Well, hello and welcome to the Learn Every Day English podcast, Your Roadway to English Proficiency.
You've come to the right place to improve your listening comprehension skills and mastery of the English language.
My name is Gary and I'll be your host today.
I'm a native English speaker born and raised in the United States and a retired engineer living in a small Texas town about one hour north of Houston.
I'm also a language learner like you studying Spanish, so I know what it is like to learn a new and different language.
So now, let's jump right in to today's episode.
Well, hey listeners, hey, welcome to this episode of the Learn Every Day English podcast.
Glad to have you with me.
Here in this episode, we're going to be talking about something interesting as well.
The 12 most difficult parts or things of learning English according to non -English speakers and I'm assuming that would be you all.
As we say in Texas, you all or y 'all.
Hey, but before we get started, I want to remind you as usual, you can follow me at my webpage.
Just go to www .learneverydayenglish .com.
You can listen to the podcast directly from the webpage or if not, just download them from podcast sites like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and the like.
Finally, at the webpage, you can access a link that will take you to our Learn Every Day English YouTube channel where you'll find engaging and interesting videos that will help you learn and improve your English and listening comprehension skills.
And finally, remember, go to the podcast resources page and there you can download the program notes for this episode and you can follow along with me so you don't have to write everything down.
So without further ado, hey, let's jump right in to today's episode.
In this episode, we're going to talk about the 12 most difficult parts of learning English according to non -English speakers and I need to give some credit for this article for I've found it online and it was written by a Harriet Marsden dated in May of 2017.
I need to and want to give her credit and it looks like she was following or went through a thread on the Reddit site asking non -native English speakers what the most difficult part of learning English was and they gave some answers and responses and here are some things that they said they found most
difficult in trying to learn English.
Number one has to do with the sentence structure or how the nouns and the verbs and the adjectives are arranged in a sentence so it may not be the same arrangement that is in your native language.
For example, in English we can say that is a fast red car or a big white house and I know in Spanish I've been studying Spanish the word order or the word sequence or the indirect and direct object pronouns fall in the sentence are different between English and Spanish.
Those are the only two languages I can speak about because those are the only two languages I have studied but I'm sure there may be other languages that have similar issues or problems.
The second thing that these non -English speakers said was very difficult about learning English has to do with phrasal verbs and I hear this a lot from a lot of listeners and a lot of English language students that phrasal verbs are very confusing and very difficult to understand but if you've been
listening to this podcast for a while you know we have four I think episodes that talk about phrasal verbs episode 12, 13, 14, and episode 24.
Episode 12 talks about phrasal verbs with the word out.
For example, like chill out, space out, or freak out.
Episode 13 talks about phrasal verbs with the word in such as chip in, given, or hand in.
Episode 14 talks about phrasal verbs with the word go such as go for it, go off on, or go on and on.
And episode 24 talks about phrasal verbs with the word hold such as hold back on, hold off on, and hold it together.
So if you haven't listened to those episodes, hey go back and check those out.
That might be another phrasal verb for you.
Check those out. The third thing that the non -English speaker said was difficult about learning English has to do with vowels and how they're I guess put together and how this how they sound together with the vowels and other words and I'll give you two examples and these two examples you have to be
very careful how you pronounce words in English.
For example, there's a word beach, beach, it's I could go to the beach it's down by the sea or the ocean.
There's also the word bitch, bitch, which can be a female dog, which is not a bad word in and of itself, but bitch can also be a bad word that you can use when you want to talk or describe about a female, so I don't suggest you do that.
So you really need to be able to differentiate between beach and bitch.
There's also the word sheet like a sheet of paper or sheet can be something that you put on your bed to cover yourself when you're sleeping, but this sounds a lot like the word shit, shit, so there's sheet and shit, so be sure you are able to make the difference or pronounce these words differently
because they have two very different meanings and I'm not going to go into detail about the second word, S -H -I -T, but you can look that up on the internet if you want to.
The fourth area that non -English speakers said was very difficult about learning English has to do with words that have what we call silent letters or the letters are not actually pronounced in the word, such as the word island, it's I -S -L -A -N -D, looks like it may be pronounced I -S -land or I -S -land,
but it's island. Other words are bomb, comb, debt, and muscle.
The fifth thing that non -English speaker said was hard about learning English has to be all the rules of English grammar rules and there are a lot of exceptions to those rules.
For example, I before E except after C is a rule that you might have heard in an English grammar, but sometimes that doesn't always, it's not always the case, there may be some exceptions to that and other English rules, so a lot of times learning all these exceptions just takes time and it takes practice
and experience. It's nothing that you can rush.
The sixth thing that non -English speaker said was difficult about learning English has to do with pronunciation and this is one of again one of the more or most common things I hear from English language learners and we actually did an episode on this episode 23 of the most difficult English words to
pronounce and some of those words are choir, squirrel, drawer, kernel, comfortable, temperature, pizza, and listen.
So if you haven't listened to that episode 23 be sure to go back and check that out as well.
Number seven has to do with idioms and English expressions.
Non -English speaker said this was a difficult part of learning English and we've actually done a lot of episodes here on the Learn Everyday English podcast about idioms and expressions.
We've got episodes 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 29, 30, and 33 and these include just episodes about common English idioms or expressions, idioms of people's names, idioms or expressions involving the word time, also expressions involving the word heaven and also hell.
So be sure to check those episodes out and some idioms or expressions that you might have heard and that actually we've talked about and some of these previous episodes have has to do with to be pissed off, cool it, cut it out, hey rise and shine.
Also idioms or expressions about animals such as hold your horses, let the cat out of the bag, let sleeping dogs lie, or go on a wild goose chase.
So if you don't know what any of those idioms or expressions are be sure, like I said before, to go back and listen and check those episodes out.
The eighth thing that people said was difficult about learning English has to do with homonyms, homonyms, and these are a word that has two different meanings like for example the word bat can be an animal if which is a flying mammal or it can also be like a baseball bat used in the sport of baseball
but it's the same word it's spelled the same and pronounced the same bat.
It's also the word watch which can be like you can look at something you can watch a movie but also watch is something you wear on your wrist to tell time.
Another example of a homonym is the word palm which is part of your hand but it can also be a type of tree like a palm tree which you find at the beach.
There is the word can which can mean to be able to do something but a can can be also like a container of a food product that you can buy at the store like a can of green beans for example or a can of tomato sauce and the last example is the word rose.
Rose can be a flower type of flower or can also mean that something went up in the air like a balloon rose up in the air so those are homonyms.
Number nine the ninth thing that people said was very difficult about learning English has to do with how do you form the plural of words in English and we have an episode that deals with that somewhat episode 22 titled why is English so hard and it was kind of a poem that I read but for example like
the I have the word house but the plural of house is houses you have the word box and the plural of box is boxes but the word ox the plural of ox is oxen the plural of goose is not gooses but it's geese and the plural of mouse is not mouses but mice and the plural of man is not men's but men so you
can see English can be very confusing when you're trying to form the plural of certain words the tenth thing that people said was very difficult about English has to do with nicknames nicknames or different names that we call people for that for example instead of calling someone William you can call
them Bill instead of saying Richard you can call them Dick D -I -C -K and there are other nicknames as well and I'm sure you have nicknames in your country where you call people different names that are not their real name or their given name and number 11 has to do with spelling in English and that was another
thing that English language learners found very difficult in learning English you may think a word is spelled a certain way as its sounds but it doesn't it doesn't make any sense at all so these are actually they were 11 things I'm sorry I said 12 but they're 11 things that English language learners
found difficult about learning English and they were sentence structure phrasal verbs vowels silent letters exceptions to English rules grammar rules pronunciation idioms or expressions homonyms plurals nicknames and spelling well I hope you enjoyed this episode of the learn everyday English podcast
it was a little bit shorter than the usual episode but hopefully it gave you some interesting information I'd like to know if you agree with these 11 things that most English language learners find difficult about learning English hey go to the learn everyday English webpage go to the home page on the that first
page there's a contact form hey let me know send me a message let me know if you agree or you disagree with this list and let me know what what do you think or what do you find the most difficult about learning English like I said before most people have told me it's either phrasal verbs or pronunciation again let
me know too if you have any topics you'd like me to to discuss on this program well I think that's it for now hey be sure to check out our learn everyday English youtube channel and be listening and on the watch for our upcoming episodes hope you find these podcasts interesting helpful and beneficial
for you and if they are giving you some help or hoping you improve your English let me know as well hey drop me a line so that's it for now for this episode and I said be sure to check out our upcoming episodes have a good day week and wherever you're at stay safe hope you're staying safe from the pandemic
as well and things are improving in your country wherever you're at so thanks for listening today and goodbye we'll talk to you later on learn everyday English podcast
