Why English is so difficult to learn...

[Paul Hanson]

The Dutch have accents? From what I gathered, when my oma talks in her Rotterdam accent, it's basically just Dutch spoken at a slightly higher pitch.

[alva]

If it's accents you want, you should visit belgium. Such a small country, but people living 40 KM apart don't understand each other
Don't mean the dutch/french lingual border here

[Traianvs]

Yeah, Alva's right... I'm from Antwerp, and those frikkin Limburgers and West-Flanders dudes make me go wiiiiii in the head!!! Unfortunately, most ppl of my class speak Limburgian, arff

IT takes AGES before they finish their sentences
and they whine all the time as well... i hate that accent...

[Ned]

Originally posted by Sagacious Dolphin


Because the Celts were kicked out or murdered by the size of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, so there was no mingling of language (or genes for that matter - modern Englishmen are nearly genetically identical to Friesans (Netherlanders, not the cows ) but English and Welsh are very distinct.

When you say accents sound similar, are you refering to their accent when speaking English or Gaelic?

SD, speaking English. To me, the Welsh and Scottish accents are very much like an Irish accent. Thus when I find the lower class English accents to be similar to the Celtic accents (when speaking English) I must assume that there is significant amount of Celtic influence on Anglo-Saxon dialects. But the absence of influence the Celtic language on English seems to suggest that the similarity in accents may only be a coincidence.

Does anybody else find Welsh and Scottish accents to be similar to lower class English accents?

[molly bloom]

Sorry, but there are different Welsh and Scottish accents too. The sing song 'Bombay Welsh' of South Wales is different from the accent of North Wales or Mid Wales, and neither sound anything like working/lower class English accents. If you were to try to get a Geordie and a Cornishman to communicate in their local dialects and accents, rather than standard English, they might have a hard time. Whereas, in Scandinavia, the British made, English language soap opera, set in the North East, 'When The Boat Comes In', could be understood without sub-titles.

The B.B.C. subtitled the excellent comedy series 'Rab C. Nesbit' for the benefit of Sassenachs down south who couldn't understand it. Despite its being in English...

One of the problems encountered with the use of English in Britain is that a class/character judgment will be made dependent upon your accent- its difficult for newsreaders/announcers to be taken seriously if they speak in anything other than Received Pronunciation and Standard English. Brummies and Scousers need not apply, was a non-spoken rule at the B.B.C. .

One of the reasons for the success of the Irish 'Murphia'
and Scots 'Macia' in radio and television is that their accents can usually place them beyond judgments made on class grounds, and they are also mellifluous. A soft Scottish accent from the Western Isles, or an educated Irish brogue are very attractive. Sexy, too...

[The Vagabond]

IMHO, the main weakness of English is that it doesn't have the plenty of suffixes available f.e. in Spanish (such as -ito, -ita, -issimo, -azo, etc.). Thus this subtle and neat way of twisting the words is not quite developed in English.

One of ABBA's famous songs is entitled "Chiquitita". This is in fact a double application of the suffix '-ita' (chica -> chiquitita). That's cool.

[mindseye]

Creek just sounds like babbling to me.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by mindseye
For an example of English vocabulary strength, consider: big, large, huge, immense, mammoth, gargantuan, collosal, goliath, gigantic, great, enormous, vast, massive, etc.

But what difference does that make? Is collosal bigger or mammoth bigger?

Originally posted by mindseye
Contrast with Chinese, where it seems you can only say big, very big, really big, extremely big, etc - or so I am told by natives who I've asked (they may have been wrong or misunderstood my question).

That's because Chinese aren't based on individual characters but groups of characters (a bit similar to phrases). Chinese characters are more like roots/suffixs/prefixs/etc. - components to form words in English.

Originally posted by mindseye
Of course, in either language you can also use similes, metaphors, literary references, slang, etc. to add additional flavor. However English seems to me to have the advantage in terms of sheer breadth of vocabulary.

Both collosal and goliath are both references, while mammoth is an analogy (started out as one anyways - or so I think).

As I pointed out before, for Chinese, you need to count the character groups. That makes up the language's vocabulary, not individual characters.

[problem_child]

English isn't difficult to learn, why I never even noticed myself learning it, I think of something I wanna say and say it, easy, it is how it has always been.

What is that you say? Maybe it is beause it's my first language!? why..... Poppycock! I've never heard such twaddle in all my life.

*awkward silence, turns and leaves*

[ranskaldan]

Contrast with Chinese, where it seems you can only say big, very big, really big, extremely big, etc - or so I am told by natives who I've asked (they may have been wrong or misunderstood my question).

big - da4
great - wei3da4
gigantic - pang4da4
immense - shuo4da4
grand - hong2wei3
grand & big - hong2da4
mammoth - wei1wei2
great (as in project) - hao4da4
great (as in importance) - zhong4da4
large (in amount) - da4liang4
large (in personality) - da4fang1
large (in tolerance) - da4du4
large-sized (in broadness) - da4xing2

That's the result of searching through one page of Chinese news.

So yes, Chinese does build on "da4", for "big" - but the variety and richness that results is in every way parallel in scope to English's multiple Greek and Latin roots.

[LDiCesare]

English is easy to learn for Germanic-language-family native speakers (Germans, Norse, Dutch...), then Latins, then other Indo-Europeans. It is quite hard for Chinese, and was hard for people who only spoke Maori and such languages (now they are all taught English as kids I believe).
I dismiss the written vs. pronounciation aspect because it is IMO secondary. Look for Irish (Gaelic) for a tough one (Conchobar = Conor...).

The simplicity of English is only in surface. The amount of irregular verbs is enormous for instance, and probably proves a nightmare to Chinese for instance. I wish I were able to show a fe examples of English oddities which can drive foreigners mad.
In particular, there are many assumptions in English which usually travel into f.e. software making it hard to translate. Stuff like the order of words in a sentence, different words for his/her based on the owner and not the owned gender/number...

Anyone knows about artificial languages here? Esperanto for instance was made to be an easy-to-learn language, but proved to be as hard as English for non Europeans. Languages tend to come along with a frame for thinking which I beliebe is what matters in learning the language. If you can think in English, then you are able to learn it, learn new words and rules as you encounter them. Otherwise, you will always fail.

Some artificial languages were very interesting concepts, like all-noun, though most of them are totally unsuitable for conversation as noone knows them. And there are many existing languages that have concepts that cannot be expressed simply in other tongues. Tthe various degrees of truth in some native american languages for instance cannot be expressed in any natural way in English.

[Traianvs]

Why don't you try Quenya?


Btw The meaning of what you are saying is most important, not how you say it... My German isn't particularly perfect, but if I can make myself understandable, and can talk to them even if I do it with errors and, then there is no problem!! The point is do they understand me!! I'm sure you do

That is why I'm not at all interested in purely linguistic areas of science, it's not important, it's just handy and interesting to speak a language.

[St Leo]

Explain to me the subtle differences between
"As we were saying"

We are about to repeat or build on the previous topic.

"While we were saying"

Concurrently with our speech, something happenned.

"Although we were saying"

We lied.

"Even though we were saying"

Someone wasn't paying attention last time.

"Since we were saying"

Our speech precipitated the following sequence of events.

"When we were saying"

The state of affairs was as follows.

"While saying"

Concurrently with conversing, we did the following.

"In saying"

To paraphrase, the actual meaning is as follows.

"By saying"

This, possibly criminal, action was caused.

"Through saying"

The following meaning is conveyed by that statement.

"Though saying"

Despite our words, we felt and did the opposite.

"Since saying"

After making the statements, we went ahead with doing the following.

when Latin has just one word for all of the above.

Then tell me that English has an advantage over Latin.

English has an advantage over Latin.

[St Leo]

But what difference does that make? Is collosal bigger or mammoth bigger?

"Collosal" rhymes with "Dorsal";
"Mammoth" rhymes with "Wroth".

IMHO, the main weakness of English is that it doesn't have the plenty of suffixes available f.e. in Spanish (such as -ito, -ita, -issimo, -azo, etc.). Thus this subtle and neat way of twisting the words is not quite developed in English.

A traditionalist would suggest "very very very very very chiquita".

[ranskaldan]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
The simplicity of English is only in surface. The amount of irregular verbs is enormous for instance, and probably proves a nightmare to Chinese for instance. I wish I were able to show a fe examples of English oddities which can drive foreigners mad.

Love to.

In English, if you take the perfectly innocent sentence:
"If I see it, I'll tell you."

And try to put it in the past tense:
"If I saw it, I'd tell you."

The result is not the past tense. It's STILL in the present, only you've just lowered to possibility of occurrence. You've made the sentence an "unlikely" occurence in the present, expressed with a past tense.

To make it into hte past, you have to push it into the past perfect:
"If I'd seen it, I'd have told you."

Only then, with a so-called "pluperfect" or double-past formation, can you express a past and unlikely event.

Follow so far?

But that's not all. We've looked at the present unlikely, the past unlikely. The future unlikely is formed by adding "should" to the condition but not the result:
"If I should see it, I would tell you."

(There's, incidentally, another way to express unlikelihood - but this time you use the root form:

"I will do it, lest he do that."
Can also be used to express want:
"I will see to it that he do that."

But this formation is becoming archaic.)