Is Learning English a Big Deal?

Learners of English express various views when asked if they think learning English is difficult.  Some students say that it’s easy, and others say the opposite.  The truth of the matter is that it depends, and to answer this question, a number of factors have to be taken into account.

SEE ALSO: Challenging English Sounds for Russian Speakers

What makes a language hard to learn?

Language difficulty is usually a relative matter.  Since many English and French words are the same (they have many cognates), the French don’t find English very difficult.  Sure, they speak it with an accent, but they can nonetheless recognize more than half the words before they have taken a single lesson.  This is in fact why Spanish, French, and other romance languages are easy for English speakers; there is so much shared vocabulary that hours of work are saved.  Anyone who has studied a language that has no vocabulary in common with their own knows how much time it takes to learn thousands of new words.

Does grammar make languages hard?

When English-speakers grumble about the difficulty of a language, they often complain about inflections.  An inflection is a change to a word (a suffix, infix, or prefix) that adds grammatical or syntactic information.  English speakers, for example, nearly always add a final s to form the plural of a noun, and this is pretty much the only suffix that English nouns can take.  Learners of English therefore have very few of these inflections to remember.

On the other hand, Russian has many; a given Russian noun can have 10 or more such endings, and learners of Russian claim that the language is hard for that reason.

However, the apparent simplicity of English can be deceptive, for in everything there’s a trade-off: In Russian, you have a limited number of suffixes, and their use is usually straightforward and predictable.

In English, however, prepositions have to make up for the work that many of these endings do in Russian.  Students then don’t know which preposition to use with a given verb or noun, and so the situation has become much more irregular and unpredictable.

To sum this up, all languages have to do the same work, so depending on how you look at language difficulty, even a “simple” language has its intricacies.

It is also important to remember that all grammars are relatively simple.  Whether we’re talking about Arabic, English, or Hungarian, a grammar could be written for each in less than 100 pages (if you don’t list every irregularity).  Every language has a relatively small number or rules, and these can be learned in a reasonably short amount of time.  In fact, most children have their native grammar figured out by the age of 5.  Adults are actually able to do it faster (although their pronunciation won’t sound as natural as a child’s).

Writing systems and associated problems in learning English

Writing systems can create huge, seemingly unnecessary, amounts of work for language learners.  The English spelling system is a case in point—there isn’t a one-to-one relationship between sounds and the letters used to represent them.

English spelling is therefore an important problem for learners, and unfortunately, it’s an unnecessary one.  Spelling reform would probably take a lot of the work out of learning the language.  In fact, spelling probably creates more problems for learners of English than grammar.  Unfortunately, this situation isn’t going to change.