Why do people usually say English is "easy"? I was wondering about that whilst reading literature, where I always find a myriad of new words to add to my SRS.
I'm aware that if you compare to languages such as Mandarin (depending on your tone, the meaning of what you say changes; ideograms), Japanese (3 writing systems; fucktons of kanjis, and so on) or Spanish (conjugation), English sounds pretty shitty easy, but if you take into account how much time you spend to master a proficient level, being able to read, dunno, Dostoevsky, without a dictionary at hand, it doesn't really sound easy.
My guess is: people think that knowing ordinary speech is mastering the language. When I come across someone saying English is easy in real life, I'll demand they read any of my books in front of me, translating word by word.
English has a very large vocabulary because it has influences from Latin, Greek, Old German/Saxon, Middle Ages French, Celtic, and so on. The truth is, most native speakers in English have very small vocabularies compared to the number of words used in literature. Most people know somewhere around 15,000 to 20,000 words total, more educated people might know 30,000, and skilled writers draw from a pool of 40-50,000 words. Learning English at the level of an advanced writer is like learning a second language by itself.
Aiden Foster
I would never fucking want to learn English, pronunciation in general is a crapshoot free of rules. In addition it's not really big on compound words so unlike languages like German you can't really use logic to remember words.
For example the word vehicle in English is just vehicle, in German its "Fahrzeug" which means "driving thing", or "pet" in English is just its own word but in Kraut it's "Haustier" which literally means "house animal"
Jayden Lee
Also while I commend German on its sensible vocabulary, the grammar is an unnecessarily complex shitshow
Austin James
Spanish is way easier than English. The conjugation sounds hard but all of the ideas conjugation expresses in Romance languages have to be expressed in English too, in ways that are harder to understand
Nathaniel Johnson
>Why do people usually say English is "easy"? Never met people saying that.
Julian Allen
At least just about every language has easier grammar than Navajo, Choctaw, or certain other North American native languages. People have no idea how bad things can get...
>read any of my books in front of me, translating word by word. want to know how I know you're a gigantic faggot who has no idea how translating works
Jordan Butler
Maybe because your language is far different. I noticed this phenomenon among Romance language speakers.
Alexander Morris
Maybe and maybe that's why you will never understand of that shame when you have learned English at school and then trying to speak here.
Evan Gutierrez
People on Jow Forums seem to think calling something easy is an insult. I think people might think it because English is the world language so people just absorb it without realising it
Evan Ross
Because it has few rules, meaning you can spend more time on learning words. You dont have to learn stupid lists of suffixes. No genders. English does have a lot of times, but its quite clear how they affect a sentence or word. Plus there is lots of material for immersion.
I also seriously doubt the English vocabulary is bigger than the Dutch one. Considering Dutch often has a Dutch, German, French and English way of saying things. And has more Greek words than English. I seriously miss synonyms in English. We even have the biggest dictionary in the world. worldslargestdictionary.com/
But the amount of words isnt what makes a language easy or difficult. Languages become difficult if you have to remember lots of ways to construct words and sentences. Its difficult when there are lots of ways to do it wrong. And of course if a language looks alien to yours.
Eli White
I'm referring to languages frequently spoken, although slav shit is harder
Xavier Evans
>taking Dostoevsky as an example of english vocabulary
Dominic Turner
Spanish, Italian, Norwegian and Swedish are also simple languages. Dutch is only one step above that. Dutch isn't very hard, although its easy to make stupid mistakes. German is a bit harder. Around medium difficulty. And French on the other hand is quite hard.
Christopher Miller
>times tenses
Levi Powell
Maybe you are just a pretentious dude.
By your definition most Anglos wouldn't have mastered english because they won't be able to read some translation of Góngora.
I do find the idea that english is particularly easy to be dumb, no language is easier than another: while there aren't a lot of declensions and conjugations as in the latin languages, english requires a rigourous word order that more synthetic don't
Carson Hall
You didn't get the point. Lapsed into the kind of people I refered to:
>My guess is: people think that knowing ordinary speech is mastering the language.
Mastering a language = being able to explore every corner containing it = reading literature like a native speaker
>Maybe you are just a pretentious dude. I'm being pretentious by saying a thing is not easy?
Adam Jackson
most native speakers don't read literature
Cooper Wood
I mean,: a cultured, educated native speaker.
As I said, just knowing the ordinary part of the language doesn't count.
James Davis
>just knowing the ordinary part of the language doesn't count. Why not? It's the most useful
Would you tell to someone that they can't swim because, while they do not drown, they don't participate in the olympics?
Ryan Brown
I don't think English literature is exceptionally difficult. Nor do I believe being able read a book is a sign your English mastery is necessarily beyond that of a person who can formulate his own sentences.
I studied law myself, and even had some courses in legal English which I passed with flying colors. And I honestly don't expect anyone to be able to read and understand a legal text. If this would be a requirement for having mastered a language then chances are even English teachers won't qualify as having mastered the language.
Nolan Adams
People say that just because the basics of the English language are quite simple, particularly in regards of conjugation but that's all.
But as it happens with anything, it becomes harder when you start aiming to reach higher levels of proficiency and understanding
Alexander Evans
I agree with you overall but legal jargon is practically a second language, it's not particularly relevant to the point because it wouldn't improve anyone's mastery of English nor would having the mastery help you understand it.
Caleb Thompson
In regards to
Lincoln Cook
>Nor do I believe being able read a book is a sign your English mastery is necessarily beyond that of a person who can formulate his own sentences. I can confirm this, I have friends that have read a lot of American Novels in their original language, but their pronunciation is very poor and they are slow constructing sentences
Jose Hughes
Well, because what dictates how a language is in its finest state, it's high culture, grammarians, writers. I believe that any language learning has to go towards them.
Adrian Young
Most people don't even learn english at schools or unis, we learn what native english speakers call "simple english". In russia they force us to learn it since the very first grade (some school do offer a choice between different languages but majority picks english anyway) yet almost nobody here can hold even a simple conversation or for example watch movies in english even with subtitles. But if you ask a person if he speak english he'll most likely give you a positive answer. People are delusional.
Jackson Perez
>Well, because what dictates how a language is in its finest state, it's high culture, grammarians, writers This is a fact: poetry is the absolute perfection of language but language in this realm is separated by a chasm from it's main purpose which is personal communication.
>I believe that any language learning has to go towards them. This is your opinion.
>This is a fact: poetry is the absolute perfection of language but language in this realm is separated by a chasm from it's main purpose which is personal communication. THAT is the point! There's a gap between the ordinary use of English, and the proficient one. The problem is: people generally mix those two up and claim to be able to do anything with English. This is what sets me off.
Andrew Roberts
It's easy because it lacks every kind of well-defined rule that other languages tend to have. It lacks consistency in grammar, tenses, word order and phrase structure. Once you know the proper words to express what you want to say, you can pretty much throw them together in a communicative word salad and it'll just work.
Verbs only have 3 ways of being conjugated, against the 60+ of any romance language. Adjectives have no gender or declination, meaning that there's always only 2-3 ways of saying it, while a neogermanic language will have about 40 declinations depending on grammatical function. Consider all this, and you obtain a language where, even when picking completely at random, you have about a coin's toss of probability of being right anyway, while you would invariably get it wrong with a romance language.
English is easy because it's pretty much MADE to be picked up and used. It's garbage if you want to be specific about anything, but it doesn't matter, because its function is to provide a linguistic bridge.
Of course pronunciation is a no man's land, but that hardly matters in text.
English is fucking easy, and no, mastering a language is not when you know all of the words, it is when you can hold an ordinary conversation on pretty much any topic whilst coming off as natural.
Hunter Perez
French is relatively easy if you already know Italian.
Alexander Hernandez
Shut up you monkey. You nigger-tongues don't know how easy you have it. Being born in irrelevant countries with shitty, complicated languages, while also being forced to learn the easiest, best, and most efficient language on Earth because it's what the only relevant country speaks. Then you make fun of Anglos for not being able to speak any gibberish alongside English while you're able to brag about being a bilingual faggot. It's not fair.
Isaiah Turner
I heard Spanish will be the official language of the US before 2030. Can you confirm that?
Parker Jenkins
I think any romance language is easy coming from Italian. They don't have as many conjugations as we do, so any other verbal structure looks easy by comparison
Jeremiah Morales
Seriously, wtf is wrong with benders? Why do they do this shit and assume every man is bi and down to fuck?
>Have gay friend for 2 years >Is roommate now >He has not made to me any sexual advances >He cannot speak English, which I have learnt in the last 2 years >Comes to me 3 weeks ago >Leans on the doorframe with finger in mouth >''user, can you help me with English?'' >I tell him I am not perfect, he can consult online forums and websites >He insist I help him >I say OK >Go to sit in his room >Its going OK, we have a nice discussion on the language, he seem eager to learn >''user, do you think in English?'' >laugh and say no I still think in our native tongue >he stands up >pulls down his pants >''How about now?'' >reveals his erect penis with lots of English words written on in small red ink >''Love'' is written on his cock head, ''Hello'' across the vein, ''Giraffe'' on the undercock etc >probably 30 words total >I stumble >''user you think in English now? You want a taste of English?'' >I stare at his cock, never seen such a big one >call him a disgusting homo and run out the room >has been uncomfortable since
I hate these queers.
Christian Sanders
ALE ZAPIEKŁO GRUBASA
Logan Wood
What's an easier language than English? Maybe Afrikaans, but I can't think of anything else.
Joshua Flores
seconded
Colton Evans
Probably Zulu Less than 1000 words, all future-oriented tenses and concepts are absent from the language, and almost all of the words in use are related to basic bodily functions like eating and sleeping.
Aiden Thompson
The people who say English is easy have been saturated in it while growing up because of American culture and to a lesser extent British. Yet their English skills are probably on par with that of a 12 year old. Because of this they'll act like they're some kind of super English scholar because they've grasped the simple written things and I imagine they still sound like retards while speaking English lmao.
Jason Wood
Esperanto :^)
Wyatt Lee
Lmao all this fucking shit is bullshit. I learned English from watching movies and playing videogames and got an schoolarship for free classes at a British English academy when I was a teen.
Luke Thomas
FOY
good lad
Anthony Scott
Because it is.
Landon Gray
>tfw you can just act like an American and disregard all other languages
