All languages are equally easy to learn natively, but of the languages, English is fairly easy to learn as a second language. compared to the others you mentioned.
was learning german for several years - barely can do anything after half a year of learning english easily excelled my german it's a great language i just love it
@@marksanders2168 unbelievably random. stop typing in comments sections, just realise that nobody cares - we're all here for the video, not for your ass.
For ridiculously easy, I’m surprised Olly didn’t also mention the word “you”. In English, it’s just “you” no matter what. In other languages, you have to be careful - sometimes _really_ careful - which form of “you” to use. How well do you know the person? Is the person your elder? Your boss or teacher or parent? How many of “you” are you talking to? Is the person’s social status above or below you. The list goes on. In English none of that matters. It’s just YOU.
The only way I can think of to incorporate a formal kind of respect into English, is to refer to the other speaker as "sir" or "mam" "Thank you, sir" "Yes ma'am, I'll look into that for you" I'm glad there isn't extra levels of sir to keep up with, such as a super-sir or a mini-ma'am 🤣
Well... I think it's matter of preference Some people prefer simplicity... others prefer accuracy Sometimes i get confused when someone says something like: "you are smart" Is it me or is it us? However, I still think that English is so easy compared to many other languages, I tried to learn many languages other than English and I failed miserably.
@@mohammedalahmed3133 Admittedly “You are smart” is a bit vague. Most English speakers take that into account when talking. They do it without even thinking about it. If there’s just one person being spoken to, then “you are smart” is not ambiguous. If there are a group of people present, then English speakers will add other words to make the meaning clear. For instance, the phrase “you’re so smart” almost always refers to the one person being spoken to. Whereas, if the speaker wants to include everyone present, then phrases like “you guys are smart” or “all of you are smart” would be used. I was once told using “you guys” is substandard English. But it’s so freaking common most people won’t complain.
When I did French in school, my teacher once asked me to translate an English word. I didn't know it, but I guessed by saying the English word in a French way, and got it right.
English is easy to learn owing to the sheer volume of music, movies television and online content in English. As the global lingua franca, there are also significant economic and personal benefits to learning English - so it's not hard to find the motivation to learn (motivation being arguably the most important ingredient to successful language learning).
Still a hell to spell though. And unnecessary grammar detail like is/are, was/were, seem/seems, and so on, is a constant struggle. At least for my part, as a Swede.
@@herrbonk3635English is actually a lot less inflected compared to other languages. There are languages with more grammar rules and linguistic variety and complexity. Also, English is generally spoken a lot slower than the other popular languages, so it's easier to comprehend and speak without impeding the flow of a conversation. Not saying people don't struggle learning it though. But there are some added benefits for foreign learners of English due to the irregularities it has compared to other languages.
@@Sol-Amar Yeah, French and German grammar are even worse, Finnish too. Perhaps I'm just spoiled, growing up with a mother tongue being one of the easiest languages on earth :) Pretty much so even when spoken fast.
Ummm, I hate to admit it but English is the exact opposite of easy to learn, it’s one of the worlds most difficult depending if it was your primary or second, and what other language is similar to it, as you learn more English you will start realizing just how tough it is, what can I say languages are complicated😕🫤. Like for me it was Estonian, so learning English might be really intricate in my case. Any grammatical rules are never change from most languages dude, learning English can be very overwhelming, exhausting and tiresome, it’s why I suggest you start off simple and then progress, don’t just cram words in your brain, no. On top of it all, it contains the most vast vocabulary, there’s over 170,000 words, the truth hurts sometimes. 😢 In fact, it’s borrowed words from various languages, it’s background is historical. English is like half phonetic and not, there’s so many rules broken in it. But also depends on how smart you wanna be in life.
I´d argue that English would be easier if it had more letters. Having more sounds than letters plus inconsistent spelling isn´t "ridiculously easy"^^ Many other languages are much easier when it comes to that.
I'd actually argue that it would be better with less letters 😂 Many of the letters are not required and all of the sounds can be made by combining letters together.
@@annarboriter it's not a pidgin language it's a Germanic language with heavy romantic borrowing. The core of the language is very clearly germanic still.
Been learning polish for just over a year now and I love seeing you using this language as an example in this video! I would love to see you do a video explaining cases in full as I’ve never been able to properly wrap my head around the cases, how to use them, when to use them etc… it’s such a difficult concept for a native English speaker and you explain things in such a way that makes it easy for me to understand. Keep up the great work :)
@@videogamerka0009 I do exactly that, but after almost a year and a half I would like to understand more how the cases work. I do most of my reading on LingQ but it would be nice just to understand the cases better as when I have conversation practice on italki or in real life as I do quite often then I can actually start to use the correct cases for the situation
English has cases too, for example: I (nominative), me (accusative, dative), mine (genitive). Unfortunately nouns aren't inflected for case but if you understand the difference between "I" and "me" then you already know how cases work
@@pia_mater thank you, I have heard this before although I do forget as we don’t really refer to it in English as cases/declension. It definitely helps to understand their use as in English we are able to immediately identify whether to use I/me/mine etc… in Polish I can use some cases immediately without knowing the specific rule, for example I know that in most if not all instances that I see ‘po’ the word that follows is in (I think genitive?) and normally ends in ‘U’ although not always the same ending. Na przykład - po polsku, po południu, po angielsku etc. This is just something I’ve picked up from my many hours of reading, listening and speaking the language, but I do like to also understand the reasoning behind this as well as being able to use it in conversation :)
English does technically still have a "case" system, but it only applies to pronouns, e.g. "he", if the object of a verb or preposition, becomes "him" (objective), and in the genitive, "his" - or "hers" in place of "she". I don't know if English grammarians consider this a case per se, but still certainly has its origins in the case system :) Also, for #7, using a noun directly before another noun like this can be called a "noun adjunct", and it's really a super helpful feature in English... it doesn't exist in many languages, e.g. many Slavic languages. My mother tongue has a type of adjective called a "relational", which is used specfically to serve the purpose that a noun adjunct serves in English.
Great points, but as someone (English) who has taught grammar to both native speakers and foreign language students, I can safely say that we do not often talk about 'cases', just subject and object pronouns. We do not usually make the distinction re adjective and nouns adjunct either. We call 'war' an adjective for 'story' in 'war story', for simplification and because its function is the main point. English is a building block language: once you have the basics, you build onto them quite easily and systematically. Happy days!
English orthography is very reluctant to create compound words reflected by spelling even after a lexical stress shift is created to demonstrate that, say, Clímatechange, is itself a new concept worthy of a noun status
@@annarboriter Indeed, I don't know why, but compounds are still often written with a space even if they're considered collocations, like your example.
@@spaghettiking653 It's mainly a matter of frequency and historical durability. They'll typically start as two words next to each other, after a period of time, a hyphen will be introduced and eventually, you get the form that removes the hyphen. A lot of it has to do with the degree to which the compound is recognized as a thing, and the degree to which people want to be specific/lazy about it. Tomorrow started out as to morrow before replacing the space with a hyphen to form to-morrow.
Speaking of language resources… it is surprisingly hard to find resources for Modern Greek. But one thing I have learned is that Harry Potter is available in all mainstream languages, so I tend to buy Harry Potter Book 1 and have a go at it. Don’t ask how many editions I own. Lol
I'm Dutch and one reason I could understand English as a toddler is because the cartoons were English with Dutch subtitles, but I couldn't read yet. So as a Dutch child I was already very influenced by the 'American' media such as movies and music. But that doesn't make English easy. In primary school I was taught English and I remembered the first lesson well. The teacher said write the numbers in English. So I wrote: wan too, tri, vor, faif, siks, sevun, ejt, nain, ten? Then I found out that English is quite difficult to write. But also the illogically written words such as Wednesday, tonight, bottle, etc. I think one of the reasons why English is the lingua franca in the world is due to the US. The US has spread its power, culture, music and film industries worldwide since World War II. In addition, English is a beautiful language, but to write you have to see it first.
In my native language, Icelandic, the definite article is at the back of the word which also changes depending on the gender of the word. The house = húsið (neuter) The boat = báturinn (masculine) The sun = sólin (feminine) Also, names are conjugated.
I think reaching the upper levels of English is difficult. The way we speak in real world scenarios is rarely like the way textbooks, and literature in general, would lead you to believe. I have a friend from Germany who is quite good at English but the moment you throw any abstract phrasing at her (think figures of speech or slang / idioms) she is completely lost.
English is my wife’s second language and she says the grammar is easy but idioms are the big problem in becoming fluent. There are far more than any other, European at least, language.
This would deserve a follow-up video titled “10 Reasons English Is Incredibly Difficult”. 😀 Sure, the basics are pretty easy to pick up, and one can put together simple sentences very early on, compared to most other languages. Also, the level of familiarity (mostly thanks to the dominant anglophone culture) helps a good deal. It’s getting to the point of proficiency when it suddenly becomes much more difficult. Even things one expected to be helpful start standing in the way all of a sudden. The real complexity of English is easy to underestimate as it’s obscured by the simplistic-looking grammar at the beginning. And I’ve been having a lot of fun conquering English my entire life. 🤗
"And I’ve been having a lot of fun conquering English my entire life. 🤗" Good on you, Mic. I am giving up studying English. Although I did Master of Applied English in an Australian university more than 20 years ago and live in Australia since then, I still have lots of English words which I have never seen or heard. Recently I read "The Handmaid's Tale", and I don't know how many words I checked in the dictionary and how many I skipped. At first I thought I should learn those words, but I soon got tired of studying them because I have no problem or difficulty living in Australia without knowing those words.
I wish English was phonetic. Ukrainian is phonetic language and we have ability to read and write anything from first grade (as 7 years old)... It was always mind blowing to watch USA movies where was spelling contests, it felt extremely dumb
@@kaydod3190 you didn't get it, I watched movies dubbed, so it was like : how to spell word itself? - the answer : I, t, s, e, l, f. How to spell word nostril? - n, o, s, t, r, i, l. It was like I didn't get what was going on, because if you hear word, than you know how to write it. I wasn't saying that those kids were stupid, of course they were not. The concept of English spelling is stupid
As a Spanish speaker my real struggle with English was pronunciation. I wanted to pronounce properly and I had to learn to replicate many vowel sounds that don't exist in Spanish. Also, getting used to differences in grammar, new vocabulary and the worst of it all, phrasal verbs. There are many phrasal verbs I've had to learn in order to understand native speakers.
With Spanish, it's the speed it's spoken, the heavy use of slang in some dialects, numerous different accents, and the different sentence structures compared to English (I.e. I gave it to you. Vs. TE lo di) or the frequent use of lo, la, el, ello, lo que, ese, asi como, como pronto, aún etc..
@@Sol-Amar if you're going to learn Spanish, you better get used to articles because unlike English speakers, Spanish speakers use Spanish for the "the" article for almost everything, even when they're talking in general. In English, there's like a subtle difference when someone is using 'the' or not on the sentences. In spanish, they use it whenever they can for some reason
@depressito Yep, I noticed and can tell the difference. That's why I included it because it takes some getting used to for L1 English speakers. But it was the speed and pronunciation more than anything.
@@Sol-Amar yeah, I remember having the same experience when watching English videos in the past. I thought native speakers spoke really fast. Now, I actually think that English speakers might just speak a little bit slower than Spanish speakers. The speed is going to feel different when you expose to the language. Spanish speakers may speak faster but words are longer so your brain is going to process them well enough later on when you get better at the language (if you compare both languages. English takes way less amount of time to say something compared to Spanish and since the brain has extra time to process all the meaning of the sentences.. You're often going to find that there are less people using the Spanish equivalent fillers such as "ehmmm.. " which is Spanish for "Uhmmmmm...")
@@depressito Yep totally agree! English is definitely spoken a lot slower on average than Spanish, especially in the South/Midwest or rural areas (American English) and I mean really slow for some dialects. English is also a stressed-timed language while Spanish is syllable-timed. And of course there are accents in English that are fast. When I began to become proficient in Spanish, people told me I started speaking too fast in English so some of those Spanish linguistic features definitely carried over to my core way of speaking. You make a good point on it's a matter of getting your brain accustomed to the sounds. The longer I've stayed somewhere and spoke it, the more recognizable and familiar the sounds and speed became. And I never noticed the filler sounds not being common until I heard a lot of people in a specific area of Mexico use "este" and "osea" a lot. May I ask what's your country of origin? Or the country of your heritage if you live abroad?
I kinda had it in reverse for French. When I was in Belgium, I could decipher the French signs easier than the Dutch ones due to all the French loanwords in my native Turkish, and English. Except for the days of the week, in that part Dutch was more useful...knowing days of the week in German did help on that part.
Languages are connected to each other and it’ is quite helpful. Ottoman Turkish must have been a bit easier to learn for a foreigner. Turkish has many loan words from Arabic, so learning Arabic from knowing a bit Turkish is helpful. Also, I agree about some French words. But in general Turkish would have been easier if they had kept more of the original loan words
@@TheGrindelwald I am learning Indonesian at the moment and the same Arabic loanwords make it easier for me. I even realized some words I thought to be original Turkish words were in fact loanwords.
Just when you said it's easy to just add "the" in front of a noun, I immediately thought "what about the pronunciation of THE ??? " and then you showed the movie "Les gendarmes à ..." 😄 I remember my English courses when I was in school, our teacher tried to make us pronunce "the" , imagine 30 pupils showing their tongues to their teacher ... 😂
to be fair, we did that too growing up in england! our teachers used to say it was the only time we were ever allowed to stick our tongues out at the teacher when they were teaching us to pronounce "th"
Tbh if English fixed its spelling, it’d be 4x easier but also UGLIER, for most foreigners it’d be better but as a native speaker, I’ve seen how ugly English is to read if we reform it….
Have you guys at Story Learning considered making a course for Tagalog? Tagalog is a highly underrated language. There’s a surprisingly substantial Filipino presence in the USA. I would highly recommend it. It’s a beautiful language
I really wanted to learn Polish since there are many Polish speakers in Chicago, but after seeing the cases and the amount if consonants in each word (although I hear it's phonetic), I switched to Spanish. I may try it again one day.
Native Polish here, you shouldn't give up, it's really doable if people are able to learn much harder languages like chinese, arabic etc. I really think you shouldn't focus on learning all these cases through grammar, instead all input approach and I think it's possible to do.
One easy thing in Polish: we have only 3 tenses( past, present and future) This makes difficult for us with any non Slavic language to use tenses properly
We've got 5 tenses ;-) (past perfect, past imperfect, present, future simple and compound future tense) but in general tenses are much easier than in english ;-)
I speak Czech and I decided to just ignore the cases^^ The more you read and listen, the more the grammar starts to sink in. Some stuff is easier than in English (spelling, tenses) so yeah, follow your interests :)
In english there are 2 exceptions for conjugation (at least). The verb to be can be conjugated in the first person as well: I am, he is, you are. Also the seldom used subjunctive tense uses the infinitives of verbs, like "he be".
Are you familiar with the poem: The Chaos by Gerard Nolst-Trenite. It's about the English language and it will drive you absolutely BONKERZ. It has a bezillion 'exceptions' stringed together; it's impossible!
I don't even remember the last time I saw a poem written to be a poem that made me feel joy, the field is so trash. But this is genuinely amazing, thank you.
1:05 English does have a (very) select few nouns that are still gendered, professions like waiter/waitress, actor/actress, though in more recent years people have started to lean more heavily toward gender-neutral equivalents for words like handyman/woman. Some more nouns that are gendered are things like blond/blonde or brunet/brunette. However, none of that really matters, because gender isn't baked into nouns (besides pronouns, but that's a different topic) or articles like other languages, and with things like blond/blonde either one works perfectly fine. (Worth noting that most of the words I mentioned are from French, a language that *is* gendered)
@@thisisnotmyname4499 yes although I suppose things like blond/blonde or masseure/masseuse are descriptive nouns (is that the technical term ? possessive noun ?) unlike say a table, which in French say is always feminine.
It's worth noting that irregularity in words in a language is usually more common with regular words that you'll use a lot, rather than in less commonly used words. Which is both good and bad as it means that you get hit with it up front, but it also means that you'll likely use them enough to get used to it.
I'd agree it's easy "to get started" but dang, is it HARD to _master_ 😅 But yeah, 100% with you on your 12:53 point; I even just made a video about myself 😎 (You were properly tagged, twice 😉)
You could say the same thing about Mandarin. It's a lot easier to get started with than one would think, but it gets extremely hard as you get further into it because of the trade offs that led to an easy start.
I learned English to a pretty good level in 5th grade. I'm from Moldova so Romanian and Russian are the predominant languages. Despite that, I found English to be very easy to learn, I almost never encountered something I couldn't wrap my head around. English isn't a hard language whatsoever, but as any other language, it's difficulty depends on the language the person learning knows. If you're accustomed to Japanese/Chinese, then of course a language with a completely different alphabet will be difficult, with all the rules which just aren't a thing in your language.
Thanks Olly. I'm old and not the sharpest pencil in the box. Helped me understand what declension is. Enjoyed reading your book Short Stories in German. Maybe i'll not be a permanent beginner after all !
The most difficult part of English is reading 📖 especially for native speakers of Romance languages. When they read they need to become familiar with the numerous vowels we use. Not even to talk of the silent consonants and the irregular plurals of certain nouns
Good to see a video that dicusses the technical things that help make English easy. I think that that easiness has contributed to its lingua franca status.
Lol! Love your videos. We have an old, American TV show called I Love Lucy. Her husband is a Cuban and therefore English is (was) his second language. He gets into how difficult English is. They bring up an example; the same repeated letters in a word with different pronunciations, ough. Ought, though, tough, thought, bough, cough, through…. Throws many English learners for a loop.
@Ir liz English grammar is only simple if you ignore its syntax, which is incredibly complicated. Admittedly, you can speak a certain amount of English without knowing that much of it.
People think English is easy because you can start forming simple, easily understood phrases at the begining stages. Moreover, the anglosphere doesn't care so much about non-native speakers' mistakes because, despite the grammatical errors and what not, we still understand what the non-native speaker is trying to say. Basically people can get away with linguistic murder at the beginning. However, once you delve deeper and go to higher levels, English is *extremely* difficult. Like someone else said in this comments section, if English were so easy, non- native speakers would speak it much better than they actually do. I would not call English "ridiculously easy". That's a gross exaggeration, imho.
Oh yeah, definitley agree, don’t go assuming language is ‘simple’ since they’re harder than we think, we obviously have to accept exceptions and challenges, nothing in life is easy, because everything requires, experience, lots of mental effort, regular practice, but we need to persist no matter the challenges, its part of life, mistakes are good when we need to learn from them, so that people tell themselves to never cause it again, if one remembers
I found English extremely easy to learn but I get why it’d be hard because of the pronounciation : pretty much 3/4 letters in english have multiple pronounciations and theyre not quite easy to some foreigners
I wish English were my first language because I could easily have language exchanging in HelloTalk. Everyone wants to learn English in exchange of giving back their Chinese, Tagalog, Indonesian, Italian.
If you ancestors were murdered by britishers, your country colonized and you nation genocided, then your first language could be english. If you were to be born of cause
My native language is Czech (similar to Polish), my second language is English, and now I’m learning French. English is by far the easiest one. The only difficult thing at English is that written English isn’t phonetic (Czech is) but written French is even less phonetic. Every other thing is ridiculously easy in English.
French is more consistent than English when it comes to guessing the pronunciation from a given written word, you have to learn the rules and then you can pronounce almost everything (though the rules are not always easy to remember). In English most of the time there is just no rule and no way to ”guess" before actually earing it… Still apart from that english is overall easier that’s for sure
@@sans_hw187 Good to know, I’m not fluent in French so I haven’t mastered the pronunciation rules yet, they are complex. For me it’s especially frustrating that in some written words you pronounce just first half of it (deux), in others, only the last letter is silent (Paris) and lastly in some words you pronounce everything (simpa).
@@luciedvorakova2167 in reality it’s the same rule for Paris and Deux: the final consonant is usually silent (when the word is pronounced alone, since when followed by another word the « liaison » can happen, the final consonent has an impact). "Sympa" ends with a vowel sound, final vowel are always pronounced. Or it’s more vowel SOUNDS that are always pronounced! In French you must not think about letters individually but as groups of letters, that put together make a sound that is independent of how these letters are pronounced individually. Ou =/= o + u, etc. When you see "eau" you should not tell yourself "I see an e, an a and a u", just know that eau = o in term of sound. For Deux, in fact you don’t really pronounce half of it but "3/4" because the -eu group also make the same sound as the lettre E in for instance "de" (although most of the some -eu sounds slightly different and more like in "heure"…) It’s not very easy but with patience it will come, good luck in your learning process!
5:12 I'm just glad Spanish got wrecked on here. I love speaking Spanish at my job, but I despise verb conjugations, especially irregular verbs. You can cheat a bit on future tense with "voy a...", but with past tense I find myself saying "en el pasado" and then using present tense way too much.
11:02 These aren't really cognates, these are borrowings from French. Cognates are words that haven't been borrowed from one language to another, but are descended from the same proto-language. Example: English 'sister' and Polish 'siostra' are cognates, but at no point did English borrow it from Polish or the other way round, both come from the same proto-Indo-european language that both Polish and English evolved from.
Actually all he mentions in the video could also be the reason why English is such a difficult language to master. Because it’s simplicity in grammer, when native speakers speak english, its just so hard to figure out if it was subject or object , verb or noun… etc, making it so difficult to understand. And it also leads to so high level of flexibility in the language, there are enormous amount of ways of expression in English, which is even harder to master.
Almost everyone who studies English “masters” it enough to be able to speak comfortably, take the Philippines, most of their ppl “master” it enough to work call center for the USA. I’ve been at German for 5 years and still am not anywhere close to be able to do call center for German customers while I can write to you like this after the same amount of time I’ve been learning English.
As an English speaker who also speaks decent French I love being able to just guess words. Today I was thinking "what is the French word for poet, It’s probably just poet with some accents" one trip to the dictionary later and I come out validated
That's often a good idea. But be prepared to apologise when you discover a 'false friend', like trying to ask a Spanish woman if she's embarrassed. ;-)
I am Brazilian and I teach English as a foreign language. I will send this video to all of my students hahaha Do you believe that they find hard to remember that "s" at the end of the third person? Agrr, I tell them they are lucky because they dont need to learn Portuguese haha
Native speakers of Spanish who were proficient in English said the same thing as you: they were so glad that they learned Spanish first before English lol. The added benefit of Portuguese is that you all can understand Spanish to a degree as well. I would have preferred to learn your language in school instead.
That's right! haha I can easily understand Spanish even though I only studied it for a year at school. English is "ridiculously easy" as Olly said and I find it funny when people say "it's because you already know how to speak". But actually it's because my native language is WAY harder than English.
It's been said that English is an easy language to learn to speak...badly. Once past the basics, someone who learns English must master more nuances and word order and such than in most languages.
@Real Aiglon I don't think that necessarily follows. Most english speakers suck even more when they try to speak foreign languages. The thing is, a lot of people have trouble speaking foreign languages, the fact that english is relatively easy helps but it's still tough to replicate perfectly. Even as a portuguese (brazilian) speaker, I find it english easier to learn english than french or italian, even though they're much closer to my native tongue.
As a Spanish speaker, learning English isn't hard. But many people don't pronounce words properly and sometimes they replicate Spanish word order and grammar in English when it's not the case. Otherwise Spanish speakers would speak better English. Actually Portuguese is easier for a Spanish speaker especially grammar and vocabulary. And Italian is easier with vocabulary and pronunciation
Portuguese was my first language. Yes, one must learn genders, but the latter can be very useful in determining the subject that a relative clause is referring to. Also, there is a nuance that is lost in English. For example, the significance of a key scene in a Brazilian film I saw recently is lost completely in the English subtitles because English lacks gender in nouns. I would agree that English grammar (with some exceptions like phrasal verbs) is easer than a lot of other languages, but pronunciation is very difficult since it has around (depending on accent) 44 phonemes. The complex and inconsistent orthography of English makes learning correct pronunciation very challenging. Portuguese spelling is not as consistent as in Spanish and Italian, but one can learn to read, write, and pronounce the language without having to deal with the many hurdles in English. A great service would be done if the English speaking countries could join forces to simply and reform English spelling. Many countries with language academies have done this to their languages. But there’s no will to do so in English. We can’t even agree on honor/honour, jail/gaol. And we consider it a mark of intelligence to know how to spell and pronounce correctly words like though, through, tough, and so on. Good luck, English learners!
Beleza, compara só um verbo entre Português x Inglês TO BE. Portuguese there are 5.000 verbs and a lot ways to conjugation. Also Brazilian´s Portuguese have a bunch phrasal Verbs, Slangs and Idioms.
And the perfect/imperfect in Portuguese is very difficult to use, more difficult than the subjunctive, because it’s so idiomatic. Then there’s the personal infinitive, unique to Portuguese and not found in the other Romance languages. Adoro o português!
@@kaydod3190 Yes, tonal languages are very difficult to pronounce. And some languages that are not tonal like Arabic are also very hard to pronounce because they have some unique sounds. By that measure Portuguese isn’t “very” difficult either! However, in my experience native Portuguese speakers have a difficult time pronouncing English and the chaotic spelling of English doesn’t help. Someone I knew who was very knowledgeable in such matters said to me that the challenge for English speakers who learn Portuguese is the grammar. The challenge for Portuguese speakers is pronunciation. This is NOT to say that Portuguese is easy to pronounce. It’s far more difficult than Spanish or Italian, for example. And its nasal sounds like ão are very difficult to master and many, perhaps most, learners of Portuguese never get them quite right. But English pronunciation is not easy for speakers of Romance languages. The subtle difference between “ship” and “sheep” is just one example of many sounds that take a lot of practice. Let’s also have a broader view. Someone who speaks Mandarin or Cantonese finds the pronunciation of English, Portuguese, and other Western languages very difficult indeed!
I was raised in Egypt and back there most of the private schools, including mine, have English as their first language and French as the secondary one, and the remaining ones are the reverse. I don't know a single English school graduate who speaks French fluently, and I don't know a single French school graduate who doesn't speak English fluently. English is way easier than other languages, and don't get me started on Arabic, I really have no idea how none natives manage to learn it!
Keep in mind that even after you cull out any English language materials that may be taboo or illegal in a given country, you still have more than just about any other language. A large part of fluency is just massive exposure and significant amounts of time being spent practicing it.
@@kaydod3190 People have a tendancy to say that French is difficult but it's really not. It's systematic, just like the other Romance languages. Once you learn the rules (and you can) it's quite simple to get a hang of. And even though it's not phonetic, you can still learn the spelling rules. I speak both French and English and French people *hate* hearing that English is harder because they equate difficulty with superiority. So, the average joe in French is brought up thinking he's somewhat of a genius because he speaks a so-called difficult language he started learning as child.
Surprisingly, some people seem to be irked (or irked-adjacent) when someone states that their language is easy. First, the simplicity level is only relative; no foreign language is easy to master reasonably well. Second, the fact that a language manages to achieve basically the same things in a more streamlined way is a triumph, not a limitation. I'm pretty happy that my own language is not impossibly complicated, fascinated as I am by impossibly complicated languages.
Good point. I think for some people there's a notion that their language being difficult means that those who speak it fluently are more intelligent and are able to navigate said language's linguistic complexity. I also agree that it's a cool, convenient, and beautiful thing when a language (or anything) is more easily understood by the masses, even with all of its unique features and "irregularity". It doesn't mean it's of a lower quality nor does it mean those who speak it aren't as intelligent as the speakers of more inflected languages. In my opinion, ease of use, universal understanding, and widespread access is a sign of intelligent design, and I think English has that more so than other languages.
Es cierto que el inglés muchas veces es más práctico para resaltar algunos conceptos. Por eso a veces se usan anglicismos, que reemplazan frases enteras que no tienen su palabra equivalente en español o simplemente porque desplazó a la palabra original en español. Algunos están en contra de los anglicismos, pero si repasamos la historia, nuestro idioma se formó por influencia de varios otros idiomas que existieron antes, empezando por el latín. Una vez que lo castellanizamos, pasa a ser parte de nuestro idioma. Por ejemplo, fútbol 🥅.
I think it depends on your native language. English is relatively to learn if u speak French , Spanish, & especially German or Dutch which are somewhat similar to English since itself is a Germanic language.However, it's v. difficult to learn if u speak Chinese , Japanese , Korean or Arabic..
@Kay Dod I have an online friend from Iraq & she took English in HS & at the University level bcuz she wants to move to The UK or The US . I noticed her language skills had improved a great deal ( she barely made any grammatical errors) after not texting her for a year or so & told her that, which made her v. happy,so I stand corrected. I was just referring to my own personal experience w/Hebrew which I found extremely difficult ( like Arabic , it goes from right to left & doesn't use the Latin Alphabet) I only took it for a year but I was in the 3rd grade which is a great time to learn a new language. Anyway, I can only remember the words for Mother, Father & the word for Hello,Goodbye & Peace( Shalom)
English to me is simple in the sense that the conjugations are ridiculously easy. Just tack one word onto the other and you have your conjugation. Romance languages turn each verb conjugation into a whole new word. I don’t understand why people think it’s that complicated comparatively
10:50 That's not what cognates are. What you have in your pink example is just a bunch of loanwords. Cognates are words that share a common root. They might or might not mean the same thing. For example the English words "black" and "bleach" are cognates with each other and with Italian "brace" (embers). Sometimes they have totally opposite meaning, for example Czech "úžasné" (awesome) vs. Croatian "užasno" (awful).
You learn so much from this kind of channel. I was surprised at your comment because in my several decades of language learning 'cognate' has always been used, in my experience, to describe a word in a different language which is recognisable because it's similar or the same in another. Imagine my surprise when I read your comment, checked it and found you are absolutely correct. You live and you learn.
Some of these selling points can also be difficulties for ESL people. Like, to chain up a dozen of nouns is easy? And now enjoy making sense of typical half-page fiction sentence, or of news headers. - no gender in nouns? - you struggle through 100 pages of a story to eventually discover that "the captain" is actually a stunning woman. (A real complaint from a fellow translator, who does this for living)
Another anecdotal evidence: once I was reading a translated tech book on some database technology, there was a whole chapter dedicated to how to block a dump. I was puzzled, cause this concept would made no sense even to a novice in the field. Then it dawned on me the translator simply had swapped the nouns, and the topic actually was how to dump a block. Then the whole thing just clicked in. Well, the translator mustn't be a techie, but still it came unnoticed somehow.
Ollie; for Die Brücke or El Puente; when you ask them to describe the bridge those Germans will use words to emphasize the beauty and aesthetics and how pretty it looks in the landscape; all the lady-like features. The Spaniards go with strength and how many tons it can carry and how long the span is; all the manly characteristics.
Really? I thought there would only be like 5 things at most! It's just English has so many complications that I thought the easy parts would amount to nothing! Edit: the reasons amounted to: 1) no grammatical gender 2) bearly any conjugations (verbs, articles, case, adjectives) 3) common vocab with French or Latin 4) nouns sometimes function like adjectives 5) nouns sometimes function like verbs 6) Recources. It is literally the world language, so you've got choices for immersion in English from *every* culture. I'd say only having 26 letters to learn is a downside! I *wish* there were more letters, how do we distinguish the 'u's of "up", "use", and "pull"? How do we distinguish the 'th's of "thing", "this", and "Thames"? How do we distinguish the 'e's of "English", "Emperor", "eve", "hate", "eighth", "encompass", and "cafe"? really, English spelling is just a bloody mess!
English only pronounces ending e’s USUALLY if it’s from French or Spanish, Café is commonly spelled with an ‘ to indicate it’s a loan word. Not always but sometimes
Where english is ridiculously hard is the reading (like, you have the written word, you often can't guess the pronounciation, or you have pronounciation and can't guess the written word)
I'm native Burmese speakers the one that you show in this Video is old Burmese writing which didn't have any space but modern writing use space like English.
Irregular verbs and spelling are the two hot messes of English. There are lesser messes with things like plurals and articles, etc…but the basics are easy to grasp. I feel the same way about Japanese. Apart from Kanji, it is missing a lot of these complications, so the basics are super easy.
honestly, i know im a native English speaker so I can't act like i know what it's like to learn English as a second language, but to me French is even worse than english. It has huge inconsistencies with irregular verbs and spelling vs pronunciation as you said as well as many more bumps in the road. Even speakers of very closely related languages like Spanish and Italian (including English in a way due to the 70% french/latin vocabulary) say that French is an unintelligible mess compared to listening to the other romance languages.
@@nostalgiatrip7331 I believe French is mostly unintelligible for speakers of other romance languages because of its pronounciation that is very different from Spanish or Italian. I definitely agree about it being quite inconsistent in its spelling though.
@@chienbanane3168 it's not a very phonetic language, I've been learning french for 4 years and i can read and write but i can still struggle to understand natural speakers without subtitles. Meanwhile i literally just started learninf Spanish six months ago and i can already understand speakers 5x better than french
With English, pronounciation (and therefore listening) requires the most work. Irregular verbs are pretty easy to learn imo. They aren't too many and the verb paradigm is composed by only 3 forms. So yeah there's no excuse come on lol, students should just spend those few hours needed there and that should do it.
English is the most overhated language in the world. It's actually one of the best languages on Earth. The only real con is that the spelling is god-awful.
I think the hot mess that is English spelling and pronunciation(I'm super glad this is my first language. It's also the only one I'm fluent in) more than makes up for how simple and easy the grammar is.
@@poohoff French has a lot of rules, but they're consistent! English has few rules (I think they're below 300) but they're so inconsistent so you pretty much just have to treat every word like an exception!
Its true spoken English is easy but if one is not constsntly writing one can easly have problems with spelling Beside its good to know when you are reading if the person is speaking to a lady or to a group of ladies or to one person or to two persons or a froup of persons If we say for example your book , what if its a group , what if its a group of women ? Or 2 males or 2 females ets , in all cases we say your book But i do fully agree this is whats making learning English easy .
The articles "a" and "an" are a little tricky though. There are some exceptions. "What kind of animal is that?" "That is a ewe." (female sheep) [ Native speakers make this adjustment automatically. ] The word "hot" is ambiguous: "This food is hot", (high temperature, or spicy ?) We really need two different words for "hot". Having only one word for "you" is my main complaint about English. Why don't we fix that ??? I agree, BOOKS are good for learning. In my German classes we had a text book for grammar and several graded books to enhance the learning experience and learn about culture too.
I've been dealing with the English language for decades. And up to this day whenever I read an English text or listen to a native speaking I stumble upon a number of unknown words. English vocabulary is humongous. Phrasal verbs are also a nightmare. So, although I like it a lot, I would not say English is easy.
No, English is one of the easiest languages to learn. English vocabulary is not humongous compared to other languages. Phrasal verbs are nothing compared to other languages. You just have to memorize them. Stop over exaggerating.
@@kaydod3190 At a basic level, I agree that English is quite easy to learn. But to have a decent level and become fluent, English is very hard. If you believe otherwise, your are a native or you've been living in an English speaking country for at least five years speaking mostly to natives or you have attended high school and university in English. Or you might be a non native who uses the language only in situations that don't require a huge vocabulary. English vocabulary consists of two different sets in one single language: the Germanic words and the Latin ones. It's huge. And phrasal verbs only start to feel natural and be memorized after you've had years of exposure.
English is the easiest language because it does not have many conjugations and declensions. We don't need to worry about the subjunctive mood and lexical gender either. English has the subjunctive mood, but it's easy to learn.
People on the internet keep saying things like "we should really respect people who speak english as their second language because they managed to learn the mess that is our spelling" and while yes, speaking foreign language fluidly is worth respecting, this seems more like trying to feel special, because foreign learners never seem to complain. First of all, english spelling does have rules and is mostly predictable, there's just a lot of them and if someone explained them to you as they did to me when I was at school, you'll probably understand them better too. And secondly, this weird spelling system is really a small price to pay for the convenience of not having to deal with declension, conjugation and aspect and given that I'm polish, I certainly know how complicated it is. The only things english could possibly have easier, other than spelling, is this impractically large number of tenses and th sounds (however we have these wonderful sounds like ś, ć, ż, ź, dż, dź, sz, cz, ą and ę, so I probably shouldn't complain)
I will never understand why people say English is the easiest language to learn. It's not. It's difficult. There's virtually no rule on how words should be spelled or how they should be pronounced. There's too many exceptions. I've been learning this language for 5 years and I've gotten nowhere closer to even being business-level speaker, let alone native-level. Although it may be because my mother tongue is not an Indian-European language but Japanese.
We have many of the "same" basic English words in Danish - often just within a simple sound shift or a slightly alternative spelling or pronounciation at the most ( e.g. dem = them, deres [dair-es] = their(s), disse = these, tørst [tirst] = thirst, torn = thorne, trone = throne, vind, vidne = witness, mand [man*] / mænd [men*] = man / men ... først [first] = first, skarp = sharp, varm, kold, vild, bred = broad, god = good, glad, nær [nair] = near, ny [ne(w)] = new, ung = young, ... op [up] = up, over, under, fra = from, ud = out, i[ee*] / ind [in*] = in, efter, før [fur] = be-fore, indtil [in*-til] = until, ... have, er [air] = ARe + am & is, kan, vil, skal, give, tage = take, se, hør(e) [h'oe'r-e] = hear, find(e), hold(e), drik(ke) =drink, , gå [go] = go / walk, tænk(e) [taink-e] = think, syng(e), synk(e), hæng(e), leve = live, dø [d'oe'] = die, bring(e), sving(e), slyng(e), drive, spyt(te), skift(e), haste, skrabe = scrape, bær(e) [bair-e] = bear / carry, ro = row, sejl(e) [sighl-e] = sail, svøm(me) = swim, smile [smeel-e], vade = wade, vandre = wander, lån(e) [loan-e] = loan, læn(e) [lain-e] = lean, lad(e) = let / load, bræk(ke) = break, bage = bake ... the list of all these very close cognates between D & E is nearly endless 😉 ), - as well as many similar grammatical features - the same word order mostly or very nearly, NO cases for nouns, their articles and any associated adjectives, same verb conjugations for ALL grammatical persons, tenses formed along the same lines as in E and many parallel strong verbs etc. So learning English is actually surprisingly easy for Danes and the other Scandinavians with their very similar languages, since we by magic already "know" half of the basics in advance - almost like a huge extention of our own languages. Having lots of TV- programmes and films here in English without dubbing ( unlike in Germany ), but with subtitles instead is of course also a great help on top of all those deep similarities, since we are used to hearing all sorts of spoken English accents and dialects and therefore know how and what to listen up for. ☺️
I never learned Spanish, but I worked for the US Census Bureau interviewing a lot of Spanish speakers with the help of cards written in Spanish. At one point I found I could understand Spanish speaking athletes. Spanish doesn't share the characteristics that make English easy, but Spanish is one of the easier languages for English speakers.
Yes ! well for me as a french Canadian i learned English from watching TV and interacting with people ! never opened a book to learn any language ! So also , i thought English was the international language because it s the easiest to learn ! If you re a pilot, you must learn English because it s the language used all over the world for all pilots ! when you know English you can go almost anywhere in the world . I know my English is not perfect but it s not too bad ! lol ! 🤓
I agree, the only thing which is difficult for me are the phrasal verbs, for me, I don't know if to other people it's the same and maybe the pronunciation but it happens in many many languages and you get use to it
English is actually a very ambigious language, same words and sentences can have different meanings making it difficult to interpret for non-native english speakers, but maybe the english script (Latin) and the pronunciations are easy to grasp
eu sou / estou tu és / estás ele é / está nós somos / estamos vós sois / estais eles são / estão eu era / estava tu eras / estavas ele era / estava nós éramos / estávamos vós éreis / estáveis eles eram / estavam eu fui / estive tu foste / estiveste ele foi / esteve nós fomos / estivemos vós fostes / estivestes eles foram / estiveram eu seria / estaria tu serias / estarias ele seria / estaria nós seríamos / estaríamos vós seríeis / estaríeis eles seriam / estariam eu serei / estarei tu serás / estarás ele será / estará nós seremos / estaremos vós sereis / estareis eles serão / estarão eu fosse / estivesse tu fosses / estivesses ele fosse / estivesse nós fôssemos / estivéssemos vós fôsseis / estivésseis eles fossem / estivessem eu for / estiver tu fores / estiveres ele for / estiver nós formos / estivermos vós fordes / estiverdes eu fora / estivera tu foras / estiveras ele fora / estivera nós fôramos / estivéramos vós fôreis / estivéreis eles foram / estiveram E ainda falta coisa And there's still a lot of conjugations
No, I don't. I just used it, I was playing video games all day and chatting with people online. I also remember trying to understand RUclips videos where a random guy explains how to solve a puzzle in a video game. Then I've spoken every weekday with my American teacher for four years.
Check out these impossible languages! 👉🏼 ruclips.net/video/2rxA-GBYJb0/видео.html
well i saw a show that said kids who speak english take about 1 year more to learn it than kids of other languages.
sing sings singing sang
take takes taking took taken [pass]
Fewer plugs and you'd get a thumb's up.
All languages are equally easy to learn natively, but of the languages, English is fairly easy to learn as a second language. compared to the others you mentioned.
was learning german for several years - barely can do anything
after half a year of learning english easily excelled my german
it's a great language i just love it
One thing English has a massive advantage with is its status as a global lingua franca, so exposure to the language is always guarenteed.
Yes exposure trumps everything, for sure!
We can thank Hollywood..then The Beatles...then Tech for much of that : )
It also means people are exposed to liberalism which is also a bad thing. Lol
@@marksanders2168 How does that even relates to what I wrote?
@@marksanders2168 unbelievably random. stop typing in comments sections, just realise that nobody cares - we're all here for the video, not for your ass.
For ridiculously easy, I’m surprised Olly didn’t also mention the word “you”. In English, it’s just “you” no matter what. In other languages, you have to be careful - sometimes _really_ careful - which form of “you” to use. How well do you know the person? Is the person your elder? Your boss or teacher or parent? How many of “you” are you talking to? Is the person’s social status above or below you. The list goes on. In English none of that matters. It’s just YOU.
The only way I can think of to incorporate a formal kind of respect into English, is to refer to the other speaker as "sir" or "mam"
"Thank you, sir"
"Yes ma'am, I'll look into that for you"
I'm glad there isn't extra levels of sir to keep up with, such as a super-sir or a mini-ma'am 🤣
@@grain9640 Or a mini-miss in a miniskirt.
Formal registers still exist in English though. You have to speak in a different way depending on who you're talking to and in what context
Well... I think it's matter of preference
Some people prefer simplicity... others prefer accuracy
Sometimes i get confused when someone says something like: "you are smart"
Is it me or is it us?
However, I still think that English is so easy compared to many other languages, I tried to learn many languages other than English and I failed miserably.
@@mohammedalahmed3133
Admittedly “You are smart” is a bit vague. Most English speakers take that into account when talking. They do it without even thinking about it. If there’s just one person being spoken to, then “you are smart” is not ambiguous. If there are a group of people present, then English speakers will add other words to make the meaning clear. For instance, the phrase “you’re so smart” almost always refers to the one person being spoken to. Whereas, if the speaker wants to include everyone present, then phrases like “you guys are smart” or “all of you are smart” would be used.
I was once told using “you guys” is substandard English. But it’s so freaking common most people won’t complain.
When I did French in school, my teacher once asked me to translate an English word. I didn't know it, but I guessed by saying the English word in a French way, and got it right.
This was me in Spanish class 😂. Would you like to pass me the teléfono in el hotel por favor ❤️❤️😘.
@@Xlebaking Someone called me out on "el carro", I had to tell them "nope, sorry, not making it up!"
Conversation: conversation /kõveʀsɑsjõ/ Gotta love that half of all English vocabulary came straight from French, right?
Le surrender hohohohn!
English is easy to learn owing to the sheer volume of music, movies television and online content in English. As the global lingua franca, there are also significant economic and personal benefits to learning English - so it's not hard to find the motivation to learn (motivation being arguably the most important ingredient to successful language learning).
Still a hell to spell though. And unnecessary grammar detail like is/are, was/were, seem/seems, and so on, is a constant struggle. At least for my part, as a Swede.
@@herrbonk3635 For me too as a native speaker.
@@herrbonk3635English is actually a lot less inflected compared to other languages. There are languages with more grammar rules and linguistic variety and complexity. Also, English is generally spoken a lot slower than the other popular languages, so it's easier to comprehend and speak without impeding the flow of a conversation. Not saying people don't struggle learning it though. But there are some added benefits for foreign learners of English due to the irregularities it has compared to other languages.
@@Sol-Amar Yeah, French and German grammar are even worse, Finnish too. Perhaps I'm just spoiled, growing up with a mother tongue being one of the easiest languages on earth :) Pretty much so even when spoken fast.
Ummm, I hate to admit it but English is the exact opposite of easy to learn, it’s one of the worlds most difficult depending if it was your primary or second, and what other language is similar to it, as you learn more English you will start realizing just how tough it is, what can I say languages are complicated😕🫤. Like for me it was Estonian, so learning English might be really intricate in my case. Any grammatical rules are never change from most languages dude, learning English can be very overwhelming, exhausting and tiresome, it’s why I suggest you start off simple and then progress, don’t just cram words in your brain, no. On top of it all, it contains the most vast vocabulary, there’s over 170,000 words, the truth hurts sometimes. 😢 In fact, it’s borrowed words from various languages, it’s background is historical. English is like half phonetic and not, there’s so many rules broken in it. But also depends on how smart you wanna be in life.
I´d argue that English would be easier if it had more letters. Having more sounds than letters plus inconsistent spelling isn´t "ridiculously easy"^^ Many other languages are much easier when it comes to that.
I'd actually argue that it would be better with less letters 😂
Many of the letters are not required and all of the sounds can be made by combining letters together.
Indeed, English is a widespread pidgin language which is long overdue orthographic reform
@@annarboriter it's not a pidgin language it's a Germanic language with heavy romantic borrowing. The core of the language is very clearly germanic still.
@@ethanoux10 FYI: Pidg is neither a country nor an ethnic group. I hope this clarifies your misunderstanding
@@annarboriter i am aware. English by definition is not a pidgin language
Been learning polish for just over a year now and I love seeing you using this language as an example in this video! I would love to see you do a video explaining cases in full as I’ve never been able to properly wrap my head around the cases, how to use them, when to use them etc… it’s such a difficult concept for a native English speaker and you explain things in such a way that makes it easy for me to understand. Keep up the great work :)
As native Polish speaker I think you should just focus on input and it will come to you naturally
@@videogamerka0009 I do exactly that, but after almost a year and a half I would like to understand more how the cases work. I do most of my reading on LingQ but it would be nice just to understand the cases better as when I have conversation practice on italki or in real life as I do quite often then I can actually start to use the correct cases for the situation
@@LanguagesWithJamie In the long run, it's easier to learn a language after you have already known how to use it
English has cases too, for example: I (nominative), me (accusative, dative), mine (genitive). Unfortunately nouns aren't inflected for case but if you understand the difference between "I" and "me" then you already know how cases work
@@pia_mater thank you, I have heard this before although I do forget as we don’t really refer to it in English as cases/declension. It definitely helps to understand their use as in English we are able to immediately identify whether to use I/me/mine etc… in Polish I can use some cases immediately without knowing the specific rule, for example I know that in most if not all instances that I see ‘po’ the word that follows is in (I think genitive?) and normally ends in ‘U’ although not always the same ending. Na przykład - po polsku, po południu, po angielsku etc. This is just something I’ve picked up from my many hours of reading, listening and speaking the language, but I do like to also understand the reasoning behind this as well as being able to use it in conversation :)
English does technically still have a "case" system, but it only applies to pronouns, e.g. "he", if the object of a verb or preposition, becomes "him" (objective), and in the genitive, "his" - or "hers" in place of "she". I don't know if English grammarians consider this a case per se, but still certainly has its origins in the case system :)
Also, for #7, using a noun directly before another noun like this can be called a "noun adjunct", and it's really a super helpful feature in English... it doesn't exist in many languages, e.g. many Slavic languages. My mother tongue has a type of adjective called a "relational", which is used specfically to serve the purpose that a noun adjunct serves in English.
Great points, but as someone (English) who has taught grammar to both native speakers and foreign language students, I can safely say that we do not often talk about 'cases', just subject and object pronouns. We do not usually make the distinction re adjective and nouns adjunct either. We call 'war' an adjective for 'story' in 'war story', for simplification and because its function is the main point. English is a building block language: once you have the basics, you build onto them quite easily and systematically. Happy days!
English orthography is very reluctant to create compound words reflected by spelling even after a lexical stress shift is created to demonstrate that, say, Clímatechange, is itself a new concept worthy of a noun status
@@annarboriter The use of a hyphen to 'create' compound words is the best option in my opinion.
@@annarboriter Indeed, I don't know why, but compounds are still often written with a space even if they're considered collocations, like your example.
@@spaghettiking653 It's mainly a matter of frequency and historical durability. They'll typically start as two words next to each other, after a period of time, a hyphen will be introduced and eventually, you get the form that removes the hyphen. A lot of it has to do with the degree to which the compound is recognized as a thing, and the degree to which people want to be specific/lazy about it. Tomorrow started out as to morrow before replacing the space with a hyphen to form to-morrow.
Speaking of language resources… it is surprisingly hard to find resources for Modern Greek. But one thing I have learned is that Harry Potter is available in all mainstream languages, so I tend to buy Harry Potter Book 1 and have a go at it. Don’t ask how many editions I own. Lol
Hahaha yeah same, I've even got copies of it in Irish and Latin 🤪
That actually an excellent idea, especially since you basically already know the story structure.
If don't got Harry Potter, it ain't mainstream.
Aristotle books are also in Greek
I'm Dutch and one reason I could understand English as a toddler is because the cartoons were English with Dutch subtitles, but I couldn't read yet. So as a Dutch child I was already very influenced by the 'American' media such as movies and music. But that doesn't make English easy. In primary school I was taught English and I remembered the first lesson well. The teacher said write the numbers in English. So I wrote: wan too, tri, vor, faif, siks, sevun, ejt, nain, ten? Then I found out that English is quite difficult to write. But also the illogically written words such as Wednesday, tonight, bottle, etc. I think one of the reasons why English is the lingua franca in the world is due to the US. The US has spread its power, culture, music and film industries worldwide since World War II. In addition, English is a beautiful language, but to write you have to see it first.
Ik denk dat het verspreiden van Engels zijn oorsprong al heeft in het gigantische Britse Rijk
It’s a lingua Franca because of its simplicity
You got "ten" right! ;)
In my native language, Icelandic, the definite article is at the back of the word which also changes depending on the gender of the word.
The house = húsið (neuter)
The boat = báturinn (masculine)
The sun = sólin (feminine)
Also, names are conjugated.
I think reaching the upper levels of English is difficult. The way we speak in real world scenarios is rarely like the way textbooks, and literature in general, would lead you to believe. I have a friend from Germany who is quite good at English but the moment you throw any abstract phrasing at her (think figures of speech or slang / idioms) she is completely lost.
That applies for any language though
Yh every language has its own slang, idioms and ways of phrasing things which when translated directly make little sense.
That could be how her mind works - she is a literal type. I have had many Intermediate students who love idioms and use them a lot.
English is my wife’s second language and she says the grammar is easy but idioms are the big problem in becoming fluent. There are far more than any other, European at least, language.
English has a lot of slang because of the disparate number of large English speaking countries with a strong literary tradition.
This would deserve a follow-up video titled “10 Reasons English Is Incredibly Difficult”. 😀 Sure, the basics are pretty easy to pick up, and one can put together simple sentences very early on, compared to most other languages. Also, the level of familiarity (mostly thanks to the dominant anglophone culture) helps a good deal. It’s getting to the point of proficiency when it suddenly becomes much more difficult. Even things one expected to be helpful start standing in the way all of a sudden. The real complexity of English is easy to underestimate as it’s obscured by the simplistic-looking grammar at the beginning. And I’ve been having a lot of fun conquering English my entire life. 🤗
"And I’ve been having a lot of fun conquering English my entire life. 🤗"
Good on you, Mic. I am giving up studying English. Although I did Master of Applied English in an Australian university more than 20 years ago and live in Australia since then, I still have lots of English words which I have never seen or heard. Recently I read "The Handmaid's Tale", and I don't know how many words I checked in the dictionary and how many I skipped. At first I thought I should learn those words, but I soon got tired of studying them because I have no problem or difficulty living in Australia without knowing those words.
He has a already made a video about "why English is so difficult"
There is exactly that - look at the link at the end of this video. :)
Here you go: ruclips.net/video/DrlX-L4o2KM/видео.html
did you watch the video...?
11:50 What is that language coming up that starts with a letter l?
I'm Czech and our language has basically all of these things that make languages so difficult. At least Czech is mostly a phonetic language
It’s spelt phonetic bro just helping
@@annoymous7052 I don't mind. It shows how stupid some “rules” in English are
I wish English was phonetic. Ukrainian is phonetic language and we have ability to read and write anything from first grade (as 7 years old)... It was always mind blowing to watch USA movies where was spelling contests, it felt extremely dumb
@@helenhikari spelling contests aren’t dumb. Those kids are very smart
@@kaydod3190 you didn't get it, I watched movies dubbed, so it was like : how to spell word itself? - the answer : I, t, s, e, l, f. How to spell word nostril? - n, o, s, t, r, i, l. It was like I didn't get what was going on, because if you hear word, than you know how to write it. I wasn't saying that those kids were stupid, of course they were not. The concept of English spelling is stupid
As a Spanish speaker my real struggle with English was pronunciation. I wanted to pronounce properly and I had to learn to replicate many vowel sounds that don't exist in Spanish. Also, getting used to differences in grammar, new vocabulary and the worst of it all, phrasal verbs. There are many phrasal verbs I've had to learn in order to understand native speakers.
With Spanish, it's the speed it's spoken, the heavy use of slang in some dialects, numerous different accents, and the different sentence structures compared to English (I.e. I gave it to you. Vs. TE lo di) or the frequent use of lo, la, el, ello, lo que, ese, asi como, como pronto, aún etc..
@@Sol-Amar if you're going to learn Spanish, you better get used to articles because unlike English speakers, Spanish speakers use Spanish for the "the" article for almost everything, even when they're talking in general. In English, there's like a subtle difference when someone is using 'the' or not on the sentences. In spanish, they use it whenever they can for some reason
@depressito Yep, I noticed and can tell the difference. That's why I included it because it takes some getting used to for L1 English speakers. But it was the speed and pronunciation more than anything.
@@Sol-Amar yeah, I remember having the same experience when watching English videos in the past. I thought native speakers spoke really fast. Now, I actually think that English speakers might just speak a little bit slower than Spanish speakers. The speed is going to feel different when you expose to the language. Spanish speakers may speak faster but words are longer so your brain is going to process them well enough later on when you get better at the language
(if you compare both languages. English takes way less amount of time to say something compared to Spanish and since the brain has extra time to process all the meaning of the sentences.. You're often going to find that there are less people using the Spanish equivalent fillers such as "ehmmm.. " which is Spanish for "Uhmmmmm...")
@@depressito Yep totally agree! English is definitely spoken a lot slower on average than Spanish, especially in the South/Midwest or rural areas (American English) and I mean really slow for some dialects. English is also a stressed-timed language while Spanish is syllable-timed. And of course there are accents in English that are fast. When I began to become proficient in Spanish, people told me I started speaking too fast in English so some of those Spanish linguistic features definitely carried over to my core way of speaking.
You make a good point on it's a matter of getting your brain accustomed to the sounds. The longer I've stayed somewhere and spoke it, the more recognizable and familiar the sounds and speed became. And I never noticed the filler sounds not being common until I heard a lot of people in a specific area of Mexico use "este" and "osea" a lot. May I ask what's your country of origin? Or the country of your heritage if you live abroad?
I kinda had it in reverse for French. When I was in Belgium, I could decipher the French signs easier than the Dutch ones due to all the French loanwords in my native Turkish, and English. Except for the days of the week, in that part Dutch was more useful...knowing days of the week in German did help on that part.
Languages are connected to each other and it’ is quite helpful. Ottoman Turkish must have been a bit easier to learn for a foreigner. Turkish has many loan words from Arabic, so learning Arabic from knowing a bit Turkish is helpful. Also, I agree about some French words.
But in general Turkish would have been easier if they had kept more of the original loan words
@@TheGrindelwald I am learning Indonesian at the moment and the same Arabic loanwords make it easier for me. I even realized some words I thought to be original Turkish words were in fact loanwords.
@@yorgunsamuray same, i didnt know many words i thought to be of turkish origin were from arabic.
I love the english language. Im very proud that im almost on a native Level of speaking etc. Greetings from Germany.
Just when you said it's easy to just add "the" in front of a noun, I immediately thought "what about the pronunciation of THE ??? " and then you showed the movie "Les gendarmes à ..." 😄
I remember my English courses when I was in school, our teacher tried to make us pronunce "the" , imagine 30 pupils showing their tongues to their teacher ... 😂
to be fair, we did that too growing up in england! our teachers used to say it was the only time we were ever allowed to stick our tongues out at the teacher when they were teaching us to pronounce "th"
😂
@@るう-j1b I wouldn't have imagined that, haha 😄
Tbh if English fixed its spelling, it’d be 4x easier but also UGLIER, for most foreigners it’d be better but as a native speaker, I’ve seen how ugly English is to read if we reform it….
@@kiboma4209 something tells me it would look like a 3x worse version of danish
Have you guys at Story Learning considered making a course for Tagalog? Tagalog is a highly underrated language. There’s a surprisingly substantial Filipino presence in the USA. I would highly recommend it. It’s a beautiful language
I really wanted to learn Polish since there are many Polish speakers in Chicago, but after seeing the cases and the amount if consonants in each word (although I hear it's phonetic), I switched to Spanish. I may try it again one day.
Follow your linguistic passions!
Native Polish here, you shouldn't give up, it's really doable if people are able to learn much harder languages like chinese, arabic etc. I really think you shouldn't focus on learning all these cases through grammar, instead all input approach and I think it's possible to do.
One easy thing in Polish: we have only 3 tenses( past, present and future) This makes difficult for us with any non Slavic language to use tenses properly
We've got 5 tenses ;-) (past perfect, past imperfect, present, future simple and compound future tense) but in general tenses are much easier than in english ;-)
I speak Czech and I decided to just ignore the cases^^ The more you read and listen, the more the grammar starts to sink in. Some stuff is easier than in English (spelling, tenses) so yeah, follow your interests :)
In english there are 2 exceptions for conjugation (at least). The verb to be can be conjugated in the first person as well: I am, he is, you are. Also the seldom used subjunctive tense uses the infinitives of verbs, like "he be".
Are you familiar with the poem: The Chaos by Gerard Nolst-Trenite. It's about the English language and it will drive you absolutely BONKERZ. It has a bezillion 'exceptions' stringed together; it's impossible!
No, but I’ll look it up!
I don't even remember the last time I saw a poem written to be a poem that made me feel joy, the field is so trash. But this is genuinely amazing, thank you.
@@storylearning I'm quite surprised you have not heard about it.
@@storylearning Fun fact: there are various versions of that poem, all by the same author.
I listened to a non native English speaker who read that poem and he actually did pretty well
1:05 English does have a (very) select few nouns that are still gendered, professions like waiter/waitress, actor/actress, though in more recent years people have started to lean more heavily toward gender-neutral equivalents for words like handyman/woman. Some more nouns that are gendered are things like blond/blonde or brunet/brunette. However, none of that really matters, because gender isn't baked into nouns (besides pronouns, but that's a different topic) or articles like other languages, and with things like blond/blonde either one works perfectly fine.
(Worth noting that most of the words I mentioned are from French, a language that *is* gendered)
Yes and ships and countries and sometimes feminised.
@@chendaforest true, though that has to do more with the pronouns one would use to describe them, man and woman are also gendered in that way.
@@thisisnotmyname4499 yes although I suppose things like blond/blonde or masseure/masseuse are descriptive nouns (is that the technical term ? possessive noun ?) unlike say a table, which in French say is always feminine.
Alternative title: Other languages are harder than English
Yes… and no-one would click on it 🫡
True
It's worth noting that irregularity in words in a language is usually more common with regular words that you'll use a lot, rather than in less commonly used words. Which is both good and bad as it means that you get hit with it up front, but it also means that you'll likely use them enough to get used to it.
I'd agree it's easy "to get started" but dang, is it HARD to _master_ 😅 But yeah, 100% with you on your 12:53 point; I even just made a video about myself 😎 (You were properly tagged, twice 😉)
You could say the same thing about Mandarin. It's a lot easier to get started with than one would think, but it gets extremely hard as you get further into it because of the trade offs that led to an easy start.
I learned English to a pretty good level in 5th grade. I'm from Moldova so Romanian and Russian are the predominant languages. Despite that, I found English to be very easy to learn, I almost never encountered something I couldn't wrap my head around. English isn't a hard language whatsoever, but as any other language, it's difficulty depends on the language the person learning knows. If you're accustomed to Japanese/Chinese, then of course a language with a completely different alphabet will be difficult, with all the rules which just aren't a thing in your language.
Thanks Olly. I'm old and not the sharpest pencil in the box. Helped me understand what declension is. Enjoyed reading your book Short Stories in German. Maybe i'll not be a permanent beginner after all !
I totally agree with that, very pertinent points developed here.
The most difficult part of English is reading 📖 especially for native speakers of Romance languages. When they read they need to become familiar with the numerous vowels we use. Not even to talk of the silent consonants and the irregular plurals of certain nouns
It’s not that difficult to read
Latin noun declension was the bane of my life at school!
Good to see a video that dicusses the technical things that help make English easy. I think that that easiness has contributed to its lingua franca status.
Lol! Love your videos. We have an old, American TV show called I Love Lucy. Her husband is a Cuban and therefore English is (was) his second language. He gets into how difficult English is. They bring up an example; the same repeated letters in a word with different pronunciations, ough. Ought, though, tough, thought, bough, cough, through…. Throws many English learners for a loop.
Nothing difficult about it. You just have to practice and memorize pronunciation and spelling.
@Ir liz English grammar is only simple if you ignore its syntax, which is incredibly complicated. Admittedly, you can speak a certain amount of English without knowing that much of it.
Engrish is easy, especialwy when you know gooder grammar.
Still your comment was obvious to understand. Aún así tu comentario fue obvio de entender.
And wehn yor speling is good to
Angrysh 😂😂😂
I think you are trollling kkkk
@Ir liz Don't lie, that was good grammar, not perfect, but good.
People think English is easy because you can start forming simple, easily understood phrases at the begining stages. Moreover, the anglosphere doesn't care so much about non-native speakers' mistakes because, despite the grammatical errors and what not, we still understand what the non-native speaker is trying to say. Basically people can get away with linguistic murder at the beginning. However, once you delve deeper and go to higher levels, English is *extremely* difficult. Like someone else said in this comments section, if English were so easy, non- native speakers would speak it much better than they actually do. I would not call English "ridiculously easy". That's a gross exaggeration, imho.
I mean English is very easy to throw sentences together but loads of natives struggle with grammar due to its complexity
@@anonymouswhite352 Exactly !
So true. Every non native English speaker makes so many mistakes when speaking. It’s definitely not the most easiest
@@samsamiii509keep making the mistake and it’ll eventually become the norm 😂
Oh yeah, definitley agree, don’t go assuming language is ‘simple’ since they’re harder than we think, we obviously have to accept exceptions and challenges, nothing in life is easy, because everything requires, experience, lots of mental effort, regular practice, but we need to persist no matter the challenges, its part of life, mistakes are good when we need to learn from them, so that people tell themselves to never cause it again, if one remembers
I found English extremely easy to learn but I get why it’d be hard because of the pronounciation : pretty much 3/4 letters in english have multiple pronounciations and theyre not quite easy to some foreigners
I wish English were my first language because I could easily have language exchanging in HelloTalk. Everyone wants to learn English in exchange of giving back their Chinese, Tagalog, Indonesian, Italian.
Your english is good enough now.
@@Frag_Limit Thanks, monee!
If you ancestors were murdered by britishers, your country colonized and you nation genocided, then your first language could be english. If you were to be born of cause
My native language is Czech (similar to Polish), my second language is English, and now I’m learning French. English is by far the easiest one. The only difficult thing at English is that written English isn’t phonetic (Czech is) but written French is even less phonetic. Every other thing is ridiculously easy in English.
French is more consistent than English when it comes to guessing the pronunciation from a given written word, you have to learn the rules and then you can pronounce almost everything (though the rules are not always easy to remember). In English most of the time there is just no rule and no way to ”guess" before actually earing it…
Still apart from that english is overall easier that’s for sure
@@sans_hw187 Good to know, I’m not fluent in French so I haven’t mastered the pronunciation rules yet, they are complex. For me it’s especially frustrating that in some written words you pronounce just first half of it (deux), in others, only the last letter is silent (Paris) and lastly in some words you pronounce everything (simpa).
@@luciedvorakova2167 in reality it’s the same rule for Paris and Deux: the final consonant is usually silent (when the word is pronounced alone, since when followed by another word the « liaison » can happen, the final consonent has an impact). "Sympa" ends with a vowel sound, final vowel are always pronounced.
Or it’s more vowel SOUNDS that are always pronounced! In French you must not think about letters individually but as groups of letters, that put together make a sound that is independent of how these letters are pronounced individually.
Ou =/= o + u, etc. When you see "eau" you should not tell yourself "I see an e, an a and a u", just know that eau = o in term of sound. For Deux, in fact you don’t really pronounce half of it but "3/4" because the -eu group also make the same sound as the lettre E in for instance "de" (although most of the some -eu sounds slightly different and more like in "heure"…)
It’s not very easy but with patience it will come, good luck in your learning process!
@@sans_hw187 Thanks, for explanation!
5:12 I'm just glad Spanish got wrecked on here. I love speaking Spanish at my job, but I despise verb conjugations, especially irregular verbs. You can cheat a bit on future tense with "voy a...", but with past tense I find myself saying "en el pasado" and then using present tense way too much.
4:46 YESS IM TRYING TO LEARN POLISH THEY GOT LIKE 10 DIFFERENT WORDS FOR EACH WORD DEPENDINNG ON THE CONTEXT 😭😭
Haha
11:02
These aren't really cognates, these are borrowings from French.
Cognates are words that haven't been borrowed from one language to another, but are descended from the same proto-language. Example: English 'sister' and Polish 'siostra' are cognates, but at no point did English borrow it from Polish or the other way round, both come from the same proto-Indo-european language that both Polish and English evolved from.
Actually all he mentions in the video could also be the reason why English is such a difficult language to master. Because it’s simplicity in grammer, when native speakers speak english, its just so hard to figure out if it was subject or object , verb or noun… etc, making it so difficult to understand. And it also leads to so high level of flexibility in the language, there are enormous amount of ways of expression in English, which is even harder to master.
Almost everyone who studies English “masters” it enough to be able to speak comfortably, take the Philippines, most of their ppl “master” it enough to work call center for the USA. I’ve been at German for 5 years and still am not anywhere close to be able to do call center for German customers while I can write to you like this after the same amount of time I’ve been learning English.
@@Timothee_Chalamet_CMBYNAgree 👍.
As an English speaker who also speaks decent French I love being able to just guess words. Today I was thinking "what is the French word for poet, It’s probably just poet with some accents" one trip to the dictionary later and I come out validated
That's often a good idea. But be prepared to apologise when you discover a 'false friend', like trying to ask a Spanish woman if she's embarrassed. ;-)
@@SpiritmanProductions Ha ha ha, that will get you a smack!
@@SpiritmanProductions En México:
«¿Quieres coger un taxi?»
@@ba-wp5zs Ha-ha, yes indeed.
I am Brazilian and I teach English as a foreign language. I will send this video to all of my students hahaha Do you believe that they find hard to remember that "s" at the end of the third person? Agrr, I tell them they are lucky because they dont need to learn Portuguese haha
Native speakers of Spanish who were proficient in English said the same thing as you: they were so glad that they learned Spanish first before English lol. The added benefit of Portuguese is that you all can understand Spanish to a degree as well. I would have preferred to learn your language in school instead.
That's right! haha I can easily understand Spanish even though I only studied it for a year at school. English is "ridiculously easy" as Olly said and I find it funny when people say "it's because you already know how to speak". But actually it's because my native language is WAY harder than English.
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin & Hobbes.
It's been said that English is an easy language to learn to speak...badly.
Once past the basics, someone who learns English must master more nuances and word order and such than in most languages.
@Real Aiglon I don't think that necessarily follows. Most english speakers suck even more when they try to speak foreign languages. The thing is, a lot of people have trouble speaking foreign languages, the fact that english is relatively easy helps but it's still tough to replicate perfectly. Even as a portuguese (brazilian) speaker, I find it english easier to learn english than french or italian, even though they're much closer to my native tongue.
@Real Aiglon That’s only because they are nervous, not trying hard enough, or lazy with learning
English grammar is quite easy, at least compared to Latin languages.
As a Spanish speaker, learning English isn't hard. But many people don't pronounce words properly and sometimes they replicate Spanish word order and grammar in English when it's not the case. Otherwise Spanish speakers would speak better English. Actually Portuguese is easier for a Spanish speaker especially grammar and vocabulary. And Italian is easier with vocabulary and pronunciation
Portuguese was my first language. Yes, one must learn genders, but the latter can be very useful in determining the subject that a relative clause is referring to. Also, there is a nuance that is lost in English. For example, the significance of a key scene in a Brazilian film I saw recently is lost completely in the English subtitles because English lacks gender in nouns. I would agree that English grammar (with some exceptions like phrasal verbs) is easer than a lot of other languages, but pronunciation is very difficult since it has around (depending on accent) 44 phonemes. The complex and inconsistent orthography of English makes learning correct pronunciation very challenging. Portuguese spelling is not as consistent as in Spanish and Italian, but one can learn to read, write, and pronounce the language without having to deal with the many hurdles in English. A great service would be done if the English speaking countries could join forces to simply and reform English spelling. Many countries with language academies have done this to their languages. But there’s no will to do so in English. We can’t even agree on honor/honour, jail/gaol. And we consider it a mark of intelligence to know how to spell and pronounce correctly words like though, through, tough, and so on. Good luck, English learners!
Beleza, compara só um verbo entre Português x Inglês TO BE. Portuguese there are 5.000 verbs and a lot ways to conjugation. Also Brazilian´s Portuguese have a bunch phrasal Verbs, Slangs and Idioms.
@@renanem5976 And what a beautiful and under-appreciated language it is!
And the perfect/imperfect in Portuguese is very difficult to use, more difficult than the subjunctive, because it’s so idiomatic. Then there’s the personal infinitive, unique to Portuguese and not found in the other Romance languages. Adoro o português!
English pronunciation isn’t “very” difficult. Especially compared to tonal languages. Portuguese is much difficult than English.
@@kaydod3190 Yes, tonal languages are very difficult to pronounce. And some languages that are not tonal like Arabic are also very hard to pronounce because they have some unique sounds. By that measure Portuguese isn’t “very” difficult either! However, in my experience native Portuguese speakers have a difficult time pronouncing English and the chaotic spelling of English doesn’t help. Someone I knew who was very knowledgeable in such matters said to me that the challenge for English speakers who learn Portuguese is the grammar. The challenge for Portuguese speakers is pronunciation. This is NOT to say that Portuguese is easy to pronounce. It’s far more difficult than Spanish or Italian, for example. And its nasal sounds like ão are very difficult to master and many, perhaps most, learners of Portuguese never get them quite right. But English pronunciation is not easy for speakers of Romance languages. The subtle difference between “ship” and “sheep” is just one example of many sounds that take a lot of practice. Let’s also have a broader view. Someone who speaks Mandarin or Cantonese finds the pronunciation of English, Portuguese, and other Western languages very difficult indeed!
I was raised in Egypt and back there most of the private schools, including mine, have English as their first language and French as the secondary one, and the remaining ones are the reverse. I don't know a single English school graduate who speaks French fluently, and I don't know a single French school graduate who doesn't speak English fluently. English is way easier than other languages, and don't get me started on Arabic, I really have no idea how none natives manage to learn it!
True. English is very easy. I’m learning French and Arabic. Arabic is hard and French is moderate.
Keep in mind that even after you cull out any English language materials that may be taboo or illegal in a given country, you still have more than just about any other language. A large part of fluency is just massive exposure and significant amounts of time being spent practicing it.
@@kaydod3190 People have a tendancy to say that French is difficult but it's really not. It's systematic, just like the other Romance languages. Once you learn the rules (and you can) it's quite simple to get a hang of. And even though it's not phonetic, you can still learn the spelling rules. I speak both French and English and French people *hate* hearing that English is harder because they equate difficulty with superiority. So, the average joe in French is brought up thinking he's somewhat of a genius because he speaks a so-called difficult language he started learning as child.
Olly, you should do a profile on Hungarian polyglot Kató Lomb for a future video. She would fit right in your Storylearning Method.
Surprisingly, some people seem to be irked (or irked-adjacent) when someone states that their language is easy. First, the simplicity level is only relative; no foreign language is easy to master reasonably well. Second, the fact that a language manages to achieve basically the same things in a more streamlined way is a triumph, not a limitation. I'm pretty happy that my own language is not impossibly complicated, fascinated as I am by impossibly complicated languages.
Good point. I think for some people there's a notion that their language being difficult means that those who speak it fluently are more intelligent and are able to navigate said language's linguistic complexity. I also agree that it's a cool, convenient, and beautiful thing when a language (or anything) is more easily understood by the masses, even with all of its unique features and "irregularity". It doesn't mean it's of a lower quality nor does it mean those who speak it aren't as intelligent as the speakers of more inflected languages. In my opinion, ease of use, universal understanding, and widespread access is a sign of intelligent design, and I think English has that more so than other languages.
"10 Reasons English is Ridiculously Hard" getting five times more viewers indicates English is ridiculously hard.
Es cierto que el inglés muchas veces es más práctico para resaltar algunos conceptos. Por eso a veces se usan anglicismos, que reemplazan frases enteras que no tienen su palabra equivalente en español o simplemente porque desplazó a la palabra original en español. Algunos están en contra de los anglicismos, pero si repasamos la historia, nuestro idioma se formó por influencia de varios otros idiomas que existieron antes, empezando por el latín. Una vez que lo castellanizamos, pasa a ser parte de nuestro idioma. Por ejemplo, fútbol 🥅.
I think it depends on your native language. English is relatively to learn if u speak French , Spanish, & especially German or Dutch which are somewhat similar to English since itself is a Germanic language.However, it's v. difficult to learn if u speak Chinese , Japanese , Korean or Arabic..
Not necessarily. Not difficult at all. I met so many native Arabic speakers that speaks English like a native speaker.
@Kay Dod I have an online friend from Iraq & she took English in HS & at the University level bcuz she wants to move to The UK or The US . I noticed her language skills had improved a great deal ( she barely made any grammatical errors) after not texting her for a year or so & told her that, which made her v. happy,so I stand corrected. I was just referring to my own personal experience w/Hebrew which I found extremely difficult ( like Arabic , it goes from right to left & doesn't use the Latin Alphabet) I only took it for a year but I was in the 3rd grade which is a great time to learn a new language. Anyway, I can only remember the words for Mother, Father & the word for Hello,Goodbye & Peace( Shalom)
To be picky, we use "an" in front of a noun that starts with a vowel *sound*, so it's "an hour", not "a hour".
English to me is simple in the sense that the conjugations are ridiculously easy. Just tack one word onto the other and you have your conjugation. Romance languages turn each verb conjugation into a whole new word. I don’t understand why people think it’s that complicated comparatively
I really want to learn English now!
*he says in perfect english*
@@terriffingtea haha yes, I was making a joke :)
@@Theodorus5 My dense-ass couldnt tell a joke if it was a half-metre up my arse 🫠
10:50 That's not what cognates are. What you have in your pink example is just a bunch of loanwords. Cognates are words that share a common root. They might or might not mean the same thing. For example the English words "black" and "bleach" are cognates with each other and with Italian "brace" (embers). Sometimes they have totally opposite meaning, for example Czech "úžasné" (awesome) vs. Croatian "užasno" (awful).
You learn so much from this kind of channel. I was surprised at your comment because in my several decades of language learning 'cognate' has always been used, in my experience, to describe a word in a different language which is recognisable because it's similar or the same in another. Imagine my surprise when I read your comment, checked it and found you are absolutely correct. You live and you learn.
5:35 ¡Qué limpia esa pronunciación! Suscripto.
Some of these selling points can also be difficulties for ESL people.
Like, to chain up a dozen of nouns is easy? And now enjoy making sense of typical half-page fiction sentence, or of news headers.
- no gender in nouns? - you struggle through 100 pages of a story to eventually discover that "the captain" is actually a stunning woman. (A real complaint from a fellow translator, who does this for living)
Another anecdotal evidence: once I was reading a translated tech book on some database technology, there was a whole chapter dedicated to how to block a dump. I was puzzled, cause this concept would made no sense even to a novice in the field. Then it dawned on me the translator simply had swapped the nouns, and the topic actually was how to dump a block. Then the whole thing just clicked in. Well, the translator mustn't be a techie, but still it came unnoticed somehow.
I'm English. I hate the worldwide popularity of English.
Well obviously the reasoning is historical influences then, and there were quit a bit of them countless times
Because of the concept of spelling, English is not easy. With out it, it would have been o e of the easiest languages on earth for sure.
Ollie; for Die Brücke or El Puente; when you ask them to describe the bridge those Germans will use words to emphasize the beauty and aesthetics and how pretty it looks in the landscape; all the lady-like features. The Spaniards go with strength and how many tons it can carry and how long the span is; all the manly characteristics.
❤️
I hope this doesn't mean German bridges collapse...
Really? I thought there would only be like 5 things at most! It's just English has so many complications that I thought the easy parts would amount to nothing!
Edit: the reasons amounted to:
1) no grammatical gender
2) bearly any conjugations (verbs, articles, case, adjectives)
3) common vocab with French or Latin
4) nouns sometimes function like adjectives
5) nouns sometimes function like verbs
6) Recources. It is literally the world language, so you've got choices for immersion in English from *every* culture.
I'd say only having 26 letters to learn is a downside! I *wish* there were more letters, how do we distinguish the 'u's of "up", "use", and "pull"? How do we distinguish the 'th's of "thing", "this", and "Thames"? How do we distinguish the 'e's of "English", "Emperor", "eve", "hate", "eighth", "encompass", and "cafe"?
really, English spelling is just a bloody mess!
Great comment, thanks!
how do we distinguish the e's - when it's at the end of the word it's usually silent (except when it's a loan word like cafe)
@@prplt eh.....hey Jude are you a rude dude with no data
English only pronounces ending e’s USUALLY if it’s from French or Spanish, Café is commonly spelled with an ‘ to indicate it’s a loan word. Not always but sometimes
Like all languages, English has it's difficulties, but it can be understood through thorough thought though
Another thing about English is if you got things wrong, you can still be understood 80% of the time
English is an easy language because its the language of a nomadic warior people. My language Turkish is the same.
I beg to differ. Any language in which the same word ("fly") can be a verb, an insect and a part of your pants, is definitely not so easy.
Where english is ridiculously hard is the reading (like, you have the written word, you often can't guess the pronounciation, or you have pronounciation and can't guess the written word)
Reading isn’t “ridiculously” hard. Stop over exaggerating
I'm native Burmese speakers the one that you show in this Video is old Burmese writing which didn't have any space but modern writing use space like English.
Irregular verbs and spelling are the two hot messes of English. There are lesser messes with things like plurals and articles, etc…but the basics are easy to grasp. I feel the same way about Japanese. Apart from Kanji, it is missing a lot of these complications, so the basics are super easy.
honestly, i know im a native English speaker so I can't act like i know what it's like to learn English as a second language, but to me French is even worse than english. It has huge inconsistencies with irregular verbs and spelling vs pronunciation as you said as well as many more bumps in the road. Even speakers of very closely related languages like Spanish and Italian (including English in a way due to the 70% french/latin vocabulary) say that French is an unintelligible mess compared to listening to the other romance languages.
@@nostalgiatrip7331 I believe French is mostly unintelligible for speakers of other romance languages because of its pronounciation that is very different from Spanish or Italian. I definitely agree about it being quite inconsistent in its spelling though.
@@chienbanane3168 that's my point exactly though
@@chienbanane3168 it's not a very phonetic language, I've been learning french for 4 years and i can read and write but i can still struggle to understand natural speakers without subtitles. Meanwhile i literally just started learninf Spanish six months ago and i can already understand speakers 5x better than french
With English, pronounciation (and therefore listening) requires the most work.
Irregular verbs are pretty easy to learn imo. They aren't too many and the verb paradigm is composed by only 3 forms. So yeah there's no excuse come on lol, students should just spend those few hours needed there and that should do it.
English is the most overhated language in the world. It's actually one of the best languages on Earth. The only real con is that the spelling is god-awful.
Well it’s good some things make it easy since everyone is learning it.
@Real Aiglon No, it’s the easiest language in the world. The most common language to learn as a second language in other countries.
Can you do one but of English accents
I think the hot mess that is English spelling and pronunciation(I'm super glad this is my first language. It's also the only one I'm fluent in) more than makes up for how simple and easy the grammar is.
English spelling is a blessing compared to French
@@poohoff French has a lot of rules, but they're consistent! English has few rules (I think they're below 300) but they're so inconsistent so you pretty much just have to treat every word like an exception!
@@xXJ4FARGAMERXx just read comments on RUclips, you'll see native speakers of French struggle with spelling way more than English speakers do
Read the poem: The Chaos by Gerard Nolst-Trenite. It's about the English language and it will drive you absolutely BONKERZ
@Ir liz Ever been to Scotland?
Its true spoken English is easy but if one is not constsntly writing one can easly have problems with spelling
Beside its good to know when you are reading if the person is speaking to a lady or to a group of ladies or to one person or to two persons or a froup of persons
If we say for example your book , what if its a group , what if its a group of women ? Or 2 males or 2 females ets , in all cases we say your book
But i do fully agree this is whats making learning English easy .
The articles "a" and "an" are a little tricky though. There are some exceptions.
"What kind of animal is that?" "That is a ewe." (female sheep)
[ Native speakers make this adjustment automatically. ]
The word "hot" is ambiguous:
"This food is hot", (high temperature, or spicy ?) We really need two different words for "hot".
Having only one word for "you" is my main complaint about English. Why don't we fix that ???
I agree, BOOKS are good for learning. In my German classes we had a text book for grammar and several graded books to enhance the learning experience and learn about culture too.
when has anyone actually ever used the word "ewe"
I've been dealing with the English language for decades. And up to this day whenever I read an English text or listen to a native speaking I stumble upon a number of unknown words. English vocabulary is humongous. Phrasal verbs are also a nightmare. So, although I like it a lot, I would not say English is easy.
No, English is one of the easiest languages to learn. English vocabulary is not humongous compared to other languages. Phrasal verbs are nothing compared to other languages. You just have to memorize them. Stop over exaggerating.
@@kaydod3190 At a basic level, I agree that English is quite easy to learn. But to have a decent level and become fluent, English is very hard. If you believe otherwise, your are a native or you've been living in an English speaking country for at least five years speaking mostly to natives or you have attended high school and university in English. Or you might be a non native who uses the language only in situations that don't require a huge vocabulary. English vocabulary consists of two different sets in one single language: the Germanic words and the Latin ones. It's huge. And phrasal verbs only start to feel natural and be memorized after you've had years of exposure.
@@chicolofi lol ok 😂 I’ll continue to speak to my non-native English speaking friends who speak it on a native level
@@kaydod3190 What languages do you speak, besides English?
@@kaydod3190 Do you have the same level in these languages as you have in English (I´m assuming you're a native English speaker)?
I never realised that other languages could be that insane. Perhaps I shan't dream of being a polyglot after all.
Perhaps give telepathy a try? It's THE universal language! ☺️🌈🌀🌈😌
English is the easiest language because it does not have many conjugations and declensions.
We don't need to worry about the subjunctive mood and lexical gender either. English has the subjunctive mood, but it's easy to learn.
I agree but f.ex; phrasal verbs are a real nightmare, or present perfect which occurs present or past...
People on the internet keep saying things like "we should really respect people who speak english as their second language because they managed to learn the mess that is our spelling" and while yes, speaking foreign language fluidly is worth respecting, this seems more like trying to feel special, because foreign learners never seem to complain. First of all, english spelling does have rules and is mostly predictable, there's just a lot of them and if someone explained them to you as they did to me when I was at school, you'll probably understand them better too. And secondly, this weird spelling system is really a small price to pay for the convenience of not having to deal with declension, conjugation and aspect and given that I'm polish, I certainly know how complicated it is. The only things english could possibly have easier, other than spelling, is this impractically large number of tenses and th sounds (however we have these wonderful sounds like ś, ć, ż, ź, dż, dź, sz, cz, ą and ę, so I probably shouldn't complain)
Finally somebody who actually understands English spelling is very complicated not just stupid
I will never understand why people say English is the easiest language to learn. It's not. It's difficult. There's virtually no rule on how words should be spelled or how they should be pronounced. There's too many exceptions. I've been learning this language for 5 years and I've gotten nowhere closer to even being business-level speaker, let alone native-level. Although it may be because my mother tongue is not an Indian-European language but Japanese.
We have many of the "same" basic English words in Danish - often just within a simple sound shift or a slightly alternative spelling or pronounciation at the most ( e.g. dem = them, deres [dair-es] = their(s), disse = these, tørst [tirst] = thirst, torn = thorne, trone = throne, vind, vidne = witness, mand [man*] / mænd [men*] = man / men ...
først [first] = first, skarp = sharp, varm, kold, vild, bred = broad, god = good, glad, nær [nair] = near, ny [ne(w)] = new, ung = young, ...
op [up] = up, over, under, fra = from, ud = out, i[ee*] / ind [in*] = in, efter, før [fur] = be-fore, indtil [in*-til] = until, ...
have, er [air] = ARe + am & is, kan, vil, skal, give, tage = take, se, hør(e) [h'oe'r-e] = hear, find(e), hold(e), drik(ke) =drink, , gå [go] = go / walk, tænk(e) [taink-e] = think, syng(e), synk(e), hæng(e), leve = live, dø [d'oe'] = die, bring(e), sving(e), slyng(e), drive, spyt(te), skift(e), haste, skrabe = scrape, bær(e) [bair-e] = bear / carry, ro = row, sejl(e) [sighl-e] = sail, svøm(me) = swim, smile [smeel-e], vade = wade, vandre = wander, lån(e) [loan-e] = loan, læn(e) [lain-e] = lean, lad(e) = let / load, bræk(ke) = break, bage = bake ...
the list of all these very close cognates between D & E is nearly endless 😉 ), -
as well as many similar grammatical features - the same word order mostly or very nearly, NO cases for nouns, their articles and any associated adjectives, same verb conjugations for ALL grammatical persons, tenses formed along the same lines as in E and many parallel strong verbs etc.
So learning English is actually surprisingly easy for Danes and the other Scandinavians with their very similar languages, since we by magic already "know" half of the basics in advance - almost like a huge extention of our own languages.
Having lots of TV- programmes and films here in English without dubbing ( unlike in Germany ), but with subtitles instead is of course also a great help on top of all those deep similarities, since we are used to hearing all sorts of spoken English accents and dialects and therefore know how and what to listen up for. ☺️
3: Slavic languages (many more, but that's an example) (I know about Bulgarian, it kinda doesn't count) don't have articles at all.
Kocie... That sounds so cute
I never learned Spanish, but I worked for the US Census Bureau interviewing a lot of Spanish speakers with the help of cards written in Spanish. At one point I found I could understand Spanish speaking athletes. Spanish doesn't share the characteristics that make English easy, but Spanish is one of the easier languages for English speakers.
I look forward to any new Dutch texts from the Story Learning press.
Yes ! well for me as a french Canadian i learned English from watching TV and interacting with people ! never opened a book to learn any language ! So also , i thought English was the international language because it s the easiest to learn ! If you re a pilot, you must learn English because it s the language used all over the world for all pilots ! when you know English you can go almost anywhere in the world . I know my English is not perfect but it s not too bad ! lol ! 🤓
I love English but it's like a lover because everytime I get to know it better it drives a lot more nuts
I agree, the only thing which is difficult for me are the phrasal verbs, for me, I don't know if to other people it's the same and maybe the pronunciation but it happens in many many languages and you get use to it
English is actually a very ambigious language, same words and sentences can have different meanings making it difficult to interpret for non-native english speakers, but maybe the english script (Latin) and the pronunciations are easy to grasp
More ridiculously easy is malay language. Same as english but no the, s, to-be, irregular verb, or even ridiculously tense.
Now we request the "challenges people learning english face" video.
Main takeaway: English lacks features that are considered strange or dificult by English speakers
for part 4 he forgets past tense and possibly future tense which changes things (he ran, he will run, etc.)
In portuguese there are more than 200 forms for the verb "to be"(ser/estar) as in English there are only 8 forms. Yes! English is riddiculously easy
8 forms? "be, am, are, is, ain't, was, were"?
eu sou / estou
tu és / estás
ele é / está
nós somos / estamos
vós sois / estais
eles são / estão
eu era / estava
tu eras / estavas
ele era / estava
nós éramos / estávamos
vós éreis / estáveis
eles eram / estavam
eu fui / estive
tu foste / estiveste
ele foi / esteve
nós fomos / estivemos
vós fostes / estivestes
eles foram / estiveram
eu seria / estaria
tu serias / estarias
ele seria / estaria
nós seríamos / estaríamos
vós seríeis / estaríeis
eles seriam / estariam
eu serei / estarei
tu serás / estarás
ele será / estará
nós seremos / estaremos
vós sereis / estareis
eles serão / estarão
eu fosse / estivesse
tu fosses / estivesses
ele fosse / estivesse
nós fôssemos / estivéssemos
vós fôsseis / estivésseis
eles fossem / estivessem
eu for / estiver
tu fores / estiveres
ele for / estiver
nós formos / estivermos
vós fordes / estiverdes
eu fora / estivera
tu foras / estiveras
ele fora / estivera
nós fôramos / estivéramos
vós fôreis / estivéreis
eles foram / estiveram
E ainda falta coisa
And there's still a lot of conjugations
Please make a video on Urdu, Pashto and Pakhto.
In English, there sees to be one adjective (blond/blonde) that changes according to the gender of the noun it precedes or follows.
I don't know how I did it, but English feels like my native language even though I learned it when I was 15~ years old.
Do you remember how you learned it? If you don't, that would be one reason why you feel like it's a mother tongue for you!
No, I don't. I just used it, I was playing video games all day and chatting with people online. I also remember trying to understand RUclips videos where a random guy explains how to solve a puzzle in a video game. Then I've spoken every weekday with my American teacher for four years.
A lot of non natives speak English like it is their native language