Learning English?

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StrokeyBlofeld
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Learning English?

Post by StrokeyBlofeld »

The recent interest in people thinking the english language is easy to learn has led me to start a new thread. Ok, the basics of the language may not be overly hard, but to understand and use day to day language properly? I think english is pretty tough, and according to quite a few foreign people I know who have learnt english it is quite hard.
Here are some examples of why, I found these on a site and though I would post them up for you all to see.

All the following words are different words with different meanings, some are pronounced the same, some slightly differently:

wound
wound
produce
produce
refuse
lead
lead
desert
desert
dessert
bass
bass
dove
dove
object
object
invalid
invalid
present
present
present
row
row
close
close
sewer
sewer
sow
sow
wind
wind
number
number
tear
tear
subject
subject

Once you have got your head around that, have a read of these:

• There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
• English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France.
• Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.
• quicksand can work slowly,
• boxing rings are square and
• a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
• And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing,
• grocers don't groce
• and hammers don't ham?
• If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth?
• One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices?
• Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend, that you comb through annals of history but not a single annal?
• If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?
• If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?
• If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
• In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?
• Ship by truck and send cargo by ship?
• Have noses that run and feet that smell?
• How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?
• How can overlook and oversee be opposites, while quite a lot and quite a few are alike?
• How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell another?
• Have you noticed that we talk about certain things only when they are absent?
• Have you ever seen a horseful carriage or a strapful gown? Met a sung hero or experienced requited love?
• Have you ever run into someone who was combobulated, gruntled, ruly or peccable?
• your house can burn up as it burns down,
• in which you fill in a form by filling it out and
• in which an alarm goes off by going on.
• That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.
• And why, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up this essay, I end it?
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Re: Learning English?

Post by wicked_assassin »

i have learned 3 forgein languages and only english is the one i can control to a certain level. Because the basic and for daily life level use it's one of the easier languages.
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Re: Learning English?

Post by Saint »

I'm Fluent in American,Canadian and Australian!
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Re: Learning English?

Post by huGGy »

Well, i don't say english is an easy language. That's always depending on who learns it and how he is used to different languages in general. For a japanese guy it's way harder to learn english than for a dutch or german guy. But from my experience with other languages and from what friends told me here, the german grammer is more difficult. For me english seems pretty easy and obvious. Of course i can't speak on a high level in universities without further practice. I'm just talking about the daily smalltalk. I admit that i need to get used to the language more again. Too often vocabularies are missing, but i didn't really get confronted with the language, since i left school. So i'm really happy about the conversations here in the forums and on ventrilo.

Edit: The word Hamburger comes from Hamburg :P
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Re: Learning English?

Post by wicked_assassin »

German is a nightmare when it comes to grammar, i have such a trauma from my german last exam in high shool i never spoken it again.
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Re: Learning English?

Post by Blackadderthe4th »

Ha! That was excellent Jim, great find! English is an amalgamation of a number of different languages that have evolved through history so no wonder many of its words can have different meanings!

One of those influences is Germanic so maybe its no surprise that German speakers find it easy. ;)
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Re: Learning English?

Post by esam709 »

I started learning english in school when I was like 4 years old, so I have never had problems with it. But 3 years ago I started learning german and although I already speak it fluently I'm pretty sure that at least half of my articles are wrong.

I have been 7 months in germany btw.

My mother language is spanish, which is also pretty hard, but in spanish reading and writing is easy shet, because you say exactly what you write;

In english if you write "hi" you say sth like "hai".

I laughed at those sentences from Stokey, I find them ironic.
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Re: Learning English?

Post by I__CHAOS__I »

I'm in the middle of it. Here in China, everybody wants to learn English, and the town I'm in, is the nr 1 place to study it. English is extremely hard for them to master. The language is full of exceptions, inconsistencies, cultural influences ...
Chinese is a lot easier for many things, only the written language is very hard and is time consuming. (drawing the chinese characters over and over until u memorise them)
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Aaryn_GenD
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Re: Learning English?

Post by Aaryn_GenD »

i heard chinese grammar is very very easy.
idc what anybody says, english is easy to learn, but hard to master, as any other language
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Re: Learning English?

Post by Sporting_Lisbon »

English and spanish were both very easy for me, french on the other hand is hard and I think it is on the same level as german.
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Re: Learning English?

Post by wicked_assassin »

[quote=""I__CHAOS__I""]I'm in the middle of it. Here in China, everybody wants to learn English, and the town I'm in, is the nr 1 place to study it. English is extremely hard for them to master. The language is full of exceptions, inconsistencies, cultural influences ...
Chinese is a lot easier for many things, only the written language is very hard and is time consuming. (drawing the chinese characters over and over until u memorise them)[/quote]

Asain writing systems are a bid lol. You got to admit that the romanic writing system is better designed, i mean more logic.

Personaly i think that a lot depends on the motherlanguage. Dutch is a germanic language so it gives you more advantage for german. Reason i don't speak german is a complete lake of practice, but it's easier then french to learn.
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I__CHAOS__I
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Re: Learning English?

Post by I__CHAOS__I »

[quote=""wicked_assassin""][quote=""I__CHAOS__I""]I'm in the middle of it. Here in China, everybody wants to learn English, and the town I'm in, is the nr 1 place to study it. English is extremely hard for them to master. The language is full of exceptions, inconsistencies, cultural influences ...
Chinese is a lot easier for many things, only the written language is very hard and is time consuming. (drawing the chinese characters over and over until u memorise them)[/quote]

Asain writing systems are a bid lol. You got to admit that the romanic writing system is better designed, i mean more logic.

Personaly i think that a lot depends on the motherlanguage. Dutch is a germanic language so it gives you more advantage for german. Reason i don't speak german is a complete lake of practice, but it's easier then french to learn.[/quote]


I disagree about the 'logic' part actually, characters are very structured (one part for the sound, one for the meaning), but its time consuming to learn and memorise them, but then again, i guess it takes time to learn full words too.
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Re: Learning English?

Post by Blackadderthe4th »

I think the whole English is easy to learn conception that people have is heavily influenced by how common it is. It's everywhere and people are exposed to it from an early age. I wonder if French or German was the dominant language would we be saying they are easy and English is hard to learn?

Of course I think anyone who didn't speak a language descended from Latin would find all European languages equally hard.
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Re: Learning English?

Post by Soccerman771 »

Can't believe that I didn't see this post before I posted in the other thread. Then again, I was in a hurry earlier.

Just so everyone knows, the british guys came up with "english" so what do you expect...they think tea should be served hot too....

I actually thought French was pretty easy in high school and with minimal effort I was able to understand and still retain some of it even to this day, 20 years later even though I rarely if ever use it.
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Re: Learning English?

Post by esam709 »

It depends most on your mother language.
Spanish, portuguese, french, italian and another language I can't remember come all from latin, and they are sometimes so similar you can understand what other people say without knowing their language.
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