Me opinion easy speak English bad. Can say sentence very wrong can understand still.

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As you can see above - in my opinion, it's easy to speak bad English. You can really mangle what you're saying and still be understood. In my opinion this is partly because most meaning in English comes not from grammatical endings, but from word order. This is because English is considered primarily an "analytic" language (meaning comes mostly from word order), as opposed to a "synthetic" language (word order is much more flexible; you use prefixes and suffixes to determine a word's function in the sentence).

You can get started in English pretty fast, since you don't have to learn a ton of complicated systems of prefixes and suffixes. In many cases you can turn nouns into verbs or verbs into nouns and still be understood, you can leave off all irregular forms and still be understood, and you can use some weird word order and in many cases, even then still be understood. I think languages with a complicated system of affixes require more of an up-front investment in time to reach a basic level, then things ease up later. In English I think it's the opposite, you don't have to do much to reach a very basic level where someone can understand you, but it requires very significant effort to reach a high level.

Therefore, in my opinion, the hard part is not to speak English basic enough to be understood, but to speak *correct* English, to speak English well enough that a native speaker will see you as the intelligent person that you are. Like it or not, people are often judged based on their use of language. The accent you speak with (country bumpkin or city sophisticate?), your vocabulary, your correct use of grammar, etc. will affect others' perceptions of you as a person. I think this is where non-native speakers suffer the most. You have all of these wonderful complicated ideas in your head, but if you can't articulate them in the language you are speaking, you can't contribute very much to a discussion.

Among the non-native speakers who say that English is easy and it should be the international language, I suspect they fall into several categories.

One - maybe their native language is indeed harder than English, and maybe they are naturally good at languages.

Two - they are perhaps talking about the relative ease of reaching a very basic level of English.

Three - they may be from a country that places a heavy emphasis on English teaching starting at a very young age, and continuing through university (I am thinking particularly of Scandinavia, where very good English is spoken nearly universally and used heavily at a university level, and of places like India, where English is often used parallel to the local language among the middle and upper classes).

Four - you have spent a long portion of your life learning English, in the belief that it will help you a great deal later on (it probably will) because it is the international language. Someone comes up to you and says "no, wait, I have a far better solution." You think of all of the time you've spent on the 'old' solution, throughout your whole life, and of the benefit that you have (likely) derived from the 'old' solution. I think that for many people the knee-jerk response is that the old solution works great and no new solution is necessary. Number one because you have personally derived benefit from it, number two because you don't want to believe that all of the effort you spend on this was wasted, and that you should now start all over again with a completely different language.

JenniferatLernu:Just a couple of thoughts.

Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps some people who find English easy are people who have a natural talent for learning languages?

The problem is that everyone can probably think of one or two people who think English is easy (or hard). However, basing it on just a few test subjects does not mean you have good statistical data.

I am curious though about statistical analysis/experiments as I admit that I do not have any references for experiments proving that English is harder than many other languages to learn.

(I can find websites with their own rank order of difficult languages but so far I have yet to find any that quote actual scientific research as opposed to just opinion.)

Here is an interesting site that ranks the difficulty of different languages. English is given a 2 out of 5, so it's on the easier side according to them.

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages...[

JenniferatLernu:Oh and here's an interesting quote from the following website:
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Literacy/reading.asp

Of course such quotes as these do not really prove anything scientifically -- it's more just for fun.

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Let's face it - English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?

If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it? If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
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Lol, funny.

Most of that is accurate, but I think that the word "hamburger" gets its name from the German city Hamburg, not because it has ham in it. So "hamburger" is actually logical, even if none of the other ones are.

I would also add to that list that an English Horn is neither English nor a horn.

That was a great post, Erinja! That really makes me think, though.. how would you go about trying to convince someone who has spent years learning English that Esperanto is a good idea, and that they should learn it, too?

A saying that goes around in Esperanto circles is that you use English to make money, and Esperanto to make friends. If someone is interested in international business, science, technology, etc, I would suggest that they learn English. In the modern world, it is hard to get by without English in these areas, unless you are working in a very limited geographical area that mostly speaks a language other than English. Learning English is not a waste of time in many cases, and learning English will probably be worth your while.

Esperanto is a great way to meet tons of interesting people abroad, it's a great way to travel cheaply, and it's a great way to learn about other cultures. It is a great way to learn how languages work, and to learn how to express yourself in a foreign language without spending more time learning the exceptions than learning the rules.

It is not a great way to make money, it is not a great way to make all kinds of international business connections, and it is not a great way to advance yourself in your job. There are people who have done these things with Esperanto, but few compared to English. English opens more doors than Esperanto does.

I think that when encouraging someone to learn Esperanto, you really have to focus on the friendship and travel level. The 'fina venko' may never come (will almost certainly never come in my opinion), but there are advantages to learning Esperanto today, in spite of that. You need to "sell" what Esperanto is today, not what it may be in the future.

I can't really say I have made money off of Esperanto but I have a ton of friends all over the world. It has not helped me advance professionally but I have really enjoyed meeting up with local Esperanto speakers in foreign cities I've visited. It has provided me with a window into the local culture. This sounds so cheesy and honestly I am not a cheesy person, but it makes me feel like I have ready-made friends all over the world, even if I haven't met them yet. This has more to do with the Esperanto culture than the language itself, yet to me it is one of the most powerful things that the language offers. Alone, I am a foreigner who doesn't speak the language and doesn't know where to go or what to do, and possibly even illiterate in the local language. With a local Esperanto speaker, I have someone who will translate a menu and tell me what the foods are, explain local customs, tell me what's worth seeing, and talk with me in our common language about topics ranging from world politics to stupid pet tricks. It's true that a given city in the world will almost certainly have many more English speakers than Esperanto speakers. But a month before my trip, can I contact a random English speaker in the city and arrange to meet them for lunch and ask them to show me the city? Unless I am paying them for this, I seriously doubt it. Yet I have done this on numerous occasions with Esperanto.

One of the questions that needs to be asked is what English? Or which English. I have been to Jamaica where they tell me that the foreign language there is English, and I can't understand any of it. My co-worker from Nigeria speaks "English", but I have to ask him to repeat, slowly, every third sentence. My friend from India might as well speak in Gujerati (how do we spell that?). Once, he was getting directions from a fellow Gujerati person, in Gugerati, and I had to tell him in English what the directions were, even tho I can't speak any of their language. Just gestures and intuition and a familiarity with our interstate highway system held the day. (Weird, I held a day!, how about those idioms?) And the chinese guy in the next cube? He is still learning basic English, although he did well enough to get a state job.

So if they learned English easily, does anyone but their mirror understand them? I speak standard American (South Ohio, which differs from North Ohio, just check out the word mango) English, and so does my wife- She was born in Chicago, raised in Pennsylvania, and was an adolescent in Florida. She often criticises my use of words and pronunciation. It's just one of those things, like the bee can't fly, but it does. English picked up vocabulary from every invader and later from every invadee. So we say pizza instead of peetsah, or peatsuh. Italian spelling is strange to us, but they invented something called pizza and we modified the heck out of it and still use their word.

The best argument in favor of Esperanto is still the same as the reason that Zamenhof invented the language. It is not the possession of anyone, no religion, no race, no nation, no organization, no political faction. Nobody has a moral advantage. Nobody can mock my use of it, nor dis me. That neutrality it the beautiful thing that I find compelling.

erinja:I think languages with a complicated system of affixes require more of an up-front investment in time to reach a basic level, then things ease up later. In English I think it's the opposite, you don't have to do much to reach a very basic level where someone can understand you, but it requires very significant effort to reach a high level.

Also Piron insists on this point (I don't remember well what are his arguments from "The language challenge" [I don't know the title in English], but his conclusion about easy beginning and difficult level up is the same of yours). I agree, and this is something I have experienced — studied English at ordinary school for 11 years, plus 5 years in a private language school. For most of that time I thought English was a great and easy language, and that everybody could and should speak it. Only when I was preparing for TOEFL I noticed how difficult English is. (When my teacher told me how to pronounce "anxious" and "anxiety", lol, I was stunned...) Anyway, that was such a frustration! My getting involved with Esperanto was partly motivated by that.

(Sorry for poor English )

erinja:...to speak English well enough that a native speaker will see you as the intelligent person that you are. Like it or not, people are often judged based on their use of language. The accent you speak with (country bumpkin or city sophisticate?), your vocabulary, your correct use of grammar, etc. will affect others' perceptions of you as a person.

Oh I so agree! My mother once married a Turkish man who could barely speak English. Well living with them I saw first hand some of his frustrations. For instance when he said he didn't understand, people would either speak louder or they'd talk like he was stupid.

He wasn't hard of hearing or stupid -- he just needed people to annunciate well, speak slowly, and use simple words. Lots of people thought he was stupid because of his short simple sentences and numerous errors. The reality is he had more higher education than most people, he just wasn't able to get his ideas across in English.

A friend's wife is a speech therapist. You'd think most of her clientele would be people who had lisps or such. Actually most of her clients were people who wanted to speak English without their previous accent because they found they were being discriminated against at job interviews.

erinja:... a month before my trip, can I contact a random English speaker in the city and arrange to meet them for lunch and ask them to show me the city? Unless I am paying them for this, I seriously doubt it. Yet I have done this on numerous occasions with Esperanto.

A most useful thing to know, thank you.

I agree about English being easier to learn at a basic level. I have now been learning English for 11.5 years, and I can usually make myself understood, but I have problems with finding the right level of formality, having used English mainly in school I know how to write a literary analysis, but if I am to explain say... how to cook something, suddenly I don't know half the words. So I speak to formal in informal circumstances, and not formal enough in my essays. And though I don't spell things wrong that often, my formulations are said to sound strange.

I think another of the big problems with English is the dialects. It feels like I have to learn to understand a new one every two weeks or so. I have been in Yorkshire for over two years now, but since the university people come from all over the place, I still don't always understand the Bradfordians. A lady at Morrison's asked me something yesterday, but all I heard was "cjdgrfgbs carrier bag sfjbkrbcvdb srghkji" even though I asked her to repeat herself twice... It is very embarassing in those situations.

Al that said, I find English relatively easy, for a non-constructed language. But then I have grown up with English on TV, in music, computer games (one of my first English words was "prison" from SimCity)etc. Furthermore, English is partly on the same language branch as Swedish, which of course play an important role.

One thing I find a bit disturbing, is that people whose first language is not English, on different forums on the internet, so often apologise for their "bad" English, even if there is no mistake whatsoever, I mean, that way you only continue to create that "clean-speech hierarchy". I think we should stop being so embarrassed for those little mistakes and accents, as long as people understand, who cares, really? I it does impede understanding, then it's another thing.