Is English known for being easy to learn?
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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ShowerThoughts
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In my experience and what I heard from other people, yes
(but it's also from a european perspective)
In comparison to most other languages? Definitely
- im, it's definitely one of the easiest languages to learn (I speak Korean, English, and some Japanese). The fact that there are no gender distinctions or honorifics contributes significantly to its ease.
- The comparative ease also comes from the fact that, since it's the de facto lingua franca, you simply cannot avoid learning it. It's also easy to learn in terms of accessibility.
English being the lingua Franca is a wild thing
English is the <"French language" in Italian> is a pretty strange statement when you think about it.
At least thats what I've always heard from various sources during my 40'sh years on this earth (beginning from our english teacher while I was around 9 years old).
I would argue it's one of the harder ones. Not the hardest for sure (that title would have to go to Japanese or Chinese, probably), but I would say that it's significantly harder than the average language
What would you consider a language that is easier to learn and why?
A language with consistent spelling and pronunciation like Spanish. English has so many special cases where words are spelled or pronounced very unpredictably.
That entirely depends on how you plan to use it though. If you e.g. only want to read and write or listen and speak but not combine spoken and written word the consistency of pronunciation vs. spelling matters a lot less.
For vocabulary I suppose you could also consider languages with compound words easier than languages with unique words for the same concepts, i believe Spanish doesn't do so well there.
Yes, I would prefer to be literate.
I was actually more thinking about the use case where you e.g. only read and write online but rarely speak the language yourself and don't watch any movies or listen to audio books or podcasts.
One comment I heard from a native french speaker is that the "dictionary is much larger" than french. Which makes sense because English incorporated many french words.
ITT: English speakers saying English is easy to learn