Why is English so difficult?

[JaneDoe]

All I wanted to do was speak and write English like most here. Is a very difficult task.


I don't know, what would I do without google translator.

[JaneDoe]

I need to get into an English course as soon as possible. My English sucks!

[< <Samson> >]

English is my 2nd language, to tell you the truth - it's quite simple compared to others


Speacially my 1st

[BG]

Depends where you are in the US you can almost mumble in some places.

But it’s got to be hard to type it on here if you don’t speak it well. Get those kits, seems like they are good.

[JaneDoe]

English is my 2nd language, to tell you the truth - it's quite simple compared to others


Speacially my 1st

What is your native language bro?

[Cuz]

Interesting avi choice

[Obs]

[Beetlegeuse]

Why is English so difficult?

Because England was been invaded like a hundred thousand times, and each invader changed the language.

The inhabitants of England once spoke proto-English, then the Romans came. When they left England a few centuries later the Romans left behind words like "wall" and "elephant" (because apparently they had neither before the Romans arrived) and a few other Latin words.

Then came the Angle and Saxon invaders and their languages merged with Latin-influenced proto-English and became Old English.

Next came the Viking invaders, who ruled England for a couple of centuries. English words that start with a silent letter 'K' are evidence of their influence. Knife. Knot. They also gave us "Wednesday," which originally was "Wodin's day." But we've dropped the 'W' and just call him 'Odin' now.

Then came the French-speaking Normans who conquered England and displaced all the Old English speaking nobility and clergy, so the new nobles spoke French and the same old peasants spoke the same old English.

Which is why swine make pork, cows make beef, chickens make poultry and sheep make mutton. Because the animals kept the (Germanic-based) English name that the commoners who raised them used but the flesh of the animals was re-named by the French-speakers who ate them.

The French also sent around their scribes to document the English language. And they did some strange things like arbitrarily adding a letter "e" to the ends of certain words. Which is how some spellings we now consider "old-fashioned," like "Ye Olde Butcher's Shoppe," came into existence. The extra letter is referred to as "the scribal 'e'."

And the scribes didn't speak such great English, which led to some interesting problems. A scribe sees a snake and asks a peasant what it's called. The peasant says, "It's a nadder." The scribe ASSUMES he's heard "It's an adder" and the name of the snake is changed forever.

Middle English kind of went underground for about three centuries, mostly only spoken by the peasants who lived in the countryside or in villages too small for any self-respecting nobleman to want to live in.

Then comes the Black Death. The plague wiped out cities but mostly spared the countryside. The nobility fled the cities for their country estates, not because they realized this would save them from the plague but because the cities stank horribly. So many people were dying from the black death that the cities kept bonfires burning to throw the dead bodies on. Two pyres, no waiting. So they all smelled of people being roasted, all the time. The nobles went to the country because even cow pastures, hog lots and chicken coops smelled better than that.

The people who couldn't flee were the household servants of the nobles. Their lords made them stay behind to mind the house and they died in droves from the plague. So when the the plague subsided and the nobles came back to their palatial digs in the city, guess what there was none of?

Domestic servants. Household staff were in great demand but there weren't enough to go around. So they brought in unskilled peasants from the countryside -- peasants who mostly only spoke English -- and recruited them to household service.

But the peasants mostly were uneducated and unlearned and slow to pick up on the French of their masters so the nobles were compelled to meet them half-way and learn some English.

And this is when Early Modern English arrives.

Early Modern English was proto-English plus Roman/Latin plus Anglo-Saxon mixed with Old Norse combined with French and finally with a French/English hybrid sprinkled on top. The problem was they were having wholesale changes in the language so quickly that there wasn't enough time for all the previous changes to be integrated before the new changes arrived. And with the printed word not being widely available, there was no means of standardizing the language.

So Early Modern English was a thoroughly cobbled-together and unregulated mess but, fortunately, in the absence of the printed word, languages typically evolve, streamlining and simplifying over time.

Except that in 1476, William Caxton moved to London and brought with him England's first movable type printing press. He could have waited for the language to smooth itself out but he didn't like what waiting a few centuries would do to his earning potential, so where the language wasn't standardized and consistent, he made arbitrary choices. And he started printing.

Which was the start of English becoming a much more static language. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in Middle English less than a century before Caxton set up shop in London. And unless you're linguistically inclined, you might not take it for an early form of English at all:

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every vein in such liquor,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Writing in Early Modern English almost exactly a century after Caxton opened his doors, William Shakespeare's words are clearly English, if a touch ... quaint. Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act 2, Scene 7:

I'll be as patient as a gentle stream,
And make a pastime of each weary step,
Till the last step have brought me to my love,
And there I'll rest, as after much turmoil,
A blessed soul doth in Elysium.

The reason Shakespeare's language is so much more familiar than Chaucer's is William Caxton.

Caxton also is the reason English still has so much incomprehensible baggage left by the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Danes and the Frogs.


Proto-English
Romans
Angles & Saxons
Danes
French
Black Death
Caxton


That, in a rather long nutshell, is why English is so screwed up.

[Capebuffalo]

Not English. That be coon ass. Ask Beaudro

[Capebuffalo]

Beetle what’s the shortest post you’ve ever made here? Lol

[< <Samson> >]

What is your native language bro?

Rusky

[Ernst]

Just remember 'Pacific Ocean' has three c's and none of them are pronounced the same.

English is a mess. There are almost no hard rules you can follow, you just have to know.

Look on the bright side: at least we don't give words genders.

[Windex]

English was not the first language I learned.

[tarmyg]

Look on the bright side: at least we don't give words genders.

Correct. I found this very confusing in German when learning it. I never figured out why a cucumber is a “she”.

[Nitmare67]

Don't feel bad! I'm from California and most the people born here can't fucking speak English... and writing.... forget it!!.

You should see the stuff that is posted on the local classified ads in central California... Just reading it pisses me off. It's one thing to do poorly at something but trying to improve vs just being an idiot and not giving a damn.

Your English is better than what most young people speak here in California!!

[Beetlegeuse]

Beetle what’s the shortest post you’ve ever made here? Lol

This.

[Capebuffalo]

This.

Touché

[Beetlegeuse]

Beetle what’s the shortest post you’ve ever made here? Lol

Believe it or don't, I hate typing. But some explanations aren't likely to satisfy the intellectually curious -- especially if they fly in the face of conventional wisdom -- without propping up your points with some supporting facts. So if you can tell me which elements of that post were not essential to making my point, I'll make a note and not do it again (= fewer keystrokes).

...Look on the bright side: at least we don't give words genders.

Old English nouns had three genders and five cases. Add number to the mix (singular or plural form) and every noun had 30 different forms. Thirty. Modern English only uses natural gender and the only time we use case is with personal pronouns. I, me mine; they, them, theirs.

Like I mentioned above, languages tend to simplify over time.

That fact that English is the only major language that uses natural gender exclusively is probably the biggest reason most English-only monoglots don't know that sex and gender have absolutely nothing to do with each other.


There's a difference between a language evolving and a language undergoing corruption. Most of the changes English has undergone in the past century were corruptions because the American public school system no longer rigorously teaches The Three Rs, reading, writing, 'rithmatic.

I've invested a lot of time studying war. And I've read a lot of letters to home from soldiers at war. I have been astonished by the overall quality of the grammar they exhibited -- even though few of them were educated beyond the 6th grade -- in all America's wars before WWII. Even if they only got a total of four years of education in a one-room schoolhouse in a one-horse town in Nowhere, Kansas and their grammar still was better than today's network television news anchors'.

The average education level of an American serviceman in WWII was 8th grade. But in their letters home you already can see a marked decline in the quality of grammar used by Joe Sixpack. For the last half of the 20th Century, the quality of public education in America was absolutely in free-fall.

[Capebuffalo]

Believe it or don't, I hate typing. But some explanations aren't likely to satisfy the intellectually curious -- especially if they fly in the face of conventional wisdom -- without propping up your points with some supporting facts. So if you can tell me which elements of that post were not essential to making my point, I'll make a note and not do it again (= fewer keystrokes).




Old English nouns had three genders and five cases. Add number to the mix (singular or plural form) and every noun had 30 different forms. Thirty. Modern English only uses natural gender and the only time we use case is with personal pronouns. I, me mine; they, them, theirs.

Like I mentioned above, languages tend to simplify over time.

That fact that English is the only major language that uses natural gender exclusively is probably the biggest reason most English-only monoglots don't know that sex and gender have absolutely nothing to do with each other.


There's a difference between a language evolving and a language undergoing corruption. Most of the changes English has undergone in the past century were corruptions because the American public school system no longer rigorously teaches The Three Rs, reading, writing, 'rithmatic.

I've invested a lot of time studying war. And I've read a lot of letters to home from soldiers at war. I have been astonished by the overall quality of the grammar they exhibited -- even though few of them were educated beyond the 6th grade -- in all America's wars before WWII. Even if they only got a total of four years of education in a one-room schoolhouse in a one-horse town in Nowhere, Kansas and their grammar still was better than today's network television news anchors'.

The average education level of an American serviceman in WWII was 8th grade. But in their letters home you already can see a marked decline in the quality of grammar used by Joe Sixpack. For the last half of the 20th Century, the quality of public education in America was absolutely in free-fall.

Just giving you a hard time. You take the time to actually explain and answer most questions before we have them as we continue reading.

[Obs]

English is hard because beetle wrote the dictionary.

[Beetlegeuse]

English is hard because beetle wrote the dictionary.

The most fun I ever had at the office was the day when I decided that English speakers would have to drive on the parkway and park on the driveway.

Second most fun was deciding that flammable and inflammable should mean the same thing.

And that whole "to be" thing, am-are-is-was-were-being-been, happened when I was playing Scrabble with Noah Webster. He got up to go piss and his beer belly bumped the game board and all of the tiles went flying off the table. That's what they spelled as they landed on the floor.

I was going to use the same method to conjugate "to go" but we tossed a coin on that one and Webster won.

[Obs]

The most fun I ever had at the office was the day when I decided that English speakers would have to drive on the parkway and park on the driveway.

Second most fun was deciding that flammable and inflammable should mean the same thing.

And that whole "to be" thing, am-are-is-was-were-being-been, happened when I was playing Scrabble with Noah Webster. He got up to go piss and his beer belly bumped the game board and all of the tiles went flying off the table. That's what they spelled as they landed on the floor.

I was going to use the same method to conjugate "to go" but we tossed a coin on that one and Webster won.

Lmao

[tarmyg]

Second most fun was deciding that flammable and inflammable should mean the same thing.

This is a constant debate in my wife's lab as here in India, it quite literally, means the opposite of what we, at least in North America are used to.

[sv.elia]

Happiest way to learn is by watching movies or tv series with eng subtitles. Also, if you have the time, throw a rpg on your console/pc, also in english and with english subtitles.

[BG]

Just giving you a hard time. You take the time to actually explain and answer most questions before we have them as we continue reading.

Agreed and I really feel smarter after reading them.........sad but true.

[BG]

Happiest way to learn is by watching movies or tv series with eng subtitles. Also, if you have the time, throw a rpg on your console/pc, also in english and with english subtitles.

Very good, would have never thought of that.

[Beetlegeuse]

The sad thing is that Americans speak such shitty English (and the English themselves aren't much better) that most Americans don't see anything wrong with the English being used in films and on TV. So if all you want to do is communicate an idea, using a telly for an English tutor might be okay. But if you want your idea to be taken seriously by people of consequence, ... uhhmmm ... no.

Maybe Downton Abbey, or Upstairs Downstairs, pretty much any drama set in pre-WWI England focused on the nobility/aristocracy (don't take English lessons from no Cockney ... nor Yorkshireman ... nor Liverpudlian). Even HBO's Deadwood. The grammar of all the town's 'movers and shakers' was extraordinary, if somewhat Victorian. Hell, even the weasely little hotelier. Bonus points for the advanced placement class in profanity. Nothing says "fluent" like cursing appropriately. Nothing says "poser" like swearing clumsily.

Learn English from "Friends"? Hogan's Heroes? Sanford and Son? Curse of Oak Island?

Hell no.

One thing I think is effective for learning languages, believe it or not, is kid's stories. Even nursery rhymes, because the dialogue is already well-known to us. But only the old classics, nothing recent, only pre-20th Century. I find them available for Italian and Spanish and what-not (with English subs) so I presume they probably are available in English with [insert language here] subs as well. I was taught folk songs and Christmas songs and well-known biblical passages in Spanish in high school that I still remember, and still have occasion to use them for references.

Read Edgar Allen Poe, who was noted for saying, “A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.” Thrive even.

That said, I have very low standards for what I consider my personal fluency. So long as I can order a beer, ask where the bathroom is, get my face slapped by making an indecent proposition to a respectable woman, and (if the previous fails) asking directions to "sporting house," I can survive.

[Obs]

The sad thing is that Americans speak such shitty English (and the English themselves aren't much better) that most Americans don't see anything wrong with the English being used in films and on TV. So if all you want to do is communicate an idea, using a telly for an English tutor might be okay. But if you want your idea to be taken seriously by people of consequence, ... uhhmmm ... no.

Maybe Downton Abbey, or Upstairs Downstairs, pretty much any drama set in pre-WWI England focused on the nobility/aristocracy (don't take English lessons from no Cockney ... nor Yorkshireman ... nor Liverpudlian). Even HBO's Deadwood. The grammar of all the town's 'movers and shakers' was extraordinary, if somewhat Victorian. Hell, even the weasely little hotelier. Bonus points for the advanced placement class in profanity. Nothing says "fluent" like cursing appropriately. Nothing says "poser" like swearing clumsily.

Learn English from "Friends"? Hogan's Heroes? Sanford and Son? Curse of Oak Island?

Hell no.

One thing I think is effective for learning languages, believe it or not, is kid's stories. Even nursery rhymes, because the dialogue is already well-known to us. But only the old classics, nothing recent, only pre-20th Century. I find them available for Italian and Spanish and what-not (with English subs) so I presume they probably are available in English with [insert language here] subs as well. I was taught folk songs and Christmas songs and well-known biblical passages in Spanish in high school that I still remember, and still have occasion to use them for references.

Read Edgar Allen Poe, who was noted for saying, “A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.” Thrive even.

That said, I have very low standards for what I consider my personal fluency. So long as I can order a beer, ask where the bathroom is, get my face slapped by making an indecent proposition to a respectable woman, and (if the previous fails) asking directions to "sporting house," I can survive.

I hear people calling this the age of illiteracy and I disagree.

It's evolution of language.
Two 13 year old girls can text each other today and spit out more information and expression, (while understanding exactly what the other means) than at any point in communication history.

The rules are good for a basis but we have expanded beyond the rules and evolved into a faster more precise language.

IDGARA WTF PPL want to hear.
Long as they get it.

The intelligent will be able to communicate properly and the modern way.

[JaneDoe]

Portuguese is much easier than English. Without a doubt.

[JaneDoe]

if anyone can give some tips on grammar .I would be grateful.

[JaneDoe]

Happiest way to learn is by watching movies or tv series with eng subtitles. Also, if you have the time, throw a rpg on your console/pc, also in english and with english subtitles.

Thanks for the tip.


I watch NETFLIX with English subtitles, but as I told you I just don't understand everything I read.

[< <Samson> >]

That’s actually what I did when I was a kid - I watched Tv, a lot of tv

[Ernst]

That said, I have very low standards for what I consider my personal fluency. So long as I can order a beer, ask where the bathroom is, get my face slapped by making an indecent proposition to a respectable woman, and (if the previous fails) asking directions to "sporting house," I can survive.

[Fluidic Kimbo]

if anyone can give some tips on grammar .I would be grateful.

When you were a child at school, did you read any Portuguese poetry?

[JaneDoe]

When you were a child at school, did you read any Portuguese poetry?

yes!

[Fluidic Kimbo]

yes!

I grew up in Ireland, and so we learned poems from Irish poets (written in the English language but also the Irish language). My favourite Irish poet was Seamus Heaney at first, but later it was W. B. Yeats.

Did you have a favourite Portuguese poet?

[Obs]

I grew up in Ireland, and so we learned poems from Irish poets (written in the English language but also the Irish language). My favourite Irish poet was Seamus Heaney at first, but later it was W. B. Yeats.

Did you have a favourite Portuguese poet?

Go away faggot.
No one wants you here.
We get it. You are damaged. Now fucking go away.