Think learning English is easy? Read this.

[Rabish Bini]

Here is something I found very interesting:

 

SO, YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE TOUGH ENOUGH TO TRY TO LEARN ENGLISH?

This little treatise on the lovely language we share is only for the

brave.

It was passed on by a linguist, original author unknown. Peruse at your

leisure, English lovers.

Reasons why the English language is so hard to learn:

1) The bandage was wound around the wound.

2) The farm was used to produce produce.

3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.

4) We must polish the Polish furniture.

5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.

6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.

7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.

8) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.

9 ) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

10) I did not object to the object.

11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.

12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.

13) They were too close to the door to close it.

14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.

15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.

16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.

17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.

18) After a number of injections my jaw got number.

19) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.

20) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

21) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?

 

Let's face it - English is a crazy language. 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.

We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that 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. 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?

 

Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. 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?

 

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which 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.

 

English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all.

 

That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.

[Mercid]

Woh! I'm glad I was raised speakin' English or else I would find it appallingly confusing!

(In fact the only thing more confusing is learning to write in ancient Chinese, no alphabet just symbols for EVERY single word!)

[Bimmerman]

Haaha great list. here's another.

 

You drive on a parkway but park on a driveway.

 

Oh sweet lunacy

[MTV2]

you do realise that rarely do you see people use those phrases. ive never heard anybody say any of those.

 

and for the food, eggplant, pineapple, hamburger, french fries, and engish muffins.

 

pineapple: they dont have to have apple in them, its their characteristics. your focusing on thing. it was called a pineapple because it looked like a pine cone so they changed it to pineapple

eggplant: "This name developed from the fact that the fruits of some 18th-century European cultivars were yellow or white and resembled goose or hen's eggs." wikipedia.org they are also called aubergines

french fries: they're named that because they're potatoes fried in a french maner.

english muffins:they are referred t oin england as muffins, but because the britains got the word from a french term they are known as english muffins or something like that.

Hamburger: they were first introduced in Hamburg, Germany. use your head.

[Rabish Bini]

LOL. That's a good one Bimmerman. And i'm also glad that I was brought up with English. Although I was also brought up with Croation. Meh.

@MTV2 - Who said I wrote it. I would post a link but it has rude humour and nude comedy.

 

Edit: Plus, not all of it is wrong. And how they originated may be correct, but it's still crazy.

 

Edit 2 - And I know that those phrases arehardly used, but it's just to prove a point. If you had no idea how to seak English, and then tried to learn, you would get mixed up between produce as in make something and produce as in what farmers make.

[Diego Varen]

Well I've been speaking English all my life, so I'm fine.

[Quanon]

Fun , I learned Englisg by school and watching cartoons on the BBC I did not find it so difficult what you showed up there ( alread , alread sometimes I to read it thrice over to get the clue )

Anyway everylanguage has these kind(= child in dutch ) of silly things , but I must admid English takes the lead .

[Grey Master]

Learnin English was not very hard, I still study it, and that will make 12 years since I first started learning it.

[MetalMark]

I'm not even raised Englisch and still I think this is easy (multiple do sound funny), want a hard language try Dutch.

[Grey Master]

Or Arabic, that's fun....

[HerbieZ]

Since when will anyone in their life have to say "A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line". Although if no one likes using the language then we'l just have to have it back and you'll have to invent your own. Bwahahaha.

[The Doctor]

English is only confusing if people use proper grammar and spelling. Which nobody does anymore.

 

Isn't it incorrect to use the same word twice in a row in one sentence? The expression "these ones" is also incorrect, I believe - you can't make the singular "one" plural.

[ChAiNz.2da]

Just deleted several posts.

 

Stay on topic. Thread cleanup isn't fun

[igyman]

Akuma has a point, the English language is full of words that are pronounced the same, but spelled differently and have completely different meanings. It's the main reason why some people make spelling errors, heck I've noticed that sometimes even the English on this forum have problems with spelling their own language. Lucky for me that I picked most of these tricks up a while ago and have very little problems managing through those paradoxes.

[Kitty Kitty]

At the base level, English is actually considered one of the easiest languages to learn, remembering of course that when speaking of how easy or hard it is, we can only look at second languages because the process of learning your native tongue is completely different and largely automatic as you're immersed in it from the time you're born.

 

Of course, there is no single answer to what language is the hardest (or for that matter the easiest) to learn, since it depends on far too many factors to ever equate to a meaningful answer.

 

For people who began with a roman based language, the hardest usually tend to be Chinese or Japanese, though for English speakers often Hungarian proves even more difficult still, due to the fact that the language has 35 different cases --That is to say, any given noun might be said or written 35 different ways depending on whether it's a subject, object, genitive, etc...

 

On the other hand, those who begin with a very different first language, say Chinese for example, find learning other similar languages like Japanese much easier since they share a common base, but they find most of the romance and Germanic languages far more challenging for the same reasons.

 

What is challenging about English though, often regardless of what you began with, is a combination of the illustration above (where one word can mean so many different things and often is even spelled exactly the same way as well), and the fact that English itself was derived from so many different languages. While the basis was the Roman alphabet, and much of the language was taken from German (hence its classification as a Germanic language), it also contains a significant influence from Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, and lesser influence from several other sources. Making all those words from so many different sources all behave together can get a little tricky, which lends to why you can buy two eggs too if you go to the store, as well as why two wrongs do not make a right, but three lefts do.

 

Sorry for the book. I find language an interesting subject and I'm prone to ramble when something piques my interest.

 

-Kitt

[Aash Li]

English doesnt borrow grammar from other languages... it lurks in dark alleyways and mugs them. xD

 

English divides by zero!

 

I never thought learning english was easy, Im a native speaker of it, and I still have some trouble with grammar!

 

18) After a number of injections my jaw got number.

 

This is incorrect grammar... it should be "...got more numb." there is no such word as 'number' when referring to something being numb.

[Jae Onasi]

Or Arabic, that's fun....

 

I thought Arabic was relatively easy to pick up, but I had something like 10 years of French by that point and the grammar's not terribly different. I haven't kept up with it, however, so I couldn't even tell you all the alphabet anymore.

 

One of my favorite foreign language moment was when I was trying to learn a little Spanish before going to Cancun. Iater discovered I really didn't need to, since they all wanted to speak English with me, but still, I always feel it's polite to learn their language and use it in their country, anyway. I did a combo of 'Learn Spanish in Your Car' and 'Spanish for Complete Idiots' (which worked very well, actually--they complemented each other).

 

One evening, the whole family was in the car, and I had the tape in. The conjugation of vivir came on. Now, on this tape the speaker says the sentence in Spanish twice and then gives the English translation. I followed along pretty well--I live in Mexico, You live in Spain, my aunt lives in Peru, that kind of thing. Then came the sentence "Mi gato vive de bajo de mi casa," said in just the same serious tone as the other sentences. Jimbo, who speaks Spanish, burst out laughing as I struggled to figure out how 'cat' 'lives' and 'house' could possibly be connected. I had to wait for the English translation because Jimbo was still howling laughing and couldn't tell me that it was "My cat lives underneath my house."

 

Another interesting moment was when I took a taekwondo class at a dojang in Cancun. I got to the class and realized I knew absolutely nothing about what moves the master was calling out in Spanish. He didn't know the English equivalents, either. However, we both had learned the Korean terms for the moves. So there we were, a Spanish and an English speaker, communicating in Korean. It was a surreal moment.

[Bob Lion54]

Its not that grammatically correct English language is hard to learn, but in practice, very few native English speakers use correct grammar. This is especially true in how we speak but it also affects our writing.

 

What is even more confusing is that many words that we use everyday simply don't fit in a textbook. English is laden with slang words that people just learning English from a textbook will not learn.

 

Most of us know how to use proper grammar, but we seldom do. Seriously, next time you are in a public place, listen to how people speak. You can even see this on TV. As native English speakers, it no problem, but think if you have only learned English from a textbook. I think you can see why people say English is so confusing.

[Rabish Bini]

@Kitty - English is the hardest language to learn. Think of it this way. Have about 20 people who all speak one language which is unknown, (as an example of course) and one person who knows how to speak every language. He teaches the 20 students every single language and how to speak it. I think English would fall under the hardest.

 

@Herbie - Probably no-one would use that, but it's just an example. You could use those two words in different sentences, and who your talking to might wonder why your using that word when it's wrong because he doesn't know proper English.

[KotO[REvan]]

Portuguese is rather easy to learn, but I can't imagine being raised in the Portuguese language and having to learn Enlglish. That would be insane.

[Grey Master]

I thought Arabic was relatively easy to pick up, but I had something like 10 years of French by that point and the grammar's not terribly different. I haven't kept up with it, however, so I couldn't even tell you all the alphabet anymore.

 

One of my favorite foreign language moment was when I was trying to learn a little Spanish before going to Cancun. Iater discovered I really didn't need to, since they all wanted to speak English with me, but still, I always feel it's polite to learn their language and use it in their country, anyway. I did a combo of 'Learn Spanish in Your Car' and 'Spanish for Complete Idiots' (which worked very well, actually--they complemented each other).

 

One evening, the whole family was in the car, and I had the tape in. The conjugation of vivir came on. Now, on this tape the speaker says the sentence in Spanish twice and then gives the English translation. I followed along pretty well--I live in Mexico, You live in Spain, my aunt lives in Peru, that kind of thing. Then came the sentence "Mi gato vive de bajo de mi casa," said in just the same serious tone as the other sentences. Jimbo, who speaks Spanish, burst out laughing as I struggled to figure out how 'cat' 'lives' and 'house' could possibly be connected. I had to wait for the English translation because Jimbo was still howling laughing and couldn't tell me that it was "My cat lives underneath my house."

 

Another interesting moment was when I took a taekwondo class at a dojang in Cancun. I got to the class and realized I knew absolutely nothing about what moves the master was calling out in Spanish. He didn't know the English equivalents, either. However, we both had learned the Korean terms for the moves. So there we were, a Spanish and an English speaker, communicating in Korean. It was a surreal moment.

 

LOL, no, arabic is very hard, and were did you bought those tapes??

LOL,LOL.

[Darth InSidious]

Bob Lion and Kitty have it spot on, IMO.

 

Re: grammar - if everyone used the correct grammar and form, the language would be far easier to understand, but when, like, you be using, like, bits that aren't right or don't flow good, it goes across really bad, right?

 

See what I mean?

 

Interesting fact: the word 'desert', meaning hot, dry place with lots of sand, is thought to come from the Ancient Egyptian 'desheri' meaning 'the red land'

 

I've always thought that the most difficult literature in the world, however, is French. Why, you ask?

Proust.

Even in translation it's hell. I got to page thirty-something of 'Swann's Way' and decided he could shove his bloody madeleine cakes up his rectum.

[stingerhs]

i'll have to agree with some of my coworkers: its easier to speak spanish than english. at least with spanish, the main problem is understanding a couple of different dialects. with english, you have the dialects plus spoken language, written language, proper written language, and one heck of a vocabulary.

 

otherwise, its a fun language.

[Dark_Lady]

Number 20 could be even longer. I had to subject the subject to a series of tests on the subject.

[Aash Li]

You think english is hard? Try learning old Irish! Or even russian!

 

Old Irish: I used to have this joke that the celts had the written language forced upon them by the romans (they were a completely oral people before then). So to get back at the invading romans, they added lots of consonants to their words. And I used to have an example of one of their worst words, but now I cant think of it.

Welsh had a similar theme, but theirs made more sense. w is a vowel if its alone (like annwn is pronounced an-noon). f = v, ff = f, dd = th, and a few other combos like that.

 

Russian is a intellectual masochists dream come true. From the description of Hungarian, Id say Russian would be slightly easier to learn, but theres still all those declensions and cases and screwy grammar...

 

Id rather learn Japanese... atleast its something I could use. lol