]

As a native English speaker, this was hilarious! I always knew that English was weird, but I had never really thought about just how weird it is. So happy I don't have to learn it as a second language. I've started to learn German, and so far I'm really enjoying it. I love how phonetic German is compared to English.

[@tharrrrrrr]

I'm just as happy as you're.

[@flixx82]

@@tharrrrrrr 😂

[@tharrrrrrr]

@@flixx82 😁

[@kevinjohnson1139]

English isn't that difficult, I started learning it when I was only 12 months old.😏

[@tharrrrrrr]

@@kevinjohnson1139 😂

[@TheLiverX]

Anakin: English only has 26 letters. Padme: Ah! So the reading is easy! Anakin: ... Padme: The reading is easy, right?..

[@ryangainey94]

Finnegan's Wake would like a word with you

[@thorstenjaspert9394]

26 are not enough for English.

[@Robin-Dabank696]

@@thorstenjaspert9394 exactly, it has 40 phonemes.

[@thorstenjaspert9394]

@@Robin-Dabank696 English needs an unique phonetic alphabet.

[@Tg8451]

So true about tones. When I first started learning Mandarin and was complaining about the difficulty of trying to figure out and remember the 4 main tones, I was quickly put in my place by someone who used "maybe" as an example of English's ludicrously difficult to learn use of tones. She used "maybe" as a single word answer to a question to demonstrate that simply by employing different tones/stressors on that one word she could say 1)Its a possibility 2)Its a strong possibility 3)Its possible but not likely 4)I know the answer but I'm not going to tell you 5)Its possible but I don't care 6)Its an extremely exciting possibility. It was hilariously good demonstration and I never complained about tones again.

[@msjennable]

Love this!

[@devonmatthews6443]

So... It depends on the situation

[@bestbigsistergs]

This is actually amazing omg I never noticed we did this in English...You have me repeating "maybe" with those different tones & meanings lmao

[@theEchannel_official]

@@devonmatthews6443 You could use the same "maybe" stress example and apply it to the "so" you just used 🤔🤔😂

[@devonmatthews6443]

@@theEchannel_official Oh... I see

[@tywinderbaum5283]

I'm a native spanish speaker from Argentina. I started going to English classes when I was 11, and by 16 I was at a C1 level. I only really learned from class the first two years. I tried reading Harry Potter in English after a year and a half of English, knowing it had a simple prose style and I already knew it by heart. I knew about 15-20% of the words I came across, deduced quite a bit from a learned instinct of how languages (and English specifically thanks to imperalism and it being everywhere), and understood enough from context and my memories that I read all seven of them without too much trouble. Ended up understanding about 60% of what I read, I think, but I didn't really care. The excitement of figuring out that a word was a different tense of a verb I knew, or in the same family as that noun I vaguely remember from a Beatles song, and finally understanding what "used to be" actually means in Yesterday, made me fall in love with learning languages. Now I speak fluent English, advanced French, intermediate german, plus some russian, hungarian, and hebrew. I'm 21. Learning languages is the most amazing experience ever. I remember playing music in English while in French class, and texting in Spanish. The feeling of mental exhaustion after challenging myself that way is incredible. Personal opinon: Reading does all the difference in the world. Surround yourself in your target language. Find what excites you about it, a new part of it to love. A sound, a sentence structure, an expression, the cultural relevance of a specific word, anything. Any excuse helps. Change your system language in your devices, use a browser extension that translates some words into your target language in every website you visit, talk to native people on an online platform (please be safe, don't share personal information online). Above all, have fun! If you're excited about it, everything feels different. Do you know the feeling of watching something in your target language and it all sounding like gibberish, and how it slowly starts to make sense as you learn? Isn't it one of the best feelings ever? P.S.: English *is* weird. In it's defense, all languages are. Just like people. The logic it has was pretty much made up after the fact to try to understand it better. They are not deliberately designed, and that's a huge part of what makes them so wonderful. Quite literally, full of wonders. Edit: correction, changed "C2" to "C1". I didn't remember which number C I got with the FCE and assumed C2 was the lower one, so I wrote that. It's the other way around

[@SpiritmanProductions]

What a wonderful comment. :-)

[@pauleff3312]

@@SpiritmanProductions I can echo that too - it is a well thought out comment. I feel the same. But having learned French from a girlfriend I once had now more than 40 years ago, it took me to begin a Spanish adventure at the end of 2019 to ignite my interest in languages as a whole. What they are, where they come from, the convenience of corruption in spelling the pronunciation at that time the corrupting the pronunciation before changing spellings along with the creation of new words needed to convey newer ideas too. If I ever get close to speaking Spanish reasonably well _to match that of how my very rusty French always polishes up every time I go there for 3 days or more;_ I had wanted to learn Russian (but I may end up skipping this because of Mr Putin's behaviour) and try something like Korean and or Greek because I want to learn different scripts (lettering systems).... My problem is I'm now nearly 60 and my memory really is on the wain - but I will repeat that the idea of learning and trying to understand other languages gives the learner a perception on how other people think and how their specific language constrains their train of thought. Think of the way we say _we like something_ but Hispanohablantes have to say that _something pleases them_ they both do mean the same thing - but then again they don't!!!! The concept of liking something or being pleased by it are subtly different... But regardless of these differences, actually trying to get inside another population's mind and train of thought has always supported my idea that around the world human beings no matter our gender, religion or language have so very, very much in common as people. I cannot express how fortunate I feel to have by chance come across an advert on the internet locally at the end of 2019 which said "Would you like to learn Spanish?"

[@SpiritmanProductions]

@@pauleff3312 I like the observation of the difference between "I like" and "it pleases me" (like "I am 50" v "I have 50 years"), but I doubt the sentiment behind them actually differs. My reasoning is that common phrases tend to be idiomatic, thus they are automatically uttered rather than consciously formulated. It is only users of a second language who initially have to think of the phrasing in terms of the semantic meanings of its words. With enough experience, that no longer applies and you're rattling them off like a native. :-)

[@OmarLivesUnderSpace]

Хм, посмотрим, что ты скажешь на изучение японского >_>

[@nick55j]

Wow very impressive! Your use of English is outstanding. I read your comment through once, then chuckled to myself and wondered if you had made any mistakes. I skimmed through quickly, no, couldn't find any. I reread it more carefully (simply for my own amusement) and YES I found one! You "make a difference" not "do a difference". Anyway, just saying.. Well done you 👏

[@stephenwodz7593]

I'm an ESL teacher who has worked in six foreign countries, and while I agree with everything you say, I must admit that my students seem to pick up English quite easily. In fact, I've been told that English grammar is actually quite simple compared to their native grammar (specifically Latin-based languages and Thai, for instance). But yes, pronunciation is a bitch, which is why I have a job.

[@lk6789]

The basic grammar is fairly easier but actually understanding the language as a native speaker is harder. What an English person says and what a non native speaker thinks they mean is often not the same.

[@septanine5936]

It seems what English lacks in grammar complexity, it makes up for with stress, spelling, and phonetics.

[@veroniquejeangille8248]

English grammar is only easy at the beginning. The more advanced you get, the trickier it gets (e.g. simple tenses vs continuous: as a beginner, it looks pretty straightforward, in advanced learners' grammar book, it is a nightmare)

[@lk6789]

@@veroniquejeangille8248 Yes, that is what my students say. 'English is so so easy', then come the idoms, phasal verbs and the punctuation to name a few. Try this one - woman without her man is nothing.

[@someguy1686]

@@lk6789 ...pretty easy to understand. I've never had any problems understanding basic English. I guess it might be because I've grown up speaking English the way a native speaker would.

[@lcarliner]

Also, don’t forget that English verb conjugations, endings and tenses are far simpler than many other languages!

[@foxymetroid]

True. Take a word like "work". If you ignore past/ future tenses, you just need to remember "work" and "works". Most verbs have just 2 forms for that tense and the s/es suffix is only added to verbs done by a third person, singular party. There are exceptions, like is, am, are, but those only require 3 forms to remember. To specify who's doing the action, you only need to add the noun or pronoun. Spanish? 7. You have the standard form and 6 forms to indicate who is doing the verb. And that's not getting into Spanish's numerous exceptions that have to be memorized. All that in a language that's supposed to be "simpler".

[@Giraffinator]

My only other point of reference is (very amateur-level) Japanese, in which, to my knowledge, there are 3 super common irregular verbs, plus a few others that might not show up as much. There's like 200 irregulars in English, which would floor my motivation as a learner, were I not already a native speaker. I tried looking up a few other European languages, and they all seem to have more than English, so maybe this is my silver lining when it comes to Japanese.

[@jaimes.5314]

Yeah, English is one of the easiest languages, that's a reason of it's popularity

[@herrbonk3635]

@@jaimes.5314 It's no "popularity", you are simply forced to use it.

[@pequenaudtekno2909]

English has nothing on Vietnamese. There's no conjugation at all haha. You have 3 markers before the verb for past, present and future, that's it. Also depending on context, people just use the present tense without the marker or *rồi after the verb mainly anyway. In comparison to French and Spanish, learning verbs in VN was the easiest thing I've learnt in any language

[@helleunderlienkristensen2125]

As a Dane, one of my takeaways from this is that English could really benefit from adopting 'æ'. Instead of read/read, you'd have read/ræd. Would help with some of the missing letters. Not that Danish isn't missing letters. Most (if not all) Germanic languages have been missing letters to properly match sounds ever since adopting the Latin alphabet.

[@roxxxydubois]

English got real messed up by the Germans that printed the first bibles in English and didn't have the proper symbols in their printing presses.

[@Uthwita]

It used to, and it made the a sound like in cat, English lost a lot of letters over time, and it doesn't help that it switched from the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc.

[@septanine5936]

I also think it should adopt diacritics. Learning spelling would be easier, maybe

[@AkumaNoKuroi]

I mean, we used to have Yogh, Thorn and Eth, Ash... Buuut the Guttenburg Press kinda scrapped anything they couldn't makeshift to the 26 letters we currently have when converting from written form to printed form. Which is why we have Phoenix and not Phœnix, Aesthetics not Æsthetics (and -edo/-aedo, depending if US or Commonwealth English), Ye not The (as in "Ye Olde..."), Menzies not Menȝies (Ming-iss in Scots) - either letters got split apart, or they were substituted for similar-looking (in hand scripts) but different-sounding letters. And *yet* - English drops diacritics and accent marks and such from letters in order to make it easier to type with a standard 26-letter keyboard, whilst adding additional letters or reduplicating the letter in question in order to get across the different sound (eg: the Ō as in Japanese for "King"; 王 - can be written as "O", "Oh", "Ou" or "Oo" when translating) As it is; I had to dig up the non-standard characters from (Windows) Character Map and copy the ȝ from Wikipedia , and the 王 from Kamen Rider Wiki (specifically the Ohma Zi-O page) to get it right.

[@hijodelaisla275]

One of your takeaways is a Dane?

[@lolozo214]

Fun fact about that adjective order: depending on the adjectives, there may actually be some room to mess about. Compare "lovely little wolf" to "big bad wolf". The second one appears to violate the rule, but English speakers prefer this because the vowel sounds go from high to low

[@WillayG]

I was going to comment on this. When I teach order of adjectives to my students I try to give them some flexibility with the rule and have them read a lot or watch a lot of unsubtitled English speaking media so that they'll get a more intuitive understanding of what actually sounds more natural.

[@Madchemist002]

This rule (the vowel shift) appears in many phrases: "tik tok," "hip hop," "flip flop," etc. It is a more convenient order to pronounce words in. I believe it's called "Ablaut Reduplication."

[@HenryLoenwind]

With those wolves another rule may come into play. The one is "(lovely, little) wolf", the other "big (bad wolf)". "bad wolf" forms a new, compound word; so "bad" is not part of the list of modifiers in front of "wolf". You can do the same with other common phrases, e.g. an evil middle-aged nice old lady. This one even contradicts itself, but it works because "niceoldlady" is a world-like phrase with its own specific meaning.

[@alangknowles]

@@HenryLoenwind You mean like Miss Marple? I've always been suspicious that murders always occur when she's around. I think she hypnotises people into thinking they are the culprit.

[@kokazon6522]

As a native speaker, i think that a large part of that rule is what the speaker wants to emphasize, too

[@mrslobster8989]

I’m proud of myself now. I literally knew everything you said in this video and I’m not a native English speaker ^^ I started to learn English about 8 years ago 😂

[@carlosmarcelovellosowendt4598]

Hail Lobster!

[@malokeytheallaround]

Good job!

[@ChineduOpara]

Congrats!!

[@GaudyGabriev]

I'm about to try and get a C2 Cambridge degree. Same as you, the fact that I knew everything that was going on here gives me a little more piece of mind xD I think English, as simple as it is when it comes to it's basic rules, pretty much just takes stupid amounts of hours of exposure to get it's details right. You can't just "study" it, you either hear and read it for thousands of hours or you'll be mostly screwed. Now this is true for any language, of course. You'll learn it best by exposing yourself to it, but the sheer inconsistency of english makes it particularly guilty of this.

[@raymak1048]

✓ I have been learning English since 2019🌷♥️

[@fannybaud2559]

As a French native speaker, I can confirm that English pronounciation and spelling are a true nightmare, but since I learnt mostly through reading books out loud and watching KZbin videos, I guess I just picked up the spelling along the way. I still wouldn't have guessed the adjective order correctly though. I guess it's something for me to improve, then! Anyway, thank you so much for your fun and informative videos. I really love watching them, and I just love your method of teaching through stories. Thank you so much!

[@anonymouswhite352]

Funny as a native English speaker I think french pronunciation is really weird. But your numbers are definitely stupider then the English counter part I've been learning those recently

[@sophieakot346]

Surely it is😀eg words like enough,tough, thorough, rough n many others.The way it is written is not how it is pronounced 🙏🙏

[@thehapagirl92]

French men are attractive, so you get a pass😂

[@viktoria8189]

I am Russian native. Also, know Belarusian, English, studied German at school. Tried Spanish, Korean, a bit of Italian. And honestly, I think English is much much easier than most of the languages. That's one of the reasons for the popularity of it.

[@crappiefisher1331]

amen

[@liul]

I agree, it's super simple

[@cristianinternationaltrade9227]

English is the easiest language. Hungarian, cantonese, mandarin, hebrew, greek or even your language russian(I'm learning it and I'm spanish native) those are difficult languages but english? It is a piece of cake😂😂😂

[@williamsouza846]

"That's one of the reason for the popularity" 🇬🇧 🇺🇸: Please, learn my language or maybe u will not be nothing 😌 no pressure 🤡🤡

[@claudiakarl7888]

I think the same. Of all the languages I‘ve learned, English was by far the most easy one.

[@ichliebebaeumeweilbaum]

I don't think we should define a language's difficulty solely based on the language itself. English is hard, but it's the huge amount of it in media and everyday life that makes it far easier to learn than others.

[@vaded2135]

Couldn’t have said it better myself 👌

[@kaydod3190]

English is not hard, no matter if we use or hear it everyday or not. End of story.

[@neilhunter5893]

@@kaydod3190 aye, nae bother there hen. 😂

[@swaggery]

And speakers of it, plus tourists that are happy to help non-native speakers practice. As an English speaker find a in person source of even say Spanish, is very very difficult. So everything comes down to pure memorization for many that try to learn a different language.

[@neilhunter5893]

@@swaggery exactly. It’s so much easier to find an English speaker most places in the world.

[@MontagZoso]

Wow. I’m a native U.S. English speaker and this made MY head spin! I feel very lucky that English is my first language and I really feel for people out there trying to learn it. ❤️

[@Nouvellecosse]

It made me feel better too. I'm a native English speaker trying to learn Spanish after spending a few weeks in Colombia (how I discovered this channel). I felt kind of sad that I grew up with such a bland, vanilla language but it's actually more interesting than I realized!

[@penaarja]

Seen many videos bout many US says "I am speaking american" 🤔 what

[@caitlin1142]

@@Nouvellecossei wouldn’t call the language of Shakespeare bland hehe 😉

[@abelpalmer552]

As a native English speaker I remember being confused that "invaluable" meant "valuable" lol

[@lisanarramore222]

Good one!

[@caseyadams1861]

And "inflammable" means the same thing as "flammable".

[@abelpalmer552]

@@caseyadams1861 yes yes same vein

[@Brindlebrother]

Whoever came up with the word ingenious was a genius

[@TheJadeFist]

I can explain that one. It's so valuable to you, that you can't place a value on it, no compensation would be adequate, nothing can replace it. So 'it can't be given value', as opposed to it has zero value as one might try to read that word to mean. Now hell if I can explain 'inflammable' though, it certainly is able to be flamed. The prefix just has multiple meanings and not consistently distinguished by spelling, enflammable would have made more sense but I didn't make the rules.

[@Pining_for_the_fjords]

English may be difficult, but it can be taught through tough, thorough thought, though.

[@RijuChatterjee]

"but" is redundant. Consider phrasing your joke in two sentences, thus: "The English language is difficult. It can be taught though, through tough thorough thought."

[@TheJadeFist]

@@RijuChatterjee The but is fine, as it's in context of contradiction to the presumption of difficulty. The problem are the two commas interrupting unnaturally, it isn't a list of 3 things or more, nor are they sentence fragments.

[@RijuChatterjee]

@@TheJadeFist why would you need but in addition to though

[@aisha1892]

@@RijuChatterjeeit's a contradiction😭😭

[@dolleene]

Lol love what you did there

[@pauldobosh9447]

I came to the US decades ago at age 4 speaking French and in six months was speaking English like all the other American kids. But, the French was gone, gone, gone. Except for one little detail - 'th' killed me and the word 'thief' was a hangup for years. In kindergarten, I was diagnosed as having a speech defect because of this 😀 This video is a delight, especially paired with "10 reasons ... ridiculously easy". I admire anyone trying to learn any new language and can't imagine making fun of anyone's efforts, especially with this crazy language. Way more fun to offer help.

[@justinlavoie5110]

L’as-tu réappris? Does it mean your parents stopped speaking French to you?

[@frozenmadness]

English would be incredibly hard if we all weren't so sorrounded by music, literature, information etc. in English. Everyone who studies whatever (maybe except e.g. French philology, where all the educational material is in French) has to read scientific stuff in English. If you publish something scientific, it has to be in English. If you search for anything on the internet, you'll probably find more information in English than in other languages (except it's something country specific). Then there's music, the most radio stations worldwide play at least 30% of the music in English (some even 100%, also in non-English speaking countries). Regarding the sentence at the beginning of this video, it was clear for me how the right word order should be, but that's just because I've heard so much English before.

[@lisanarramore222]

Exactly. Take away all the English you've been hearing in music, movies and the internet all your life, and it becomes a whole new ballgame.

[@dkwhattouseasusername1012]

Its great that English is my 2nd language and its one of my strong points but bruh Chinese is so hard, I can communicate using it with no problem but reading and writing are just so hard...

[@vaded2135]

Exactly!!

[@kaydod3190]

No, it will still be easy

[@kaydod3190]

@@lisanarramore222 No, it will still be easy

[@themichael3105]

I'm an ESL teacher. Been teaching Adult English in China for 10 years. This is a great video. Well explained and engaging. Thanks.Subscribed. Cheers.

[@storylearning]

Cheers Michael!

[@Justaguy689]

I’m a native English speaker who is learning Spanish, what I’ve noticed is that Spanish spelling is very straightforward and the spelling rules are very consistent.

[@robinbruce7838]

English might be very easy to learn and get a basic grasp of but it's so incredibly nuanced at the same time. It really is more than the sum of its parts. The basic building blocks might be simple to get but to really sound like a native you have to understand (or rather feel) some very bizarre and abstract unspoken and sometimes incomprehensibly complex rules overlaying these basic blocks. It's almost like a whole veil of higher logic is just mysteriously floating over the language changing flavor, meaning feel seemingly at random.

[@shaunmckenzie5509]

This could be said of every language

[@Luboman411]

I see you're talking about our old, illogical friends that permeate all English--phrasal verbs. When I learned about these as a native English speaker, I was totally blown away. They're deep-set in our language, but they're crazy weird and illogical to learn. There are thousands and to be completely fluent you must know a huge number of them. However, they make no rhyme or reason. Yet native English speakers use them all the time, throw them out nonchalantly and still understand them so well. Phrasal verbs really are a "veil of higher logic that is just mysteriously floating" there.

[@calebw8189]

The best way to learn English spelling is to not get caught up in the rules and simply read it and listen to it as much as possible. Eventually, your brain will automatically write "though" without even thinking about the excess of consonants. It's easier said than done, but that's ultimately how native speakers learn. Bonus tip: As Olly said, many native English speakers struggle a lot with spelling, so don't stress too much about it.

[@youtubedeletedmyaccountlma2263]

They struggle with spelling? Wait till they touch French. The French makes even more no sense 🤣

[@nebroskitheraut6705]

Yes! I learnt the language gradually as a kid. I used to watch Hollywood movies when I was a kid right from the 1st standard (maybe even before that!). When I was in the 3rd standard I could understand every single sentence that the actors said on TV. I picked up the American accent on the way too. In the 6th standard a British show called Horrid Henry aired and I picked up the accent so quickly! I think that I picked up the language so fast because I was a kid, and also because of the various outlets that I was exposed to. Now I feel like I have gained some extra advantage over my peers who can't speak the language comfortably, because they feel bored and unexcited when they try to watch an English show, or watch an English YT video. They only watch YT videos where the YTbers speak our native language. But, the problem is that there aren't that many YTbers providing useful info to help them learn new knowledge (because they are mostly vloggers or Mukbang eaters) , and as a result they don't gain as much info as I do from the English side of YT. I used to pride myself over being the most fluent English speaker in my class, and even today I still am! I didn't have to bother learning the grammatical rules that the teacher gave to us, because the correct sentences just form so naturally in my head. On the other hand, the classmates of mine who were not so fluent just crammed up the grammatical rules and formulas. All because I watched some random English movies in my childhood. Lol

[@user-mrfrog]

@@youtubedeletedmyaccountlma2263 Despite some complicated rules, for example past participle agreements with pronominal verbs, French spelling is 85% regular! Still a lot of exceptions! :( But English orthography is only about 65% regular. I am presently learning Icelandic and while declensions are a pain in the neck, its spelling is quite consistent! This proves that all idioms have their strong and weak points!

[@jasondean88888]

Something that helped me was trying a language with a totally different alphabet (hence why I'm hear). It stopped me from trying to assign incorrect meaning to symbols that looked familiar. The next thing I did was only write left handed. Literally start from scratch like a 5 year old and learn all new muscle memory. Next thing I did was to compare it more to learning physics. Thinking of it like some different version of English made it harder. Much easier just to say "I have no idea what the rules are hear and I'm going to just have to trust my teacher on whats what until I know enough to ask an intelligent question."

[@septanine5936]

Fr. I stopped associating spelling with pronunciation long ago. It's saved me lots of stress, but I'd say I do rely on auto correct quite a bit

[@anbi7418]

I'm Polish. How I've learnt English spelling? Pretty much exclusively through memorisation on a word-to-word basis. I think after roughly 7 years of studying I started to get an idea about how to spell a word based on pronunciation (and vice-versa) but before that I would simply learn words from a list and whenever a word had an unexpected pronunciation, I would write it phonetically in Polish next to it.

[@MozartJunior22]

Actually, verbing is something that exists in most languages, and it's a feature human beings really need. In Hebrew and Arabic we have a "root and structure" verb system, each verb consists of 3 letters (sometimes also 4 or 2) which carry the core meaning of the verb, and it is "poured" into an appropriate structure which carries the rest of the information (1/2/3 person, male/female, singular/plural, temporal tense). This allows us to easily create new verbs without "breaking the language". For example, "to google" -> the root "G.G.L" (ג.ג.ל) -> "legagel"(לגגל) "to send an SMS" -> "S.M.S" (ס.מ.ס) -> "lesames" (לסמס)

[@cmolodiets]

but in other languages you can tell a verb from a noun even if the noun is actually derived from the verb

[@harryjakosa2141]

When I was in school in Ireland, I would constantly complain that Irish was very difficult because of it’s inconsistencies. I never realised that the language I was speaking in when complaining was exactly the same if not worse.

[@Eli-ou8sq]

I'm learning Gàdhlig and the VSO word order as well as the lenition threw me off a lot

[@nono7105]

@@Eli-ou8sq Ugh, that would be terrible. I tried learning Korean but along with sounds that are completely unintelligible, the SOV order really pissed me off. The correct way is SVO. If you're language doesn't get that right it ain't worth learning.

[@tamanegi8985]

@@nono7105 but for Koreans it would be weird to learn a language that is SVO no? There is no correct or incorrect languages - I know you were probably being sarcastic with that comment but still lol

[@nono7105]

@@tamanegi8985 No, I wasn't being sarcastic, and no, it's not a matter of which method you were raised with. It's a matter of common sense. The verb describes a relationship _between_ two things; the subject and the object. So it should go _between_ those two things. Obviously. If your language does it another way it's doing it wrong.

[@tamanegi8985]

I grew up speaking both English (SVO) and Japanese (SOV), so from someone who does both, it make sense either way. The language you grow up speaking can wire your brain to think it’s the most logical and natural sounding but it’s not necessarily true for everyone. While word order is very important in English, it’s not so much in Japanese bc the language has a thing called particles which mark the role of each word (subject, object, etc.)

[@ironskullis6610]

English was taught in my school as a reward, being able to communicate was a reward. we would be taught that English lessons were bliss. although, something struck me as a kid. i figured, since other kids couldn't speak that same language as me. i could teach them. i would teach them how i was taught, reading a book as a reward. reading English comics as i spell out the punctuation, and silent letters. they practically grew up speaking two languages. i had a friend for years, until he had to move back to Germany.

[@stanwoody4988]

Despite all this weirdness in English, I keep hearing from language students that when they go abroad everyone wants to speak English with them instead of their target language.

[@BecciBuck]

Yes, this is definitely a thing. At least, I experienced it in Korea. And it was hard to convince them to speak Korean to me sometimes, since their English was often better than my Korean. 😖 So we’d just say (in Korean), “Please, speak in Korean. I need practice.” People there were very kind and patient, too, and usually accommodated if we put it that way. But this was a thing we ran into, and we would oblige and take turns a bit, if someone really wanted to practice their English.

[@BecciBuck]

@@M86KIA absolutely! That’s why I’d usually humor someone who really wanted to practice their English too. It actually didn’t happen *very* often. Most people in Korea were excited to hear a foreigner speaking Korean, even if it was just simple things. But there were at least a few times each month where someone kept speaking to me in English. We spoke to hundreds of people each month, possibly even 100/day some days. So a few/month is not really very many. There was only one person in my 15 months there who absolutely refused to speak to me in Korean.

[@notaname8140]

As an English speaker in France, I found that most people were like this, but I had several situations where I asked someone (in French) if they speak English and I would just get "non, pardon", then when I said (still in slightly broken French) "sorry my French isn't very good, I'm Scottish", I would get "aaah Scotland!" and all of a sudden they could speak perfect conversational English lol

[@spaceowl5957]

> native English speaker in France Run

[@notaname8140]

@@spaceowl5957 lol, most people were fine with me, especially once they realise I'm not English or American lol

[@shykaku7339]

I agree that English has some weird grammar and pronunciation, but I still feel like it is easier compared to other European and Asian languages. For example, I think German is way harder. You have three genders Der, Das, Das with no clear rule on which noun is which gender. You also have Dative, Genitive and Accusative which changes the meaning of the sentence. Hungarian is also tough to pronounce as it has many unique sounds and the grammar is tough. And Japanese has two native alphabets with Kanji. Japanese also has particles that don't exist in English. I even think Spanish is more difficult as it has two genders with irregular verb conjugations depending on what tense you use. I think any language is tough to learn, but most Europeans start learning English very early and that gives them a huge advantage over English speakers who start learning in Middle or High School.

[@devstark]

exactly, this is the dumbest video i've seen in years. english is beyond easy. having spelling and grammar exceptions is not even kind of an exclusively english thing. almost every single point in this video can be easily explained by any native speaker with a 2nd grade education. not to sound pretentious but i'm sick of people calling english a difficult language. it's beyond false. same idiots that complain about spanish being hard (despite maybe being the easiest language in the world)

[@Interprestor]

@@devstark But English DOES have a real statistically proven problem with inconsistent spelling. It's far more inconsistent than most European languages whereas Finnish and Spanish are on the other side of the spectrum. The video does have an (often made) point. Grammatical gender is also ridiculous and completely arbitrary though, and don't get me started on German noun cases. The absolute worst.

[@MouseySky]

@@Interprestor Yeah, I'm a (teenage) native english speaker and I still struggle with spelling because it's so inconsistent

[@harrypadarri6349]

It’s a misconception that cases make learning a language more difficult. Some systems are quite complex like in Russian or, the extreme case, Finnish. The set of cases in German is fairly small. Only dative might be a bit confusing. There is even a genitive case in English. (English’s only case) If a language has an accusative case for example, it simplifies a lot. “I mean them” is straight forward. “I mean they” - not so much. A lot of features of the English language are intuitive to native German speakers. I found the lack of cases one of the confusing features. And verb tenses in English are quite weird. Going, it goes, it doesn’t go,it is going, it went, it didn’t go, it has gone, it has been going…

[@sharraleigh]

I learned German in university, and I asked my professor: "Why is it 'der Wagen' but 'das Auto'? They both mean car? Why is it neutral in one and masculine in the other?" Basically, nobody knows why. It's just the way it is.

[@drysaliva1604]

English is my second language, but ever since middle school it's always been there in my life. All my daily activities were centered around it. Games, music, shows, manga, KZbin... Now I'm in college studying English and see what you talked about happening to most students in my class. I was really fortunate to learn the language that way and spare myself so much troubl. I'm thankful to whatever it is that drove me towards that path.

[@tednudgent2525]

This video got me thinking. All these things were things I once struggled with, but now I don't even think about them anymore. It became natural to me. English is not my mother tongue and in school I was really bad. I improved only by reading a huge amount of exciting books. And when KZbin came around with videos as well, but first and foremost with reading stories.

[@secretkeeper9262]

I’m a native russian. I’ve been studying english for almost 12 years. Now I’m learning spanish and french. I can say that spanish and french have crazy grammar, not as crazy as german language has haha. But spanish and french are way more difficult than english for me

[@devstark]

потому что английский очень легкий

[@amaza888]

As a native French-speaking person, even I think French is difficult! I'm also guessing that I would find the Russian language incredibly difficult to learn. 😅

[@secretkeeper9262]

@@amaza888 french for me is very difficult. it looks for me like something really strange. you know, you can easily read in spanish and quite understand it, even if you have a2 but french no.. i think it’s so beautiful and it sounds really cool but why so difficult??😡 I’m trying hard and i hope that I could do it. regarding to russian, yes, it’s also very difficult language and i’m lucky to know it. there are some things in grammar (i don’t know what it’s called) that spanish and french don’t have but actually german has😫🙌🏼

[@secretkeeper9262]

@@amaza888 generally speaking i’m not from russia. ukraine is my home country. the official language here is ukrainian but all people know russian. and in some regions we speak russian. so, i’m also lucky because i know to languages by default:)

[@kaydod3190]

@@amaza888 French isn’t difficult. It’s a category 1 language. Calm down, your pushing it.

[@riaconradt2554]

As a native English speaker, I never really thought about these things and took most of them for granted. Some parts were eye-opening. Great video.

[@robnorris4770]

As a native English speaker, I’m also very glad I never had to learn English. As for UK vs American spelling, don’t worry about it, both are acceptable. I learned to spell by reading and writing. A lot.

[@eugenec7130]

Could native English speakers standardize the British and American English please? It is a pain in the ass for the non-natives to learn both the variations. (The word "ass" is fully acceptable in American English but is rude in British English?)

[@ShawFujikawa]

@@eugenec7130 Getting half a billion people to agree on one set spelling and pronunciation for certain words is impossible, lol. Ass can be pretty rude in both dialects because it can be used as an insult in both American and British English.

[@mimthyss]

@@eugenec7130 ass can be rude in both variations. It depends more on context than country. "Ass" referring to a donkey isn't offensive, but if you say "you're such an ass." Thats an insult. Or if you say "damn, girl, you have a fine ass!" Thats sexual harrassment. Lol. Basically, with things like that, I would just recommend avoiding it unless you're aiming for an offensive tone

[@pontosanaz6485]

@@eugenec7130 its rude in both, stooped

[@surlyogre1476]

Ah! But you _did_ learn English. You just don't _remember_ learning it, or *having to* learn it. (All human beings have to *learn* their native language... you started as soon as you were born (maybe even earlier.))

[@analuisa674]

Love this video 😂 I'm brazilian and I'm comfortable with english now, but I remember stressing over the inconsistencies of the language plus the false cognates when I first started learning it

[@xezzee]

As a native Finnish speaker the English language is probably the hardest thing I have had to learn. Finnish language is made so you write what you pronounce and you pronounce what you read ... it is made in a way that if you write something in Finnish and then ask someone else to read it, they should read it exactly the same. So if you go listening any native Finnish speaker speaking English you might find out they are speaking the Rally English which basically means we try to pronounce the letter R on every word where it is. Also the meme comes from Rally where Finnish speaking English had strong R in their accent. Or so I think :D Never actually googled if this is just urban legend. Thus when starting to learn english we first have to forget everything we spend years learning -.- Oh so you don't pronounce the way you write? Well fuck me then I guess. I still make a lot of mistakes now and then. Which vs Witch Once vs Ones Than vs Then Or the latest I wrote Pilon when I meant Pylons. Everyone was super confused about that.

[@hijodelaisla275]

The English language is a Finnish?

[@NichaelCramer]

The point is that while Finnish spelling *currently* may match pretty closely with how the its words are *currently* pronounced, as time goes on the pronunciation will drift. This is essentially unavoidable. It happens in all languages. (See, for example, John McWhorter’s book “Words on the Move”.) This is the primary reason why English spelling is so “out of synch” will English pronunciation. And, given enough time, the same will eventually happen with Finnish.

[@xezzee]

@@NichaelCramer I don't think you speak, read nor write Finnish language at all when you make statements like "may match" what do you mean by that? the Current Finnish spelling is literally matching the pronunciation as the whole written system is build around that from ground up unlike English. While English *May* have been build originally from ground up we don't actually know, do we? It is also possible that English is based on Latina and thus the spelling would not be build from ground up to be matching the pronunciation. I have not actually googled much about this and that is my understanding that English is based on Latina and not how you pronounce the words. When you say " As time goes on the pronunciation will drift " and in reality it is already happening in Finnish language. I can go to Helsinki and propose we use bus but the people will think I'm insane for saying that we should take the next link or folding knife. (English = Finnish => Different Finnish Dialects) Bus = Linja-auto => Linkki => Linkka => Linkkari => Bussi => Pussi => Nysse => Dösä => Onnikka ... I have used Linkki and Linkkari and my friends were extremely confused when they heard Link and Folding Knife ... "Should we take the next Link?" "What now?" "Should we take the next folding knife?" "Are you ok?" There is also Finglish which is joke about English words used in Finnish like Bus used in Finnish is Bussi or how Tank would be Tankki and then we can say I drove a tank over a bus "Ajoin tankilla bussin yli" but that has double meaninig 🤔 Tankilla can also mean "While fueling" 😒I'm off topic... TL;DR: If the pronunciation of Finnish word drifts so will the Spelling.

[@prplt]

Finnish isn't completely phonetic either tho (I don't think any language is) like for example some letters are pronounced as double but not reflected in the spelling (like tulepa is pronounced tuleppa or hernekeitto is more like hernekkeitto) also there's the problem that spoken Finnish is very different than standard written Finnish (like keltainen is pronounced keltane) btw where in Finland do you say "linkki"? I've never heard that one either😂

[@xezzee]

@@prplt Linkki is used around middle Finnish. Linkka can't say. Linkkari I hve heard few times past 20 years...

[@64imma]

Literally the way they teach pronunciation is the "sound it out" rule, where you say how you think it is pronounced, to then be corrected by your teacher

[@dedeyusupziaulhak8562]

As an Indonesian the hardest part when I learning English was the tenses. Because in our language tenses is doesn't exist, then to adjust with that condition was really challenging.

[@IsaVarg]

I'm Norwegian, but I grew up with an abundance of American and English movies and TV shows, so I learned how to pronounce things in a very natural way. As I got older, I pretty much only read books in English, so I learned to spell things correctly, alongside learning grammar and studying vocab at school since I was 5. I don't think my situation is super uncommon. Especially in Norway, we learn English so early and have such easy access to English-language media that it really isn't that hard to learn it.

[@mohammadyahyavi4076]

Tbh I've learned all these rules by watching an awful lot of tv series and movies so it never occurred to me that English could be really hard to learn in some cases because it all came naturally to me with the magic of immersion. The immersion has been so deep to the point that I can understand a lot of words, phrases and expressions in English but if you ask me to translate some of them to my own mother tongue I'd be unable to. XD

[@luciafloria1675]

English is my second language and I've never struggled with it it's so easy. I know a lot of foreigners from different countries and they all speak English just fine. I think the reason why people are so good at it is because English has a huge influence on media all over the world. We absorb it as children.

[@dvz6275]

I learned English through watching KZbin, not at school wich is amazing that languages can be learned through observing and listening (I live in South-Africa and my home language is Afrikaans a sister language to dutch wich in return is related to English so that made it a bit easier to learn I actually started speaking English when I was 7 yet it wasn't the best English you'll hear that's for sure...)

[@cuseyeti_one8three]

ESL teaching is a monumental task. I've learned more about grammar teaching than I ever learned as a native speaking English student.

[@podokonnik1796]

As someone who learned English as a second language, I find tenses the most confusing thing about English (other than spelling/pronunciation, but those are things that you can get used to). It's a lot like writing an unoptimised "if and else" code with a specific tense for every possible scenario instead of a set of simple rules that can account for them.

[@eugenec7130]

Tenses are useless. There are no tenses in most languages, for example Chinese.

[@mpanmi3927]

I also learned english as I second language as well and what I have found really helpful is watching a lot and I mean a lot of english movies with subtitles and if I have a problem with tenses I just go with what fells right from the movies I have watch

[@worldoftancraft]

@@mpanmi3927 that famous movie's lexic. Which is made to be understood by everyone. Without good writing, speaking and cunning constructions

[@WillayG]

I'm curious, could I ask what your first language is and what tenses give you the most trouble? Also, your English seems pretty awesome to me. 👍

[@ChineduOpara]

Ah, fellow software developer?

[@akittenplays4104]

one thing that’s important to remember about why english is actually not as hard as you would think based on how confusing the grammar, vowels, etc. are, is that unlike some languages, it is usually somewhat easy for a native speaker to figure out the proper meaning even if you mess up. You won’t sound natural or fluent, but it’s not like Thai where messing up the tone could lead to a complete lack of understanding.

[@tashnahtv6098]

I already knew tone and emphasis placement were important, however, you've just made me think twice about the great importance it has in the English language. As a native speaker learning another language and who has been corrected by a speaker of the language I'm learning, I could not quite hear what I was doing wrong. You have fine-tuned my perspective.

[@ninamariawolk4954]

I love the English language and I had a lot of fun learning it. It changed my life completely and I don't remember having had problems with it 🤔 But I'm a native German speaker, so I guess that's the reason behind it.

[@laurencefraser]

English being a Germanic language, speakers of other Germanic languages (such as German) have less trouble than most, though not none.

[@jackfordon7735]

@The505Guys German grammar is much more difficult than English, plus Germans get the added bonus of being bombarded by English language pop culture all the time, so don't sweat it

[@herrbonk3635]

My language (Swedish) is even closer to English in most respects, but I still find English hard as hell. Not only the crazy irregular (french) spellings, but also all those meaingless syntactic distinctions, mainly on verbs (like seem/seems, is/are, do/does, and so on).

[@tmarofvulcan]

Fascinating. I stumbled across this video while looking for a short (plus-minus 5 minutes or so) video to show to my grade 5 classes next year, and just got sucked in. While I already knew most of what you mentioned (mostly thanks to Alan C. Davies's THRASS course), it was still a total trip to hear it all set out so logically. (And I'm now SO aware of how I'm writing!) I'm a native English speaker (white South African) who teaches English as a "home language" even though two-thirds of the kids I teach are actually learning it as a second, third or fourth language! So I try to find ways to help them feel better about their "lack" of English skills. (Try to pronounce a q sound as in the name Manqoba or the 'hl' sound as in the name Nhlanhla - both from indigenous South African languages - and you get a good idea of how people struggle with English.)

[@AmbiCahira]

How I learned it? Through mistakes and corrections. First my teacher, then people online. I used to spend countless hours in chatrooms, forums and games with text based interactions and I did request to be corrected if they caught mistakes and while at times it was embarrassing or frustrating it was super helpful. Pronunciation I got a lot of help from singing to instant feedback where I sound differently from the singer, and to make things intuitive I watched so much TV from both the US and the UK. Supernanny? Study time. Friends? Study time. Lord of the rings? Study time. Jamie Oliver drowning his healthy food dishes in olive oil again? Study time. If it was on and could be listened to I absorbed it. I must say documentaries are surprisingly useful because docu-narrators are very clear spoken and speak kind of slowly and the images give context.

[@elgueromeromero4277]

Fun side note: words that can mean its own opposite-like weather (to weather/endure a storm and to erode something)-are called Janus words, named after the Roman god with two faces pointing opposite directions. Whenever I get discouraged about my Spanish or hit a rough patch in French, I'm always glad I don't have to learn English.

[@DanGR023]

English is still easy anyway because of its grammar, non native speaks indeed outnumber native speakers, and there is a big diversity among them: Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Russians, Europeans, Latinos, Africans, Arabians etc.

[@Pantology_Enthusiast]

TIL about janus words. Thanks!

[@worldoftancraft]

@@DanGR023 in most languages the majority of grammar can be replaced with just correct ans primitive words' order.

[@ChineduOpara]

Janus words? More like... Anus words, amirite fellow ESL teachers??? 😂😂✌🏾

[@ruysig3193]

English is so irregular in spelling and pronunciation that it is necessary to learn them separately, which is similar to the difficulty of learning Chinese characters when studying Chinese or Japanese. Chinese and Japanese are often complained about the complexity of their writing systems, and as an East Asian, I would like to make the same complaint about English.

[@indigobuntz3564]

Honestly, ‘hard’ is a word I would never use to describe English. I’m Italian, and I can assure you that it is far harder than English (for instance, instead of “do, did, done”, we have “fare, faccio, ho fatto, feci, facevo, facessi, facendo, fatto. All of these but three change, sometimes almost completely, according to the person and the number of the subject), and yet Italian is not among the hardest languages to learn. As you can see, even if I still make some mistakes, I am kind of fluent in English, and I have never really studied it. It‘s an easy language to learn and understand, the only exception being the many different accents, that’s really confusing.

[@user-is7xs1mr9y]

I'm a native Spanish speaker and even I find Italian hard lol. I agree, English is definitely not hard.

[@stylesheetra9411]

@@user-is7xs1mr9y there is this quote about every romance language being easy to learn if you already native in one. Biggest BS I ever heard

[@elosoderusia4598]

@@stylesheetra9411 Honestly I feel like that’s only true for Spanish and Portuguese speakers…

[@RijuChatterjee]

You probably qualify as a "native" English speaker, then, in that you learnt it through exposure at a young (

[@DavidBonelo]

ha! noobs, in spanish we have: hacer haciendo hecho hago haga, hagas, haga, hagamos, hagáis, hagan haz hice, hiciste, hizo, hicimos, hicisteis, hicieron hiciera, hicieras, hiciera, hiciéramos, hicierais, hicieran hiciere, hicieres, hiciere, hiciéremos, hiciereis, hicieren haré, harás, hará, haremos, haréis, harán haría, harías, haría, haríamos, haríais, harían ... 🤣

[@derekwong8772]

As a Chinese native speaker, I've been learning English for almost three years at school. I am an English major student, and we have many English courses that aren't that helpful in enhancing your reading, listening or speaking skills. Most people say list of grammars rules are not useful because remembering them wouldn't help one to grasp the language except causing headaches lol. However, as I learn more about English language, it gradually comes to my senses the necessity and importance of learning some grammar rules while reading and listening intensively.

[@Eli-ou8sq]

Your English is great! Keep it up!

[@pauleff3312]

Olly, you really are a gifted teacher in the way you explain stuff. I watched the "Why English is easy" film before this one and you have managed to give me a laugh and remind me of the complexities of English and just how hard learning it can be . Thank you for the entertainment value. I will share them both with some Hispanohablante friends. Your books are a good resource too, BTW, for anyone else reading - they are worth the investment.

[@malokeytheallaround]

Whenever I get frustrated with insane rules in my target language, I always have to remind myself that English is just as crazy.

[@puglifecr9884]

I'm 13 years old and I know how to speak my native language (Nepali) and English, both to extreme fluency, and after watching this video, I'm proud of myself. 🤓

[@zyphe.rabbit]

That's amazing!

[@robman2095]

Do many people in Nepal learn English to an advanced level? We seem to get a lot of Nepalese students in Australia for a country with a relatively small population like Nepal.

[@lalitthapa101]

@@robman2095 most schools in urban areas teach in english although many teach in Nepali too. So basically,a Nepali who has gone to school can understand basic level English. The reason why Australia is a hotspot for Nepalis is cause its seen as a good destination for education and jobs.No filter Nepal is poor so many students and people migrate to other countries for jobs.

[@StanbyMode]

Maithili's better

[@HeavyReign12]

I think what makes English such an efficient lingua franca is that you can be full of errors in your sentence structure and people still understand you. Plus words that sound the same are usually so far away contextually from eachother that people dont get confused. Whereas like I've seen almost identical words in other languages mean something like wife and grandma. So you say "I kissed my wife" but you actually missed one letter and now you've kissed your grandma. I dont feel like that happens in English as much, its more forgiving for mistakes. Not to mention because so many people speak it, if you arent good at it, than someone has probably already heard your flavor of English and figure out what you're saying.

[@azriel9499]

This video made me understand why people like the idea of Esperanto being the lingua franca. The specific adjective order has got to make so many English language learners want to cry or pull their hair out.

[@WesolyArbuz]

I love the idea. Time is the most precious asset. It would save us trillions of hours if the lingua franca was easy. However, we would have to agree on this to make it happen. The idea of Esperanto convinced me a long time ago (something like 18 years ago) yet I haven't learn it. There is much to do in life. At this stage Esperanto would be just a passion for me - with no real utility cause it's not widespread enough. For this reason it's not my priority and I keep learning English. Hopefully in something like 10,000 hours of English input I'll be able to say I'm handling it pretty well... I'm not kidding. An adult has rather above 100,000 hours of exposure to their native language. If I get somewhere close to that level within one-tenth of the time I will be quite satisfied. So far I have approx. 1000-1500 hours of English acquisition behind me (if you count schooling ages ago) and I need to make use of translator and dictionary to put together these few sentences. I spare about 1,5 hour daily for this goal, that is 500-600 hours yearly, so at this rate in fifteenish years should be fine... ;) but I'm gonna pick up the pace and get there in 5-10 years. Now you can feel why I dream of Esperanto as a lingua franca. I'm not complaining about learning English - once you've switched to [massive] input approach, it's quite fun. Just it demands enormous amount of patience. With Esperanto it could come 10 times quicker. There is huge difference between 1 and 10 years of learning... PS I don't want to discourage anyone with the large numbers above. My aim is to speak English not much worse than my native language (otherwise the numbers would be a few times lower). I'm just trying to be realistic in my assumptions and to remember how long it takes native speakers to master their language. A lot of persistence to all language learners. Good luck. :)

[@bofbob1]

Personally I support using a constructed language as lingua franca (but not esperanto tbh) not because English is hard, but just out of a principle of equality. If you look at the financial benefits this state of affairs creates for English-speaking countries and the financial costs for non-English-speaking countries, we're talking trillions of dollars. That and it forces people who just want to learn a lingua franca to also learn about a culture they may have no interest in at all.

[@WesolyArbuz]

​@@bofbob1 ​ You are right. The equality aspect cannot be overlooked. My learning hours perspective can be easily converted to the trillions of dollars you have mentioned. In this case, we can treat time as a perfect, stable currency which cannot be devaluated or we can convert it to USD for illustration purposes. Let's take, for example, US average hour wages of 26.15 USD, multiply by a billion people trying to learn English (it's just a simple illustration) and, let's say, 3 thousand hours to learn English decently. So it's 3 trillion hours times 26.15 USD = 78.45 trillion dollars. It's definitely a matter of trillions. If using of a constructed language we would achieve similar level of fluency in one-tenth of the time, we would simply save something like 90% of our costs as a whole and in addition we would benefit from easier, better cooperation. In my opinion, the biggest obstacle is an early stage of popularization of a constructed language, as long as the main reward of learning it remains personal satisfaction (lack of broader benefits). Once critical mass is achieved, it would be downhill from there. I would imagine the critical mass to be tens of millions of people. Esperanto is stuck at around million. The hope for such ideas may be the power of the Internet but so far it is dominated by English and further supports its domination. Will the idea blossom online? Will there be millions of people willing to learn without tangible benefits? Maybe the next generations of politicians will be more sensitive to these issues? (I don't like to count on politicians for anything but I put the emphasis here on "the next generations" cause I see more sensitivity and wisdom in the youth.) After all, Esperanto was not so far away from being made an official language of the European Union - one policy initiative of this magnitude could completely change the course of events. Concerning the question whether Esperanto or other constructed language: I'm flexible. I don't put emphasis whether a new lingua franca would be 9 or 11 times better than English. It can be even 8 times - I'm on for it. :) I just know that arguing about which artificial language is the best would enormously reduce the chances of any of them succeeding. So I'd rather support the most popular one and focus on saving 90% of the costs without getting into discussions of how we could save 92% or which one is the most equal of equals, etc. What doesn't change the fact that I remain open to other options and such ideas are close to my heart.

[@l.p616]

I am learning Esperanto and I loved the language but there a lot of things Esperanto should do better but it's really easy I can know the exactly pronounce of a word I never seen before just reading and make new adjectives just with the knowledge of ones I already learned for exemple If you know nothing about English how would you know that the opposite of "easy" is "hard"? With esperanto you just have to put the affix "mal" "Facila" that means easy become "malfacila" that means hard etc however there things I deslike in esperanto meanly the writing which I think a bit ugly

[@mattstrigo815]

@@l.p616 Saluton

[@BecciBuck]

Oh, and I definitely had not heard the word “schwa” before about a year ago. I had no idea what that was, though obviously, I’d encountered them probably thousands of times as an English speaker. How did I learn that word? I helped my oldest with his online 2nd grade school work. They literally teach that word and what schwa sounds are now. They also teach a concept of “vowel flexing” in phonics programs now. So if you say the word with the sounds you think the vowels should make but it’s not a word you’ve heard before, try “flexing” (or using a schwa) and see if that sounds better. 😧 English is hard, and reading English is difficult for even native English-speaking kids to learn.

[@darkcreatureinadarkroom1617]

Native Spanish speaker here. Your comment brought flashbacks of learning the rules for accent marks as a kid, and fiddling with words to try and determine where the stress is in each word and if and where the accent mark should go. And it was vocabulary I already _knew_ because, well, everyday usage. I wonder how Spanish learners do it.

[@villi333]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="218">3:38</a> As a spaniard, I used to though the word "aesthetic" means ugly due to the fact that prefix -a is related to the opposite.

[@remycallie]

That's because you're making the mistake of reading British English. :) It's "esthetic" in American English. Old English had this thing (from Latin?) of two letters joined together -- in this case A and E and they retained it in a lot of words. For example, they used to spell it "aeroplane." The way it was printed, the letters were actually joined.

[@whitexicanat-large681]

I learned English for the entirety of my childhood, since kindergarten. And I honestly can't remember what it was like learning English. I'm amazed at the fact that I was able to get a grasp of all of this things. I still can't tell the difference at <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="452">7:32</a> . And I can't remember pretty much any gramatical rule both in English and Spanish, yet I'm fluent in both.

[@hijodelaisla275]

This things?

[@jdrancho1864]

English is an easy language. Everybody around the world understands it, you just have to yell at them loud enough.

[@makkurotatsu]

I encountered English as my first foreign language in fifth grade, but I cannot remember much of my first year of learning (I am in my fifties now, so it has been a while). What I do remember is that I enjoyed English enough to read progressively more demanding magazines and novels over the course of the next years, and that I watched TV shows with English dialogue, crappy as they were. Terry Pratchett holds a special place in my heart to this day. In essence, I exposed myself to written and spoken English as much as possible, and I believe this imprinted much of what "sounds right" or "looks right" in my memory. I did of course study vocabulary and grammar, but in the end there is no subsitute for immersing oneself in how native speakers handle their language in order to get the hang of the weird edge cases and exceptions. The one thing that eludes me still is punctuation, and I usually throw in a few commas and hope for the best. I am also lucky in that I simply enjoy natural and artificial languages as a general concept, and I am fully aware how important Noam Chomsky's work in linguistics was for my own field (i.e. Computer Science). Languages are amazing.

[@holahola9849]

Aunque tienes una forma muy suave y agradable de platicar en inglés, me encantó escucharte hablar en español de repente. 😉

[@holahola9849]

@William Hancock ¡Genial! El español es un idioma hermoso, aunque, al parecer, algo complicado para los no nativos. Como decimos en México: "¡Échale ganas!" ¡Saludos! 😊

[@ourtube1128]

@@holahola9849 holaa, llevo cuatro meses estudiando español. Este idioma me da entusiasmo mucho, ¿podemos estar de acuerdo en que el español es buenísimo sí? :D

[@pablobond_vzla]

@@ourtube1128 ¿Solo llevas cuatro meses estudiando español? Te felicito. Lo haces muy bien 👍

[@holahola9849]

¡Así es,@@ourtube1128 ! ¿Ya tienes tu palabra favorita en español? "Querétaro" y "apapachar" han sido escogidas, en distintos momentos, como las palabras más bonitas de mi idioma natal. La primera es el nombre de una de las ciudades más bellas de México, y la segunda proviene del náhuatl y significa darle cariñitos a alguien, mimar. 💕

[@holahola9849]

Tienes razón,@Lilie, aprender otro idioma puede ser tedioso. ¿Por qué no le haces caso a Olly y practicas tu español leyendo historias cortas?

[@Liggliluff]

(<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="35">0:35</a>) I find it so strange when people say "ueue" is useless in "queue" since "q" already does that sound. But people don't make the same argument for "tea", "tee", "bee", "jay" and arguably *.sea"

[@chendaforest]

I had never thought of that before for queue. Though Q is a weird letter, like in Quay pronounced 'Key'

[@michaelsoftbinbows8859]

People should just be happy that "queue" and "cue" are spelled differently and not both spelled as just "q", that would make their job of understanding English even more difficult, why would anyone want that? And of course the English speaking world did not intentionally decide to spell things this way, the reason for the strange spellings like the one you see in "queue" is because French has been mixed into English throughout history. "Queue" is directly from French and it follows French rules for pronunciation and spelling.

[@chendaforest]

@@michaelsoftbinbows8859 and a lot of old Norse and German as well.

[@michaelsoftbinbows8859]

@@chendaforest Yes, Old English was originally a Germanic language. There are also plenty of Latin and Greek words in English

[@chendaforest]

@The505Guys yes indeed, it's a real mishmash .

[@rondelf4963]

I think English is easy to learn because we are exposed to so much English content everywhere, especially on the internet resources for learning are easy to come by and anyone can access them. Compared to other languages you need to really search

[@BecciBuck]

Yes!! I ran into these often with Korean missionaries I served with and in the English classes we’d teach in the community. I’m *not* a linguist or even an expert in the English language. Just a native speaker. And there is *so* much I’d never thought of before. It gave me so much empathy. I actually think it’s easier for English-speakers to learn Korean, because Korean is so much more consistent, than for them (or any non-native English speaker) to learn English. I no longer snicker at anyone who makes little mistakes. I’m *floored* by anyone who learns English at all! But I’d never considered word order before. That and the “I never said he stole my horse” bit… 🤯 I never realized how much intonation changes the meaning of a sentence in English. I thought you were messing with us with that for sure…until you demonstrated it.

[@eugenec7130]

I am a Chinese who have learned English. Yes, you hit the bull's eye by saying that it is easier for native English speakers to learn Korean (or any other Asian language) than otherwise. The reason behind this is that there is simply too much "rubbish" (obsolete and impractical usages) accumulated in English. Unless English goes through an overhaul or a spring cleaning to get rid of its mess, it is forever a hard language to learn.

[@robogamer2023]

@@eugenec7130 Oof, You got that right buddy. Well for starters english is a language you can learn only by using. Especially with native speakers. English is a language more about knowing what to do than having consistent rules. I'm not a native speaker myself. I'm a native Hindi speaker Although I've been exposed to english since childhood as almost all schools in India use English as a medium of instruction

[@WillayG]

As a native English speaker who has learned Korean to an advanced level and continues (slowly) to learn I feel the need to disagree with what you said about Korean being easier. The basic grammar is more straightforward for sure but I do feel that certain things in Korean make it quite difficult as you advance. I actually used to feel the same as you but the more I learned the harder it got. Honorifics for example; you just kind of have to know how you should conjugate verbs based on who you are talking to and about. And you kind of need to know what you're suppose to call everyone based on your relationship with that person, and it's kind of awkward to ask what they want to be called. This is just one example and Koreans are usually very forgiving and encouraging of any effort to speak their language but after a certain level it gets quite difficult to get everything sounding natural. Pronunciation is another thing. I've heard so many native English speakers try and fail at pronouncing Korean words because we tend to be very lazy with our vowels. Myself included. Other things like hard consonants and final consonants seem to be a lot of trouble too. I'm not contacting you as such, I do think the basic grammar is quite easy and fun for beginners to get into but there are things I feel that make it just as challenging as English and I just wanted to add my two cents for whatever it's worth.

[@uamdbro]

To be honest I think that for a large of the world, grammar is actually the most difficult part of English. As an extreme case, I live in China, interact with a lot of Chinese English speakers, and I am not exaggerating when I say it *extremely* rare to meet a Chinese person, even one with great pronunciation, vocabulary, etc. who doesn’t still regularly make errors in verb tense, usage of definite/indefinite articles, etc. Another example would be Germans frequently failing to correctly use continuous present tense.

[@SoulAcid1]

I am not getting it. Because I am german? :D

[@kit922]

@@SoulAcid1 auf deutsch: ich gehe = In english: I go OR I am going But "I go" in context would be "I go regularly" or "I go to the store on Tuesdays" or "I go to school at 8am" etc. "I am going" is what you're doing right now, so in context it's "I am going to school (now)". However, unfortunately, the "I am going" formation can also be used like the future tense, "I am going to school tomorrow", which is basically synonymous with "I will go to school tomorrow". This is more common than the future tense ("I will") when talking about the near future (e.g. I am having a baby in 9 months vs I will have a baby one day). The last way I can think to use this form is to say you are in the process of doing something that takes a long time, for example "I am going to the top of mount Everest" said by someone who is walking at the bottom of the mountain. Other examples of each, this time with the verb "to run": I run for the cross country team I run 1 mile every morning He runs at least one marathon per year You run faster than she does We run together every day They run in gym class I am running to the store right now I am running in tomorrow's race You are running too slowly! Are you running with me tomorrow? He is running away He is running after school today We are running on the beach We are running in the race tomorrow They are running home They are running in the race next year To show the difference again, I'll use "to earn": I earn about 32k each year (regularly happens, happens on a scheduled basis) vs. I am earning my degree (*in process*) vs. I am earning a lot of money (*happening right now*) vs. I swear, i am earning $100,000,000,000 this year! (*happening in the near future*) Another one, "to try": I try my best each day, I am trying my best right now, I am trying to get accepted to university next year, I am always trying to improve

[@SoulAcid1]

@@kit922 You don't get the joke, right? "I am not getting it" is continuous present tense.

[@lagavulin7194]

I'd say you are right about the pronunciation part. When it comes to grammar however, every single European language (except for maybe Swedish) is more complex and complicated than English. It just seems complicated for people who speak languages where conjugation and tenses aren't a thing (such as Mandarin and other Asian languages) What makes you think that present continuous is a problem for Germans? The conditional clause appears to be more of a challenge in my opinion.

[@lagavulin7194]

I am going/I am looking.... is pretty straightforward and doesn't pose much of a problem. Some might say that this tense does not exist in German, but this is actually not true. "Ich bin am Essen" (for example) is the frequently used equivalent of "I am eating", it just happens to be a rather colloquial way of saying it. This is the reason why German speaking people don't really struggle with this tense.

[@ONIscrooge]

One thing that has always perplexed me is people either forgetting, or not knowing, that English has dialects as well. Get someone speaking Appalachian English with someone not familiar with that type of English and watch the fireworks.

[@Cream12345Ice]

Im Croatian and I got the English pronunciations pretty flawlessly just from watching and reading a lot of stuff in English from an early age.

[@adrianl8429]

I've learned English mostly from cartoons when I was growing up. Grammar was always a challenge for me since I learned phonetically. Had a teacher helping me out a little, but in all honesty I learned through trail and error with the spell checkers online.

[@jeffreywickens3379]

What I find amazing, is that you've realized and formalized all these rules about English structure, that I do indeed use and follow, but didn't realize myself.

[@derpauleglot9772]

I´m German and I speak English, French and Czech. I also know some Russian, Japanese and Esperanto. I find that there are easy and difficult things about all of these languages. I find that it really comes down to how similar a language is to your native language and how much time you spend studying the language. As you become fluent in a language, you start to become ignorant of many of its difficulties. For example: In Czech, "Prague" is "Praha" but "in Prague" is "v Praze" and "to Prague" is "do Prahy". At first, I found it super difficult but after 6 years of studying Czech it´s just....obvious. I´ve also met people who are better at German than most Germans are at English, they are just harder to find. Most people are forced to learn English, in German you can´t even graduate school without it. In addition, most people would rather learn English than German/Spanish/whatever because of music, the media and whatnot. According to stats by the Goethe Institute, The British Council and the Alliance Francaise, English is a easier at a basic level (A1-A2) but the difference disappears once you get to C1 and C2. Reaching a conversational level took me the longest in English but that´s probably because it´s the first language I studied.

[@andriusbalukas207]

I've learned English as a second language at about the age of six, my mother tongue being Lithuanian. Compared to my original, rule-oriented, complex, Baltic language I cannot tell you how many times I've unsuccessfully tried to convince American English speakers what a slippery language it is to learn. But the same slipperiness makes English such a wonderful playground for slang. As for spelling, the French and Dutch aren't that far behind English. Their locals must have ambushed every Latin spelling missionary attempting to teach a logical corresponding symbol to sound.

[@PattisKarriereKarten]

As a German I always liked English from the beginning. All the inconsistencies you mentioned never really occurred to me. The th sound was the most difficult and I still struggle with it sometimes. I really find any other language much more difficult. French for example has so many „round“ sounds that sound similar but are not really the same („en“ vs „on“ for example). English pronunciation is much closer to German. And grammar isn’t something I do that often since leaving school 20 years ago, so it doesn’t bother me. Great Video again ☺️ BTW: I love your accent ❤

[@MrNizarAh]

I learned English and French since I was very young and I’m fluent in both. I even have a band score 8.5 or C2 in Academic IELTS. I’ve always thought that these 2 languages were relatively easy, with English definitely being the easiest language in the world. However, all that has changed since I’ve started learning German (currently level B1). Don’t get me wrong, German is pretty much difficult (especially the Vocabs) but it’s pretty much logical and with spelling rules that are almost always respected. Thus, you could be 99% sure how to pronounce a German word that you don’t know correctly when you read it. Now I’m aware that English is indeed a difficult language due to all its irregularities, but one can overcome them through a process of trial and error, and with continuous exposure from a young age.

[@robman2095]

Yes English is easy to speak badly but hard to speak well because of the inconsistencies

[@Kirillissimus]

@@robman2095 And for most practical cases the bad English is just enough. You may sound strange and wrong but as long as people can understand you it is OK. That is what I believe makes English so popular - it is hard to become fluent but at least it is quite easy to be half-decent.

[@robman2095]

@@Kirillissimus Yes, of course.

[@zzzz_020]

I have been learning English for four or five years and now studying in the states, I still think English is pretty difficult but many people don't find it that way because we all started to learn English at a very young age. Think about if you are forced to learn Russian since 3, then probably you wouldn't think it's hard when you were 20.

[@andreydoronin6995]

I think language will be difficult for natives and foreigners for different reasons. With Russian, I notice (from my personal experience also) that native speakers find it difficult to write words correctly as a lot of vowels become reduced and consonants devoiced so it leads to a strange situation - you can pronounce a word properly if you know how it's written but not vice-versa. Also, there are inconsistencies that don't make sense like ц cannot be followed by ы but there are exceptions like цыган. Pronunciation and grammar are rare problem but the word stress is random even within the forms of the same word. There are words that natives systematically conjugate or pronounce wrong (or at least considered wrong by centralised education). Also, I sincerely hate Russian punctuation. Following the rules on 100% makes sentences difficult and ugly to look at, just slightly better than having no punctuation at all. Strangely, I find the situation similar to English where natives can't decide where to use where/were/we're or confuse then/than. Looking back at English I find the language easy in retrospect. Yeah, the spelling is randomized inconsistent garbage but at least there is not a lot of grammar to learn compare to Russian (no noun cases, basically no verb conjugation, more standartized plural forms, no grammatical gender etc). The biggest obstacle to learning English is the way it is taught in Russian schools. A lot of grammar rules are presented in an way that is over-simplified to the point it's basically unusable. Teacher would explain articles (as there are no concept of articles in Russian) as "WELL, if a word appears in the text for the first time it uses A/AN and if it appears a second time it uses THE". The biggest insult were the tenses as they are just poorly presented too. I had no idea how tenses worked (in Russian tenses are structured differently) until I picked up a book which illustrates the tense system of English, what's the concept behind Simple-Perfect-Continuos etc and how they fit into Past-Present-Future.

[@kaydod3190]

It’s not difficult, your just not trying hard enough

[@zzzz_020]

@@kaydod3190 You can say this to almost everything and it has no point to argue about that because this statement is neither based on Science nor statistics.

[@matthowells6382]

@@kaydod3190 *you're 😂 Maybe you should try a bit harder, clearly more diffcult than you think

[@kaydod3190]

@@zzzz_020 It is based on science and statistics so hush 🤫

[@entropie138]

"I never said he stole my horse." Great demonstration on how word stressing gives a multitude of nuance, subtext, and connotation to one simple sentence.

[@leilaalgarve1235]

The hardest part of English is when I have to place a preposition, specially if it can be translated as "em" in Portuguese. I'm often confused.

[@JC-ks3yk]

I've been teaching ESL for a looooong time now and I pretty much had to re-learn English myself just to be able to understand it well enough to teach it properly to my students and let them know that their frustrations weren't their fault. XD

[@madmolf]

Same for me, I guess most ESL teachers have to go through this process, as most of our learning was organic an intuitive. I also reassure them on the frustration bit 😉

[@stevesheldon8616]

As a child I was a bookworm and I always won the class spelling bees. I was good at writing, too. I wasn't much good at anything else, though. Worst in class in math and later algebra.

[@affechristoph]

As a German, for me it was easy to learn English because many words are similar (or are completely stolen from German) and the grammar is about as weird as the German grammar (I'd say German has a even weirder grammar). Only the pronounciation is hard for most German speakers and even I have a strong accent, but most English speakers also struggle with German pronounciation, so that's fair, i guess?

[@JoshuaGraves113]

Personally what helped me pronounce German was learning different sounds in Dutch. I don't know how to feel about that.

[@dietraveler6214]

German pronunciation is super easy and intuitive.

[@michaelsoftbinbows8859]

English was originally a Germanic language, after all :)

[@Pogramista]

I am a native Polish speaker who learnt a little bit of English and I must say I have mixed feelings about English. That language can be very easy at least in the terms of being able to freely communicate with others (but if you really wanna speak proper English you need to put an extra effort though). What I find easy about English is a very simple grammar. No genders, no case system, no conjugation of verbs (except for adding an "s" at the end of the verb in the singular third person but speaking from experience it is not necessary and I have noticed that many native speakers omit this rule). Some may say that English has ridiculous amount of tenses to learn but honestly it is not hard, especially when you look at the alternatives. I think that constructing sentences according to the rules of the tense is very simple (but to tell which tense should be used at the moment is often freaky and not so obvious though, to the point that many English speakers sometimes don't use a proper tense in a proper situation). Articles for me are difficult to use correctly but it is caused by the very fact that there are no articles before nouns at all in the slavic languages so for me it is a completely alien concept. I do agree that the right order of words can be hard, espceially in the examples as you showed in the video but on the other hand such long phrases aren't often used. What I find very hard about English is, the pronounciation, thousands of vowels among which many sound almost the same (and that makes understanting of English so much harder), linking words, connected speech (I still can't understand how natives can turn a sentence "what do you want" into "watcha wan"), thousands of thousands of synonymous words (when I think I have a pretty solid base of English vocabulary I come across with a completely unknown word which means something I actually know a word for but natives use both words). Prepositions in English sometimes seem to be random for me. For example why do you say "X arrived IN y place", for me a word "to" sounds much more logical. Overall though I would say that English is pretty simple language when we compare it to other languages in Europe but it has some freaky aspects.

[@Froggo9000]

If you don't like saying that something arrived in a place use "at" instead. You don't say "John arrived in the airport" it sounds weird but instead you say "at" which has a similar meaning to "to" in that context.

[@kylespence4869]

I'm a native speaker currently learning polish. I find polish to be very "to the point". Polish doesn't have articles like "a, the, an" like english does. You just say the noun. I find this very bizarre because I am used to framing sentences in english. In english we say "I am eating an apple" In polish it's just "Jem jabłko" Which translates very literally as "I eat apple" I also struggle with certain definitions. Like if I am saying something is or isn't an animal, it doesn't make too much sense to me when to use "zwierzę" or "zwierzęciem" , and also when to use "jest" and "to" to describe it. I would say polish has a more logical structure to it though. There seems to be less rules to learn and it does seem to be more consistent and easier to pronounce once you get a grasp of each polish sound. Whereas in english we use the same vowels for different sounds which can be confusing. Also, the polish are not big believers in using vowels to separate consonants which makes a lot of polish words look impenetrable to an english speaker, who us used to words being made up of the structure xyx where x is a consonant and y is a vowel.

[@aziatix1168]

@@kylespence4869 Wow, what made you learn Polish language? It's my native language and honestly I think it's very complicated with a lot of irregularities and exceptions and...7 cases + so many "shch", "tsh" sounds. As a Pole I can see why polish is so hard for foreigners. I love my language, in my opinion it sounds really slavic but at the same time it is pretty elegant and beautiful. It has so many diverse sounds that I feel like I can express anything with it...but still, in my opinion, these 7 cases, number of irregularities and extensive amount of "szcz", "trz", "prz", "psz" etc. is TOO MUCH! At the other hand, I'm during my 3rd year of college on English phillology. I know I might have commited some ortographical or grammatical mistakes in this comment, nevertheless I think my English is quite good and I'm used to that. I have been studying English for the last 15 years and now it's like a second main language for me. To be honest though- if I was to start learning English now, at 21, with all these phonetics, irregularities, all present past and future tenses....that'd be a NIGHTMARE! We have totally different prounanciation in Polish than in English. Each given letter has only one sound- 99% of the time in all the words. English isn't this kind of language and during my 1st year of college we had entire subject named phonetics where we had studied all these phonetic transcription and symbols- it really cleared my mind and made my English speech better. They don't teach that in elementary, junior nor high school. We always prounounced the words using our intuition and following the speech of our English teacher and that was it! So you must guess that relying only on that, we Poles learning English during lessons in school have minnimal possibility to learn how to achieve a true native accent...and English native people judge you when you don't have the accent. For us Poles, as for multiple more nations, it's extremely hard to have the right accent, especially we have totally different type of language and we do not have silent sounds at all. In many aspects, English may be easier than other most popular European languages, but pronunciation is a total mess. We do not have problems with German, Italian or Spanish. The big problem for us are French and English. Anyway, I was growing up listening to American mainstream pop/electronic songs and tbf it must be the best sounding language in music. When I hear women, no matter whether it is Latina, Black, Asian or White, all of them sound so attractive e.g. Ciara, Cassie Ventura, Jennifer Lopez, Ellie Goulding, Britney Spears, Selena Gomez etc. English is the best language to fit catchy songs. They also say Italian, Spanish, French or Russian are melodic, but out of the 4 I like only Spanish voices in music. Polish is a cool language for pop music. We have female singers like Natalia Szroeder, Ewelina Lisowska, Honorata Skarbek or Doda who have plenty of catchy songs. Sorry for long comment. All languages are amazing, and that is why it's so frustrating to me, cause I'm learning "only" Italian, English and German, whereas I think it's still not enough and I'd love to speak all of them and even more like Japanese, Spanish, Korean, Thai, Chinese, Bulgarian...That's why I'll stick to claiming that the languages I can speak (Polish, English, Italian, German) are the best!

[@gibbeldon]

The words "famous" and "infamous" were funny to learn for me as a native German. At first I fell into the pitfall and thought "infamous" was just the negation of "famous". When I stood corrected I noticed that we have a helpful descriptive in German: something can be "berühmt-berüchtigt". "Berühmt" means "famous" and "berüchtigt" means "infamous" and thus I was always able to correctly remember those words.

[@reygiez.remando8429]

For me, the hardest part in english is actually the "Phrasal Verbs" . Those confusing and advanced phrasal verbs that have a bunch of meaning.

[@WillayG]

So many of my students and advanced speakers I know struggle with these. I feel your pain.

[@vali69]

I find them easy though. Never had a problem with them in highschool when they were teaching them, albeit at that point I probably already had like 10.000 hours of immersion done. Huh, maybe it's because I've been immersing so much. Yeah, immersion is always the answer. You know, classes are so much easier when you already reached a native like comprehension of your target language. It's all just answering based on your intuition, fully unconscious process, and it somehow impresses others. "Wow, you definitely studied a lot to reach such a level", no ma'am, I've just been watching minecraft videos on youtube, non stop in my free time, for the past 5 years.

[@2eleven48]

I sympathise with you as a retired English teacher who taught English as a foreign language abroad. Phrasal verbs are extremely commonplace in English, but can be a devil to explain to those unfamiliar with them. There's not much you can do, but learn some or all of the bloody lot. In doing so, you will understand the wonderful subtlety of the language. I wish you good luck. Robert, UK.

[@darkcreatureinadarkroom1617]

@@vali69 Immersion is indeed always the answer! I hated English classes, but I didn't have too much of a hard time learning the language because I had access to so much content to help with immersion, I was almost always ahead of my classmates (not bragging, seriously). It also helped that my mom is a huge language nerd lol

[@vali69]

@@darkcreatureinadarkroom1617 yeah, looking at people in the comment sections of language learning videos I see a pattern of questions people keep asking with the only viable answer being "just immerse more". It's so funny how immersion can literally solve any problems someone could have when it comes to language learning. Even those that are about the writing system. You would think when it comes to learning kanji for example, you should focus on learning outside of immersion and you're right, except if you're at an intermediate or above level you could just immerse by reading and using a dictionary and forgo anki or whatever you'd be using.

[@Wawruto]

"English is the world champion of borrowed words". You clearly haven't studied Albanian, 93% of its words are borrowed 😅

[@lunadinkelberg6381]

Another example: "I'm down for it" and "I'm up for it" seams to be the opposite but is the same

[@MrKhushrenada]

I am from Belgium (Flemish) and was exposed to French, English and Japanese. I started learning French when I got it in school at the age of 10 because exposure by itself was not enough. At the age of 12 I got English in school and was able to fill in my schoolbook in the first hour when it was given to me. The teacher noticed this and got angry at me, she took my book and told me if she found even one mistake I would get punished. The next day she gave me back my book but did not punish me as she couldn't find a mistake. I am still not conversational with Japanese. I am conversational albeit it at a low level in French and German (because of similarities with my own native language). With English it is completely different as I am more confident with it in comparison to my native language, my friends from the U.K. have told me regularly my English is better than theirs. And I was in a voice chat last week with an American that asked me wich state I lived in because he assumed I was American. Basically what I am trying to say is that English is probably one of the easiest languages to learn, maybe not writing but definitely speaking.

[@guccipetitben6939]

english: “weird and hard to learn” french: hold my baguette

[@foxymetroid]

Japanese: Hahahahaha. You guys would never survive having 3 writing systems, one of which is pretty much just Chinese.

[@amaza888]

🤣 Ouaip!

[@michelrobinet3138]

Try chinese or russian lmao

[@antoniocampos6627]

I always liked the word “oh” because it’s a single word that can convey someone’s entire mood or be used in almost any context such as if you are sad, surprised, scared, confused, happy and many other situations.

[@zephyrandboreas]

As a non-native English speaker, having started to learn when I was 15 years old I found English ridiculously easy to learn. Seriously. Took three years of high school but when starting University all text books were in English and so I had to immerse myself in the language. And was translating to some friends who had not learned English in secondary school. Yes, it is not perfect but I found it much easier to learn and dominate, especially grammar, than my own native language or a highly related language like French. When I was 17 I forced myself to read an entire book in English during my summer vacation. Not knowing what I was getting myself into I picked 'The catcher in the rye' at a bookstore. Because it was small. The decision I made was to make sure to check in a dictionary every time I came across a word that I did not know the meaning of. Half way through the book I no longer needed to check the dictionary. And so I find it very interesting that different individuals have different opinions relative to which languages they find easier or more difficult to learn and dominate.

[@pilky_boooi]

Exactly my language is killing me while I get kinda bored in my English classes (sorry teacher if you are reading this)

[@Hi-lz1ht]

Mhm. Congrats on learning English btw. From what I’ve seen you’re English is pretty good. Better than mine and my native language is English.

[@siyacer]

Interesting

[@sand7861]

@@Hi-lz1ht *your

[@Hi-lz1ht]

@@sand7861 point proven. Your English is better than my English. 😭

[@daliyah6474]

I think I was lucky growing up. My mom immigrated from Indonesia to Belgium and had to learn Dutch. So the first few years my parents spoke English to one another, which resulted in me having a good understanding of English from a young age. We also traveled a lot and I was an extraverted child. I would talk to everyone that we’d run into so I got to practice it a lot. Also all the magazines or books in the airports were in English. My native language is Dutch, which has a fair amount of similarities w English. Overall I’m just really glad my parents made sure I never had to “learn” all of these absurd rules😂

[@No-tw6qj]

I love Dutch as a native English speaker, as I started learning it I felt like I already knew half of it just because of the similarity

[@jaxxon98]

@@No-tw6qj Same here.

[@t-shunyah2905]

I have been learning English for about 7 years and using it for 3 to 5 years. Now I am an actual English teacher and I had a hard time accepting how much of language knowledge goes from experience (observation, listening and reading materials, speaking) and how it is almost impossible to explain so many details to pre-intermediate students who forget verbs while making sentences.

[@andythelynx6705]

I started learning English wen I was in kindergarten as my 2nd language, yet got to this level only in the last 4 years I'd say. (English is my 3rd language but is not going to be the last) Also compared to Russian and Latvian its so different yet easier for me to use since its more used in social media compared to Latvian( my native) and compared to how much Russian content i can find.

[@syzygythenightwing2]

I remember when I was younger, I was always confused by the meaning of the word "priceless". Did it mean something was cheap so you were unable to put a price on it, or did it mean the exact opposite? Now obviously, using context clues from reading through many works over the years, I did eventually figure out it meant something _valuable,_ not cheap. But this was so counterintuitive to me that for a long time, every time I came across the word, I had to take a while to remind myself "this means the thing is so expensive or worth so much it is priceless- no price could be put on it to compensate for its value." Because that's its proper definition. But yeah. English is... a mess, to put it lightly...

[@donyab.e4767]

As a non-native who has been learning English as a second language for nearly 20 years, I think the most difficult aspect of English is the way it's pronounced. In fact, I do still struggle with differentiating English words when spoken by a natives from time to time. In contrast, in my own language (Persian), we almost never have to spell words nor do we ever have to use something similar to the A for alpha, B for Bravo code words because the way we pronounce words is so clear that we hardly ever misspell a word.

[@Red_rose3024]

Why isn’t it difficult for us Norwegians to learn English? We have English from early in school though! And it’s not difficult to learn Spanish either. Not a problem to pronounce either. I speak both! 😍😍😍

[@mattkohenoglu9768]

It has nothing to do with school anita, wake up. It's probably because you watch tv and read in english starting from a really young age.

[@Red_rose3024]

@@mattkohenoglu9768 Wake up? I am awake and asked Olly! 🥸

[@alexbustillos6428]

Bueno con el español claro que no tendras problemas nuestras palabras suelen ser homogenias y tiene un tono exclusivo del contexto , me encataria aprender noruego tristemente no sé que dialecto usar

[@kevinb2208]

What you meant to say was "We learn English early on in school though". Often non-native speakers can indeed learn English relatively easily but it's hard for them to be 100% accurate in English.

[@Red_rose3024]

@@alexbustillos6428 Tienes que aprender el dialecto cerca de la manera de escribir (se llama bokmål). Yo soy del norte de Noruega (Tromsø) y allí hay un dialecto totalmente diferente, pero podemos entender unos a otros. Yo aprendí español cuando tenía 41 años en una escuela con jovenes 2 años.😍😍😍