32.76 !

40, it took me years to learn to speak English correctly. I'm halfway there with Esperanto in less than half a year.

I've always heard English ranks as an especially difficult language to learn. I work with someone who speaks English as a second language, she describes her experience as "I had to learn English three times: once for grammar, once for spelling, and again for pronounciation!"

There are thousands of English grammar rules, but the most important one is the 80-20 rule: rules governing English grammar are right about 80% of the time, the remaining 20% consists of irregularities and exceptions.

Grammar:

Using a simple example: plurals. Most English plurals end with '-s', '-es', '-ies', or '-oes':

chair - chairs
house - houses
cat - cats
brush - brushes
pony - ponies
potato - potatoes

By there are lots of exceptions:

jewelry - jewelry (singular and plural are the same)
ox - oxen (note that the plural of "ax" is "axes")
mouse - mice
woman - women
person - people (although "persons" is correct in some contexts)
man - men
child - children
goose - geese (note that the plural of "mongoose" is "mongooses", not "mongeese"; the plural of "moose" is "moose", not "meese")
index - indices
piano - pianos
salmon - salmon
pants - pants

The irregular plurals depend on a words origin. For word historians, there's actually some consistency between words based on their origin. For example, most words from Old English pluralize words with the "-en" ending (men, oxen, children), game animals and fish are not pluralized, Latin and Greek words are pluralized with Latin and Greek conventions (final '-is' becomes "-es", final '-um' becomes 'a').

But, since most of us know all but nothing about the history of words, we just have to learn irregular plurals by rote memorization.

The 80-20 rule applies to possession, verb conjugation, adjectives, adverbs, etc.

Spelling / Pronunciation

The 80-20 rule is alive and well in English spelling and pronunciation: words that sound the same may not be pronounced the same, and vice versa.

For a start, we have long vowels and short vowels:

'A' - AY plate, AH pat
'E' - EE see, EH set
'I' - AI pi, IH pit
'O' - OH sow, AW sod
'U' - OO blue, UH blur

There are mostly predictable rules which govern when a vowel is pronounced:

- Two o's make a "oo" sound. Mood, moon, spoon, pool, loot. Exceptions: soot, book, took, look, rook, makes short U sound,

- For words which don't end in 'dg' or 'zh' sound, final 'e' is silent and makes the nearest vowel "long". mad/made, man/mane/manage, sed/sede/sedge, tub/tube, bath/bathe. Exceptions: captive, minute.

Words which *look* the same may not sound the same (this is usually the case with borrowed words):
- Recite = ree-SIGHT. Recipe = REH-sih-pee.
- Reign = RAYN. Foreign = FOR-inn

And don't even get me started on the irregular rules regarding syllable stress.

If it weren't for being a native English speaker, I'd probably never the language.

Frankouche:32.76 !

I'm for 9.333333333333333333333333333

I can't see any language as being really hard or easy, to me it's all about how much you put your mind to it. If the language is regular and stuff like Esperanto, then the human mind is more likely to accept learning it. If you have a personal interest in the language, e.g. wife or loved-one, you'll be more willing to learn all the intricacies of the language.

And of course practice makes perfect, and if you don't put practice into it, it could be the most regular, easy to learn language ever and you still won't master it.

English also has the benefit of being a natural language, therefore it has sister languages with cognates and similar grammar to refer to. Esperanto is unique in that it requires one to learn a pretty new system, and a potentially confusing one at that (many grammatical endings like "-ado" or "-is" are misleading if not explained to the learner first, as they look very similar to European grammatical endings but are completely different in function).

In the end though it's a non-issue. Languages should be learned to communicate with people and because of their artistic appeal or other personal reasons like historical studies etc, not so much because they're easy (which helps with the communication, but only if there are willing speakers to communicate with)

JulietAwesome:I've always heard English ranks as an especially difficult language to learn. I work with someone who speaks English as a second language, she describes her experience as "I had to learn English three times: once for grammar, once for spelling, and again for pronounciation!"

I might just add if you don't mind that English actually ranks somewhere in the middle of difficulty - it's apparently neither insanely easy nor insanely hard (it does depend on the teacher a lot though). And with any language you have to learn the grammar, spelling and pronunciation more or less separately otherwise it will generally lead to erroneous language acquisition (think of your stereotypical state-sider with a heavy accent speaking spanish), although ideally spelling should be simple and correlate with pronunciation.

One misleading aspect of Esperanto is that it has a highly regular spelling and pronunciation system - but if you've only written esperanto before you'll be in for a shock when listening to it for the first time, although having a similar sound set in your native language helps. In that way it's just as bad as English as there is no magic way to combine spelling and pronunciation without learning both separately.

JulietAwesome:jewelry - jewelry (singular and plural are the same)

Actually it's a non-count noun. However, according to Wiktionary it can also be pluralised in rare cases as jewelries (now that I didn't know).

white knight:(But what is English compared to German?! - Read, what Mark Twain wrote about "The Awful German Language" !

A bunch of whiny, uneducated pratter in my opinion.

gyrus:

white knight:(But what is English compared to German?! - Read, what Mark Twain wrote about "The Awful German Language" !

A bunch of whiny, uneducated pratter in my opinion.

It wasn't meant to be serious, Mark Twain was a satirist!