
The hardest aspect of learning English as a second language - ColinWright
https://thelanguagenerds.com/the-hardest-aspect-of-learning-english-as-a-second-language/
======
josefrichter
Nah, it's a small quirk, but it exists in many other languages. Phrasal verbs
are the real trap. Keep up, keep off, keep out, keep on, keep out,... Rather
uncommon in other languages and very easy to make mistake, sometimes very
embarrassing one..

~~~
xpil
My words exactly. There's over 3000 phrasal verbs in English and memorizing
them is pain in the hole (plus it makes no sense). The only effective way of
learning them is to submerge yourself in the language by listening to _plenty_
of audiobooks or moving abroad where English is spoken natively.

I'm Polish myself and hit a hard wall with phrasals when I moved over to
Ireland 13 years ago. I still keep discovering new ones every now and then
despite living here for over a decade.

~~~
V-2
We kind of do the same thing, only in the form of prefixes (podać, wydać,
zdać, zadać, oddać, poddać, nadać, przydać etc. and on and on it goes).
Ultimately it boils down to the same thing - little syllabic bits altering the
meaning of the verb.

~~~
iforgotpassword
Yes, It's exactly the same in German. So I guess I don't agree with this
comment thread at all - It's just learning vocabulary. I never felt like this
is a specific problem when learning English. I much more agree with the
article: Spelling + pronunciation is just fubar and the greatest annoyance.

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Avalaxy
Mandatory: English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough
thought, though.

~~~
m4r35n357
Sadist!

~~~
benschulz
You may enjoy [1].. or not.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo)

edit: english version

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mumblemumble
Forvo can help with this. Recorded pronunciations for words and phrases,
crowdsourced from native speakers, with information about their gender and
home region. (Useful for fine-tuning your pronunciation and intonation.) It
has an app, and, if you're the flashcarding type, the website lets you
download MP3s.

Beyond that, I think all I can offer in consolation is that English
orthography _does_ have an internal logic; there are guidelines you can use to
tell when "ea" is pronounced /ɪ/ and when it's pronounced /ɛə/ or /e/. It's
all subtle enough that it's useless to try to actually _learn_ them - thinking
about that stuff will just slow you down, which is worse than making the
occasional pronunciation error. But, over time, you will develop an instinct
for it, and it will all eventually start feeling natural. Same for stress
accent.

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mlboss
Problem is English is not a phonetic language. There is not much you can do
with only 26 characters. In my native language you pronounce what you wrote.

~~~
digitalsushi
I feel like if we had rules in place from the start, we could do everything
with half as many characters.

~~~
bluGill
Actually we need twice as manager characters, but we would need a lot less in
any given words. Even decided Capital and lower case were different letters
not different ways to write the same letter we would still need more symbols.

However that wouldn't help either. As a Mid-westerner I pronounce "about"
differently from someone from Boston (they do something like a-boat). We no
longer can reform spelling unless we also reform pronunciation as well.

~~~
MagnumOpus
German or Spanish manage to have extremely divergent dialects while still
having phonetic spelling of the standard written dialect.

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tomcooks
Related
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti)

~~~
jcranmer
But English pronunciation rules are regular enough to be able to say that
"ghoti" should be pronounced "GO-tee". Word-initial "gh" is _always_
pronounced as a hard g. The argument that "o" can be pronounced /ı/ comes from
a vowel reduction rule in unstressed syllables. And pronouncing "ti" as /ʃ/
comes from the yod-coalescence that fricatizes /t/, /d/, /z/, and /s/ in
certain cases, namely where the previous syllable ends in one of those
consonants and the next one begins with a /j/ ("y") sound. Since "ti" is word
final here, there's nothing to fricatize it.

English spelling does have quite a few rules, and it follows them far more
than people realize. The main real problem is our proclivity to borrow foreign
words and insist on using foreign spelling and pronunciation for them. The
other main issue is that we conserved the spelling of English from Middle
English, so you have to map the pronunciation shifts to spelling rules--and
some words ended up being weird exceptions to the pronunciation shifts (e.g.,
"father" went in a different direction from the other "-ather" words, like
"lather" and "rather").

~~~
kwhitefoot
>(e.g., "father" went in a different direction from the other "-ather" words,
like "lather" and "rather").

In my dialect (north eastern corner of the West Country) all three sound the
same except for the initial.

Otherwise I agree with everything you said.

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bjourne
How come the English never tried for a spelling reform? Such reforms were
implemented both in Sweden and Germany to simplify spelling. Like the article
says, bear really _should_ be spelled bair.

~~~
gruez
Good luck getting the Americans, Canadians, British, Indians, and Australians
to all agree on something.

~~~
jsolson
I mean, we already disagree on spelling for some words, the name for the
letter 'Z', and what to call dwellings in multi-family properties, so we're
not off to a great start...

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musicale
I concur on spelling being the Achilles' heel of English. We actually subject
children to contests ("Spelling Bees") in which they must spell English words
without recourse to automated correction or a dictionary. Because native
speakers commit spelling (along with typographical and grammatical) errors so
frequently, automated spelling and grammar checkers are an essential feature
of word processors and text entry systems. Dyslexia seems to be more common
among English speakers vs. speakers of more phonetic languages.

I doubt spelling is a competitive sport in saner languages, though I imagine
that character writing (and reading) contests could be a thing in languages
with large numbers of written characters.

Like long division, both spelling and character recall can be delegated to
technology, but I'm not sure what I think of this as a general principle. I
use spelling checkers and I like phonetic character input methods, but I
dislike grammar checkers.

~~~
ColinWright
That's fine until you need to distinguish between your/you're, to/too/two,
their/they're/there, its/it's, and similar problems. Maybe people think it
doesn't matter, or that it won't matter, but it always disrupts my flow when I
see errors like that.

Clear, effective communication is best when there are no, or at least very
few, grammatical errors to distract the reader, and in the cases given above,
and more, spell-checkers don't help.

~~~
spaced-out
>That's fine until you need to distinguish between your/you're, to/too/two,
their/they're/there, its/it's, and similar problems. Maybe people think it
doesn't matter, or that it won't matter, but it always disrupts my flow when I
see errors like that.

That only matters to you because you were taught different spellings for those
words.

Consider the word 'read'; it's pronounced like 'reed' when used in the present
tense, and like 'red' when used in the past tense, but spelled the same in
either case. Does that disrupt your 'flow'? I'm willing to bet it doesn't,
because you were taught the same spelling for both those words (and they are
different words!)

Now consider the word 'about'. It can mean 'almost', as in "I'm about to
arrive", or it can me 'regarding', as in "This book is about...". If you were
taught the 'regarding' definition of 'about' is spelled 'abowt', I'm sure you
would have added 'about/abowt' next to 'to/too/two' as something that disrupts
your flow when misused.

~~~
dfawcus
re 'about' \- it can have a lot more meanings than those two.

e.g. 'about his person' (carrying something with you) 'he is about' (he is
close / near) 'he is out and about' (he is some distance away)

etc.

~~~
jimmux
Aren't these all the same definitions, merely indicating an approximation?

"I'm about to arrive" -> "I'm close to arrival but not here right now".

"This book is about..." -> "This book is roughly this short approximation,
because I can't fit the entire synopsis in a sentence,..."

"About his person" -> "Close to him, possibly so close as to be carrying it"

"He is about" -> "He is somewhere around here, but not in this exact spot"

"He is out and about" -> "He is out somewhere in this area"

"Gone walkabout" -> "Traveling with no specific destination"

"Roundabout" -> "Traffic control method that encourages vehicles to take a
more circuitous passage, rather than directly crossing an intersection"

The context of the word changes the interpretation, but the essential function
of "about" is the same in each case.

------
dublin
And of course, this granddaddy of all gripes on English punctuation, which was
written 100 years ago now:
[https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem....](https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem.html)
(This link was chosen because it has audio links for each section of verse.
The German speaker doesn't nail the pronunciation of all the words, but gets
very close, to the point that most differences are possibly a matter of
regional dialect.)

~~~
vidanay
This is interesting...while reading this line of the poem:

"Tear in eye, your dress will tear."

I could physically feel my brain rewinding and re-defining the leading "Tear"
when I encountered "in eye".

(I am a native speaker of American)

~~~
StavrosK
That's why garden-path sentences are easier in English, I guess.

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Grue3
It's definitely not the hardest aspect. Just learn each word and its
pronounciation independently. The spelling is just a mnemonic. If you can
remember the gender of each word in your native language, or where the
stressed syllable is, you can remember how to pronounce each English word as
well.

For me the hardest part is using articles (the/a/none) which don't exist in my
native language. I still don't understand the exact rules of their usage and
usually just insert whichever article sounds the best.

~~~
mumblemumble
For what it's worth, that's how native English speakers deal with articles,
too.

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Balanceinfinity
One of the anomalies of English is the spelling bee. I can't really speak any
other language, but I've been told that the idea of such a bee in most
languages wouldn't make any sense because everything is spelled - if not
exactly how it sounds - then with a consistency that makes the spelling
simple. Here, all we have (even for English speakers) is brute force
memorization. If you don't know how vacuum is spelled, then good luck
guessing.

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jscholes
I think the most difficult aspect of learning English depends on (A) the
learner and (B) the goal. If your aim is to learn the language to a sufficient
degree that you can handle business customers at an upscale hotel in a non-
English speaking country, you're going to have different concerns to somebody
trying to emigrate to and fit in with a community in the north of England.

------
ubermonkey
Lately, my favorite comments about English as a second language come from
Finnish comedian Ismo, regarding his take on the most complicated word in the
English language: Ass.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU)

(Reasonably SFW; the set is from a normal TV talk show.)

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AtlasBarfed
Since english is so massive at this point with its absorption of so many other
language subsets, has anyone ever tried to standardize a base vocabulary
subset that matches a "bare minimum expression" of another language but
selects words for consistent conjugation and pronunciation?

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RickJWagner
From childhood, the baffling 'ghoti'.

It's pronounced 'fish' [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti)

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8bitsrule
One of my favorites is the 'silent e'.

Bear and bare. Pronounced the same. Bar, car. Bear care.

And then there's the 'f' sound. Comes in many disguises.

Fish, tough, cuff, cough, phone.

Spanish, as a second language, is such a relief.

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AlphaGeekZulu
The Chaos Of English Pronunciation by Gerard Nolst Trenité:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw)

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dqv
Pronunciation _consistency_ is pretty important too. "I deer you to slap the
beer" does make sense because both /ɛr/s (?) have been remapped to /ɪr/s (?)

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zeveb
Amusingly, in my dialect 'ear' is pronounced like 'eer', not like 'EE-ur.'

~~~
nkrisc
American Southeast?

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dundercoder
"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a correct
sentence in American English[0]

[0] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo)

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tsukurimashou
it all depends from which language you're coming from, some will have it easy,
some will have it hard, on different things

~~~
StavrosK
Not really. Nobody will find English pronunciation/spelling easy, unless
they're coming from English.

~~~
sheepdestroyer
Coming from French. I find English spelling easy. I mainly learnt by myself,
reading stuff on internet and books. Could not care less about correct
pronunciation though, and I have the thickest 'cliché' french accent. But
which of the native English accents would be the correct one anyway? So I
decided to consider mine not worse than any. H does not exist by the way.

~~~
StavrosK
I'm not sure what you mean, you seem to conflate pronunciation and accent. How
do you pronounce "bow", "tear" and "row"? When you say you find spelling easy,
you mean you find it easy to spell an unknown word when you hear it? Because
I'd really like to see that.

~~~
sheepdestroyer
Not sure if the distinction between accent and pronunciation is very relevant
here? I have a particular/personal 'French' accent that heavily influences the
way I pronounce words. As stated, it mainly comes from the way I learnt : I
often straight up applied french pronunciation (but with some basic informed
knowledge of what could be the proper way) to what I read. So, to answer your
examples, I pronounce those exactly like the french "beau", "tire" and "rot".

For me, English has been a mostly literary language for years with most spoken
forms coming to me with simultaneous subtiles. So, it's rare that I encounter
a new spoken word that I haven't read before, but with time and familiarity
you develop some kind of heuristics I guess (and enough of English comes from
French that there is no need to be too lucky).

I now live in Japan and used to guide, in English, foreign tourists in Kyoto.
Amusingly only native speakers seemed to sometimes have difficulties to
understand my strange pronunciation/accent.

~~~
StavrosK
> So, to answer your examples, I pronounce those exactly like the french
> "beau", "tire" and "rot".

That's where the problem comes in: You can't pronounce those words without
context. "A row of people was watching the row". "A tear in the painting
brought a tear to my eye", "I bow to your skills with the bow".

~~~
sheepdestroyer
I can : all the same to me. Context, mostly, makes me understood

~~~
StavrosK
I mean, yes, all languages are easy if you don't care much about correctness.

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cgriswald
TLDR: Similarly spelled words are pronounced differently, like in an old
Gallagher bit: [https://youtu.be/X74j1wK_sa0](https://youtu.be/X74j1wK_sa0)

~~~
krige
that's small time. even identically spelled words are pronounced differently,
see polish (shoe polish) / Polish (nationality)

~~~
StavrosK
Even worse are bow, row, lead, etc. English is crazy.

~~~
dfawcus
If you're going to mention 'bow' one should also remember 'bough' for
additional fun.

~~~
dfawcus
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.

When the bow breaks, the army will fall.

When the bow breaks, the actor will fall.

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saiya-jin
Meh, try learning french in your late 30s from 0 as your 4th (actually 5th)
language. Of course the goal is not some basic grocery-shopping level but
fluency and all the quirks that come with it.

~~~
bausano_michael
Unfortunately this experiment excludes several groups from participating.
Those past late 30s who didn't learn French as 4th/5th language, those knowing
more than 4/5 languages, those who learned French as their 2nd or 3rd
language, and French.

~~~
saiya-jin
Nobody said it would be easy to achieve, i am still in the process of getting
there. Its more about that such things are in possibly all languages out
there, this is normal. Definitely all I've encountered so far.

Plus you forgot all other french-native speakers other than French nationals,
which are much more numerous than French themselves.

~~~
bausano_michael
That is very true, I forgot about native speakers who aren't French! Good
spot.

