Why is English considered difficult?
I don't understand the claim that English is hard, because it is in fact a very simple and structured language. I'm not even going to put English up against finicky east Asian languages, but just compare it with the (supposedly) easiest Romance language, Spanish. Some comparisons you're all probably aware of already:
1.) English has a rigid subject-verb-object sentence structure. It never deviates from this structure. Spanish has S-V-O, O-V-S, O-S-V...it goes on and on.
2.) Very simple verb system compared to Spanish. 4 persons conjugated very similarly. Spanish has 5 (6 in some countries) conjugated across at least 15 varying tenses. No subjunctive or imperative, at least that requires a lot of effort.
3.) English has three articles: "the, a, an". Spanish has 8.
English nouns have no genders and no agreement with adjectives.
Although English is heavy on the slang, it's not the only language with slang. There are irregulars but again so do most other languages. The huge vocabulary can be a challenge, but that's the only difficulty I can see.
So why do people say it's so hard?
18 Answers
I don't understand the claim that English is hard, because it is in fact a very simple and structured language. I'm not even going to put English up against finicky east Asian languages, but just compare it with the (supposedly) easiest Romance language, Spanish. Some comparisons you're all probably aware of already:
For any person who speaks a Romance language, English is one of the simplest languages to learn, by far. The problem is that not everybody learns another language so easily. Going back to the Asian languages you want to avoid, if you knew how difficult -- the uses of the articles are (that many other languages don't have), you'd understand why English can be hard for many people. A basic introduction on the uses of the articles ("the" and "an") could easily have over 100 pages full of hundreds of rules and thousands of exceptions... which are still not very well understood by grammarians.
2.) Very simple verb system compared to Spanish. 4 persons conjugated very similarly. Spanish has 5 (6 in some countries) conjugated across at least 15 varying tenses. No subjunctive or imperative, at least that requires a lot of effort.
Again, for languages without tenses, English seems like their worst nightmare, but English tenses are not particularly difficult for Spanish speakers. The problem is that they are used differently, and again, applying the rules correctly is much harder than you imagine. Try to teach any Spanish speaker why you have used this tense but not that one, and after giving an explanation, the student will come up with a sentence that will contradict your previous statement. Try to patch up your previous statement with another one, and the student -- will again find another case where it doesn't quite work. Teach for many years, and you'll accumulate a list of hundreds of cases where no rule seems to work and you don't know how to explain it. Then you'll begin to scratch the surface of the real problem.
3.) English has three articles: "the, a, an". Spanish has 8.
The forms of the articles can be learnt by anyone in a day. How to use them can take years for many people... in either language. You are paying too much attention to the morphology, which is a minor issue here, and ignoring the real problem: the syntax and the usage.
English nouns have no genders and no agreement with adjectives.
That's the easy part. No Spanish speaker has the slightest problem with that, but you have agreement with pronouns that we don't, like for example "hers" and "his", which causes us a lot of trouble, because both forms are "suyo" in Spanish. There are not many like these, but there are a few you probably have not considered.
So why do people say it's so hard?
Let's start with the usual one: it takes longer to learn how to spell in English than to learn how to speak several easy languages. That is a huge handicap.
Spanish has 5 vowel sounds and English has 12-15, and sometimes 5 of your vowels, which to you are different sounds, seem to be like slightly blurred versions of just one of ours, but the differences are hard to tell apart. There is a vowel (schwa) that appears in most words but we don't have it, and to make things words, its sound is so vague to our ears, that it can be confused with three of our vowels, but is none of them. Pronouncing all the other 10 vowel sounds is extremely difficult and it takes a long time. English differentiates between long and short vowels, but we are not used to that distinction, because it doesn't exist in our language.
In terms of consonants, there are a few new sounds we don't have. We don't have a "v" sound, and your "b" and your "v" sound the same to us, for example. Your T in "top" and "stop" are different, like your P in "pot" and "spot", but they sound the same to us. There are combinations of sounds that don't exist in Spanish and we find very difficult to articulate together, but I guess this happens when you learn any new language. Just observe the sound of the vowels ea in bear, near, flea, break.
An added problem is that plurals and compound words change their pronunciation radically. Thus, Christ and Christ-mas sound different, as do child and child-ren, and many other words. The R is pronounced in "irony", but not in "iron"; the L is not pronounced in "salmon", but it is pronounced in "salmonella" (the first one). These annoyances go on forever.
English has three prepositions (on, at, in) where we have one (en). Even people who have been learning English for many years and are fluent still hesitate at times with these three prepositions. Like in Spanish, many verbs and adjectives require a preposition which has to be memorised, since they follow no rule. English has more prepositions and they are harder to use.
The phrasal verbs in English are renowned for their complexity, and mastering them is something few people would dare to claim. I have a dictionary of phrasal verbs as thick as a normal dictionary, for example. The amount of nuances and changes of meanings you get with them are as complex (or more) as the use of "se" with verbs in Spanish.
English syntax is very unpredictable in many respects, compared to Spanish. You use a wide range of constructions where Spanish only uses one, but selecting between indicative and subjunctive. The uses of your gerund and present participle is difficult enough to confuse even yourselves, when you try to analyse them. Learning these is no small task, and people find it very hard. Modal verbs are very complex: may, might, can, could, shall, will,...
English intonation is very complex, with the tones going up and down all the time, as opposed to ours, where it barely changes. Our rhythm is monotonous and systematic: each syllable has the same length, like a shot from a machine gun, whereas in English you have to expand and contract the length of each syllable depending on whether they are stressed or not, and the intonation. When vowels get stressed or unstressed, their pronunciation also changes, while in Spanish the pronunciation never does. Sentences like "Do you eat a lot" can be pronounced clumped in a way that resembles just one syllable to us. This is the ultimate challenge for a learner of English in order to sound like a native.
This is just a little sample of the countless problems that a Spanish speaker encounters when learning English. This list could go on for pages and pages, but you wouldn't fully understand how difficult they are, unless you've tried to teach English for years, or English is not your first language.
I've heard many Spanish speakers ask the same question: why do English speakers find Spanish so hard? It is so easy! Only people who have not mastered a second language would ask such a question.
And again: take a language like Chinese, which has no articles (which are difficult to use), no genders (not even his/her or him/her), no plurals (which are tricky, especially in English with mouse/mice. Not even dog/dogs - they say one dog / two dog), no tenses (English has 12 or 13, depending on how you count them), no irregular verbs (no find/found), no changes in the verb forms (like think, thinks), no gerunds (no like/liking), no illogical prepositions (dream of/about...), no phrasals,... For Chinese people, English is a horrible grammatical nightmare.
Verb conjugations tend to be very irregular, as does the formation of plurals. Spelling is whimsical, at best, and has no relationship to pronunciation that you can count on. There are words that are spelled the same, but pronounced differently, with completely different meanings - wind (moving air) and wind (what you do to a clock). On the other hand there are many words that are spelled differently but pronounced the same with exactly the same meaning - theatre and theater, disc and disk.
English is a Germanic language with a Latin grammar imposed by the Catholic clergy, and a duplicate Norman French vocabulary imposed after the Norman conquest. It has absorbed vast numbers of words from Latin and Greek pretty much willy-nilly.
English isn't so much a language as a great collision of languages and cultures. I'm a native speaker and study languages as a hobby and I think it's just outright strange. If it wasn't my milk tongue I don't know if I could ever learn it.
English does have a subjunctive. It's just that most native English speakers know so little about grammar that they are unaware of it. But it is used all the time, in the same way Spanish subjunctive is. "If I were seven feet tall" is subjunctive. "I was at home last night" is indicative.
English isn't my mother tongue but it's the first foreign language I learned. I started at school when I was 6 and having lived in England for more than 30 years, I'm pretty fluent, but by no means perfect !!
Why is English difficult? It depends on your perspective and where you start from.
For Japanese, the sound of English is VERY tricky. A sentence like "The frail woman lost her rubbish tin drum." will reduce them to tears.
To the Cantonese, the fundamental distinction between "he" and "she" in English is tricky. We just use a neuter 3rd person pronoun. No need to worry about things like "He went to school." and "I saw him at school".
You might think the English verbal system is simple. But it is certainly a lot more complicated than Chinese ! Tenses as you know it doesn't exist in Chinese. We just use a time particle and we instantly know whether you are talking about yesterday, 23 years ago, in 5 weeks time, or future in general. I still remember the number of exercises I did at school in order to understand the difference between "I did it yesterday.", "I have been doing it all day."; "I will have done it by tomorrow."; "I would have done it if I had more time." ,etc, etc.
Closer to home, Danish has an even simpler verbal form than English. Instead of "am, is, are, was, were", they just have "er" in the present tense and "var" in the past. I'm sure the Danes find English verbs complicated.
3.) English has three articles: "the, a, an".
We don't worry about articles in Chinese. We just stick "one" in front to mean "a boy". Icelandic only has the definite article, so easier than English in that respect. I think Russian is the same and it is reputed to be an extremely language.
As Heidita said, the English phrasal verb is an absolute nightmare for learners.
"Right, sit up and listen ! Go out to the woods and chop down a tree, chop it up and bring the wood back into the house to fill up the container. Then sit down and fill in the form so that they can consider your application to stand in for the chairman. You know he is standing down at the end of the week. So if you get in, you won't have a lot of time to get your policies down on paper and set things up, not to mention you will need time and set the wheels in motion.!" Yes, a bit contrived, but you get my point.
English nouns have no genders and no agreement with adjectives.
That's true and I am very pleased with that. Unlike Japanese where adjectives behave like verbs, so that they have different endings to signify present tense positive, present tense negative, past tense positive, past tense negative, etc.
So, "This is delicious."; "This is not delicious."; "This was delicious."; "This was not delicious." The word "delicious" in these four sentences will all have to be declined accordingly. Now, having to agree with numbers and gender in Spanish doesn't seem so hard any longer.
I don't meant to pick holes in your post Hero. A lot of what you said is true. But my point is that English is no more difficult or easier than any other language. Every language is difficult but they are difficult in different respects. From my personal experience, English isn't particularly difficult at the beginners level. But as you get more and more advanced, the difficulties and subtleties slowly emerge and it is then when you tear your hair out and throw all the exercise books in the air in exasperation !!
Hi Hero, I couldn't agree more, jeje, no language I know is as easy as English.
We do have the problem of pronounciation and spelling though, can't be forgotten, and the freaking phrasals, but otherwise...very easy indeed.
However, no conjugation, no declination, no articles, sentence structure....everything is easy. 
On the other hand, you can read and write Spanish learning a couple of spelling rules and you would be able to read and write it correctly, if for example somebody dictated you. This would be impossible even at my level of English, Freaky stuff, jeje
Also, regarding difficulty, a language like Japanese could take up to four times longer to master than Spanish to an English speaker, and yet, a Korean finds Japanese three times easier than English. While for Spanish speakers it is rather easy compared to many other languages, people from other countries whose languages are very different from ours tend to find English very hard... because it is very different, but they will find very easy similar languages that will be extremely difficult for us.
Do you think English is an objectively easy language? Well... so why so many people find it hard? Your mother tongue will determine whether a second language is easy or hard for you, but what if you don't have a mother tongue yet (i.e. you are a baby)? Is English easier than all other languages? According to a study done on lots of languages by experts in linguistics and language development, the easiest language to learn in the world seems to be Turkish, which is a grammatical nightmare for English or Spanish people, for example. How did they measure this? The Turkish children's grammar is as good as an educated adult (even though their vocabulary and reasoning capabilities are well below), i.e. they are familiar with all the suffixes, cases, syntactic relationships, and they don't have any problem making any construction, no matter how complex. In comparison, other languages take about 4 to 6 years. Ask culé to tell you how "easy" Turkish people (arguably the "easiest" language in the world) find English? I bet she tells you that they find Finnish (or even Hungarian) easier, languages with a reputation for being extremely hard.
This question would make more sense if you were discussing this with somone whose mother tongue is the same as yours, and you are comparing the same target language. Of course you find English easy: it is your mother tongue.
Heidi said:
Students of English only have to learn that the structure of English is extremely strict and boring, jeje, always the same structure.
I agree, English is extremely rigid, but that is precisely what I find most difficult! My disorganized hispanic thought has constantly to be constantly reorganized in real time for speaking. That's one of the hardest things for me to do.
The stricter the language, the more likely it is that I'll make mistakes!!
Así lo creo yo/ Yo lo creo así/ Así lo creo/ Lo creo así/ Yo así lo creo
I think so/ I think so/ I think so/ I think so/ I think so
English syntax is very unpredictable in many respects, compared to Spanish. You use a wide range of constructions where Spanish only uses one, but selecting between indicative and subjunctive. The uses of your gerund and present participle is difficult enough to confuse even yourselves, when you try to analyse them. Learning these is no small task, and people find it very hard. Modal verbs are very complex: may, might, can, could, shall, will,...
I don't agree with this part at all.
Students of English only have to learn that the structure of English is extremely strict and boring, jeje, always the same structure.
Auxiliaries and modals have one important function: we must keep the structure s+p+o intact at all cost. Students, once they understand this, have no problem with this.
Gerunds, the word itself is confusing, but that is not a problem either, teachers do not talk about gerunds and present participle, we talk about gerunds, period
Spanish syntax and structure is one of the most unpredictable I can think of. We don't use subjects, we can start the sentence with whatever word we want to, we have indicative and subjunctive and a long etc.
Compared to English, Spanish is a nightmare.
Regarding Spanish, you left out the pronouns.
You left out the fact that object pronouns do more than be objects...they can (but don't always) affect verb meanings...but the effect is not always a predictable one (but it can be predictable sometimes).
You left out that SE can put a sentence into a passive mode or it can be LE wearing a disguise because it's embarrassed to be seen standing next to LA or LO or it can mean you, you all, it, him, her, them, yourself, yourselves, itself, himself, herself, or themselves. Oh wait, it can also be "I know."
But English has this semi-phonetic spelling system whose exceptions have exceptions and that is filled with silent letters, vowels that can be long, short or schwa (and actually a few others)...with no clue as to which...and is perhaps worse than French for having several ways to spell a single sound...and, definitely worse than French, can use the same letter combination for more than one sound (cough, slough, caught, ought, off, stop....though, dough, hoe, stroll, role...through, threw, blue, too...etc.)
Then we've got those pesky phrasal verbs (prepositions changing the meaning of verbs...sometimes in a somewhat logical way...sometimes in a radical, illogical way). Turn vs. Turn off/on/up. Phrasal verbs seem a just revenge for Spanish's pronouns.
I don't know that any language can be "harder" than any other one. I think it's relative. Spanish is difficult because it's not my mother tongue, but it has enough similarities to my mother tongue that it seems learn-able. Chinese is so different that it seems impossible...I'm slowly trying, though (and Vietnamese, too)...just not with the same dedication I've given to Spanish. I imagine people who speak tonal languages (like Chinese) could learn another tonal language more easily than a non-tonal language like English or Spanish. A Spaniard could probably pick up French or Portuguese more easily than English or Chinese. German made much more sense to me, but English has strong roots in common with German, and the two languages have similar grammars and rhythms (words are more clearly separated unlike in Spanish where they all run together).
El políglota Francois Micheloud says about the Spanish language:
Spanish is objectively an easy language. It lacks the many difficulties of complex languages like Russian or Japanese. It has way less exceptions than French or English. Apart from the difficulties of word gender and conjugation, Spanish grammar is straightforward. I rate the difficulty of learning this as your first foreign language for an English speaker as 2 (out of 5, with 5 being the hardest). The difficulty is only 1 if you already speak another Romance language, such as French, Italian, Portuguese.
Spanish presents few grammatical difficulties. The main difficulties, shared with other Romance languages, are:
1. Word genders: ...You just have to deal with it if you don't want to sound like a moron.
2. Conjugation: ....It is not immensely difficult and with a good language program and dedication, you should be able to overcome this difficulty.
3. The subjunctive mood...
Obviously, he says this because he is from Switzerland.
Could be one of those things where...you know, the Frenchman says, "French is easy compared to English," and the Italian says, "Italian is easy compared to English," and the Spaniard says, "Spanish is easy compared to English," and the Chinaman says, "Chinese is easy compared to English," and so forth. In other words, it could be a natural result of English being the world's current lingua franca. That is, a large number of non-English-speakers end up having to learn English (but relatively few English speakers ever have to learn another language) and then compare learning English to learning their mother tongue and always consider English as more difficult.
I have to agree, 'Ive been trying to learn spanish for six months.The conjugation alone is giving me fits. I see on here all the time about language difficulty(which language ,spanish or english, is harder to learn),I can only hope that after six more months I get it. Buena suerte to us all.
Out of interest, a boy is blond whereas a girl is blonde. I'm not sure if there are any other adjectives that change with gender in English...
I have seen that nametaken, who is the corrector for natives on this site, jeje, has actually dared to correct lazarus.
I am sure he appreciates the corrections just as I do, hardly anybody except nametaken offers corrections for us...please do, all corrections are appreciated.
(Not talking about typos...there is no hope for me there, but a grammar mistake or something...please do offer corrections)
Short answer because I feel lazy: It's considered such a difficult language to learn due to the unpredictability and random patterns that are established but often not followed.
While I am teaching English the things I notice that students find difficult are:
Spelling and pronunciation. (These negatively affect the learning process)
Modals. (don't exist in Spanish) The fact that "will" can be used in many different ways for example.
But I believe that Modals are an exceptional "strength" of the English language.
Imagine the sentence: "I can do it."
then replace the "can" with the other 10 Modals and you have 10 new sentences with no other changes needed..
Phrasal verbs. (don't exist in Spanish) The same one can ge both literal and idiomatic.
Verbs made from nouns.
Nouns made from verbs.
Prepositions - often at the end of sentences.
They way English uses Gerunds.
Idiomatic expressions and idioms. (These are not the same thing)
The many synonyms.
The many "exceptions" that prove the rule.
Question forms -direct - indirect - tag questions etc.
The English verb system is very easy compared to Spanish. Except the irregular ones - but they exist in Spanish too.
Danish - Swedish - Norwegian - Dutch - Icelandic and even German students find English much easier than Spanish for obvious reasons.
