Welcome to the Listening Time podcast.
Hey English learners.
This is Connor and you're listening to episode 244 of the Listening Time podcast.
I hope your ears are ready to practice listening with this episode.
In today's episode, I'm going to answer the question, Is English a hard language?
Of course, I'm not just gonna give a yes or no answer.
I'm gonna talk about the aspects, the parts of English that I think are hard or easy.
So I am excited to talk about this because I love talking about the English language and I think when I talk about topics like this the difficult and easy aspects of English it just helps you have a wider, a bigger understanding of the English language and it might help you start to notice certain things in English that you didn't notice before.
So I think this will be a helpful episode for all of you.
And I want to remind you that you can get my training specifically if you want my pronunciation training, where I help you pronounce things more like a native speaker, more like me, for example.
If you want that training, make sure to sign up to become a Listening Time super member or family member or VIP.
You can do that by clicking on the link, the description below this episode, and if you sign up for one of those levels of my membership, you'll get my specialized training in which I help you pronounce things more like a native speaker.
So if you want that, the link is down below.
All right, let's talk about English and whether or not it's a hard language.
And let me start out by talking about languages in general and why we might consider them easy or hard, easier than other languages or harder than other languages.
In general, learning a language is challenging.
I think that we can all agree that learning any language is a challenge.
It can be hard.
Some languages are more challenging for some people.
Some languages are harder for you than for a speaker of a different language, perhaps.
And so it's gonna depend on some factors.
And the biggest factor is how different is the language from your native language?
So if you're a Spanish speaker, for example, and you are trying to learn Portuguese, this is much, much closer to your native language than, let's say, Russian.
So, of course, Portuguese is gonna seem easier for almost every Spanish speaker than Russian will.
And so, the similarity, the relation to your language is probably the biggest factor.
And when you are learning a language that is related to your language, there are probably a number of cognates, meaning shared vocabulary words.
If you're a Spanish speaker and you're learning Portuguese, there are tons of cognates.
You might recognize more words than you don't recognize because of how many cognates there are, how many shared or similar words there are.
And so this is the biggest factor in terms of why certain languages will seem a lot easier than other languages, because if a language is really similar to your language, there's less to learn, right.
You already know a lot, compared to someone who speaks a language that is not related to that language.
And the other thing.
The other really big factor in my opinion, is how many rules do you need to learn?
I'm not talking about vocabulary here.
I'm not talking about how many new words you need to learn, but rather how many new rules do you need to learn?
Some people might say that there's no such thing as a hard or an easy language to learn.
It just depends on its relation to your language and your motivation for that language, your personal situation.
And there is some truth to that.
But I also believe that some languages are probably objectively harder to learn for most people because of how many new rules are in that language that person needs to learn.
Of course, if we're talking about someone who speaks a language that is related to that other language, that's different.
They probably have the same rules or similar rules in their language.
But let's just talk about people who speak a language that is not related to that foreign language.
If we compare that foreign language to another foreign language that also isn't related, then usually the language that is harder to learn is the language that has more new things to learn, new rules in particular.
And again There are other factors like motivation or whatever.
But if we're talking about just the language and let's pretend that the motivation level is the same for you to learn any language, then usually the language that has more new rules will be harder.
So think of languages that have things like bunch of different verb tenses or many conjugations.
Like the word the verb is different for every single subject I you he she, etc.
There are more conjugations in some languages than in others and some languages have more verb tenses or just overall verb forms than others.
And some languages have a case system.
For example, like in Greek, which I'm learning now, a noun, for example, will change its form depending on where it is in the sentence, depending on it's a function in the sentence.
I should say if it is the subject, it's going to be a different form than if it is the object or if it is the possessor of another noun.
The noun will change so like the person's name.
Let's say the person's name is john, but the greek version of john, That person's name will be different in different parts of the sentence.
If you're addressing John directly, or if you're saying John hit the ball, or if you're saying John's house, the name John changes in those different cases.
For some of you that sounds crazy because your language doesn't have cases and so of course that is going to seem much harder for you than if a language doesn't have Those different cases.
So that's another thing.
Sound and stress, the systems of sound and stress in a language.
If there are more things to learn about that sound and stress system, that's going to make it harder.
So some people might disagree with me and say that languages are not objectively harder or easier.
It just depends on your motivation for them, how interested you are or whatever.
And yes, I agree somewhat, but I think that in general, the more new things you need to learn, the harder the language is.
So let me talk specifically about English.
What are the hard aspects of English?
And of course, This is very general.
I know this will depend on your language, but I'm going to talk in general.
So one of the hardest aspects of English is the number of words and the amount of vocabulary that you need to learn.
English has many words and it has more words than most other languages, and partly because it has many major influences.
It has Germanic influences because English is a Germanic language.
So related to German, Dutch languages like that.
And English has a huge Latin influence.
So many of the words in English come from Latin or French, for example, and English has a lot of Greek influence.
So there are a lot of words that come from Greek.
So English has a lot of different, Which means that there are often multiple words that can be used to say the same thing.
Like one word might be more of the Latin word. word and the other word will be the Germanic word.
So, because of these different influences, you have a lot of vocabulary to learn in English, and phrasal verbs are included here.
I know many of you think that phrasal verbs are like a grammar thing, or you think of phrasal verbs as a separate category of things to learn.
But phrasal verbs are simply vocabulary words, in my opinion, but they have a verb and a preposition.
But you shouldn't think of them like that.
You should just learn them as like a single vocabulary word.
Of course, you have to learn whether or not you can separate the two words, and there are things like that.
But in general, the best way to think about phrasal verbs is to think of them as vocabulary words.
When I say bring up, you should just think of that as one new vocabulary word, even though it's two words.
So we have many phrasal verbs, thousands even.
I don't know the exact number, but there are so many phrasal verbs in English And these are just additional vocabulary words.
So you have a lot of vocabulary to learn when it comes to English.
So this can be one of the hardest things for people.
Another thing that can be hard in English is listening comprehension and Many of you agree, and that's why you're listening to me right now, because this is easier than listening to other native speakers speak at normal speed.
And there are some different reasons why English is harder to understand than English other languages.
And when I say harder to understand, I'm not saying that it's hard to understand because of how many words you know, and There are still many words you don't know.
I'm saying that maybe you can understand a sentence when you see it written down, but you can't understand it when it is spoken.
So in that case, it's a question of listening comprehension.
It's not just because you don't know the words or whatever.
English can be hard for people to understand even if they understand written English.
So this is what I'm talking about.
So English is a hard language to understand for many people because it's not phonetic meaning one letter doesn't represent one sound.
You can't just assume that a letter is pronounced a certain way every time.
It is not like that at all. in English.
Letters can be pronounced in many different ways depending on where they are in the word, what letters are next to it, whether or not it's part of a combination of consonants or vowels or whatever.
So English is not phonetic like Spanish, for example.
And English is stress timed, not syllable timed.
So this is where we get the crazy stress system in English, where some syllables are really long and other syllables are really short.
And this is why we have so much reduction in English, where we reduce certain sounds, so we don't pronounce them how you expect us to pronounce them, and sometimes it's even hard for you to hear the sound because of how little stress is on that syllable.
So that can be really hard for people.
And so you might expect the wrong sounds in English.
You think that certain words are pronounced a certain way, but they're not.
And so you have to become aware of the correct sounds and how stress and reduced speech affect those sounds and those words.
So this is why, if you haven't done so, you should sign up to receive my training, my listening practice seminars, my pronunciation seminars, my sound training, because this is what we focus on with that training.
I help you understand and become aware of the correct sounds and patterns in English, and people usually learn a ton of when they watch these seminars and these training videos.
So please sign up for those if you need help with this.
The link is down below.
Another aspect that most people would consider hard about English is the pronunciation.
And of course, I already mentioned the stress system in English and reduction. and that is a very challenging thing for a lot of people so even if they are pronouncing the individual words correctly they don't sound like a native speaker when they say a whole sentence because they are not stressing the right words and reducing the right words, so that's hard, and just the range of sounds in English.
For example, English has a wider range of vowel sounds than many languages, so like the letter O can be said in different ways.
The letter A can be said in different ways.
It just depends.
We have diphthongs where we have like two vowel sounds in one syllable.
And it might be hard to get both of those vowel sounds and make those sounds in your mouth.
We have a lot of consonant clusters where we have like three or sometimes four consonants in a row, like in the word strength, where we have an n g, t and h all in a row without a vowel in between.
That can be tricky for people, and so there's a lot uh, that is challenging about pronouncing english correctly.
Again, if you need help with that, please sign up for my training and it will help you pronounce things more like a native speaker.
And then lastly, I just wanted to add one little grammar thing.
Dangling prepositions can be hard in English.
For example, when you have a preposition at the end of a sentence or the end of a clause.
Like if I say, he is a difficult person to work with.
That final with at the end can sound really strange for a lot of people, because many languages do not allow you to have a preposition at the end like that, like you wouldn't say those are the companies that I have worked for.
Like in your language it would be those are the companies for which I have worked.
But in English native speakers usually leave prepositions at the end of the sentence when it's natural to do so and that can be really tricky for people.
So that's like a little grammar thing that can be hard for people.
But let me also mention some aspects of English that aren't that hard, in my opinion.
It depends on your language, of course.
It depends on other factors.
But in general, I think these things are not as hard because you don't need to learn as many rules when it comes to these things.
So number one, conjugations.
So when we say I walk, you walk, we walk, they walk, we say walk for all of those different subjects, except for he walks, she walks, it walks.
But with that word, we only need to focus on two forms, just walk and and walks.
And you just need to know that walks is for he, she, and it.
That is not a lot to learn compared to, for example Spanish, where you need to change the ending of the verb, the conjugation for all the different subjects.
For I, for you, for he, for we. etc.
So there are fewer conjugations to learn in English.
So I think that this makes it a little bit simpler to just say the subject and the verb, because there aren't so many different verb forms, verb conjugations.
I should say
Another thing that isn't quite as difficult in English is the fact that we don't have a complex case system, like I already mentioned.
Like in Greek, you have to change the endings of nouns and adjectives and change the articles like the.
Even you have to change these depending on the function of the word in the sentence, and some languages have really complex case systems.
I think I've heard that Russian has a really complex one, so English doesn't have this.
And that makes it so that you don't have to learn so many different forms of words.
Even me learning Greek right now, which Greek does not have a super complicated case system, but it does have different cases and it is super challenging for an English speaker.
So the opposite would be easier if you don't have to learn all of these different forms.
It's less to learn.
Another thing that's not as hard in English is that there is no gender in terms of nouns, because in many languages nouns are either masculine or feminine, or sometimes masculine neuter, neutral nouns, like in greek, for example.
There are masculine nouns, feminine nouns and neutral nouns, and you have to learn which ones are in which category and, of course, the article changes depending on whether it's masculine or feminine or neuter.
There's a lot that you have to consider, and it's nice that in English you don't have this.
You don't need to worry about gender.
For English speakers, when we learn other languages with gender issues, it's hard for us.
It's really tricky.
It can be really annoying for the learner, especially if you combine that with the case system of some languages.
It just gets complicated.
There's a lot to learn a lot of rules and we don't have that in English.
So you should be thankful for that.
And one other aspect of English that is less difficult is that there's no formal register.
Really, when I say there's no formal register, what I mean is there's not like a separate way that you need to conjugate verbs to talk to someone with respect.
Like in all of the languages I've studied, I think there's a separate verb conjugation that you use to talk to someone who is older than you.
So you can talk to them with respect, or you might talk to someone your age this way, but Maybe they are some type of authority like your manager or whatever.
There's another separate way that you need to talk to them.
And this is related to business.
Grammar, you have to change the form of the verbs that you use when you talk to them.
This can be really tricky for English speakers, because in English We don't have this.
We just say you, regardless of whether we're talking to a kid or the president.
Of course, we might say sir or ma'am, but that's just an added word.
We don't have to change like the pronoun that we use.
We don't have a separate verb conjugation.
If I say you go, I could be talking to a child or the president.
That doesn't change.
So there's less to learn.
Really, there's almost nothing to learn when it comes to this particular aspect, except for learning how to be polite, but that's a vocabulary issue in English and just not using super informal language or whatever.
But it's not like another rule.
You need to learn like you need to use this different pronoun to talk to someone with respect and change the verb conjugation.
You don't need to do that in English.
So that is an aspect that's easier when it comes to English.
Okay, I could go on and on about this topic.
I love talking about the different aspects of English and other languages, but I'm going to stop there.
Hopefully you found this episode interesting and hopefully it opened your eyes to some of the things that are easier and more difficult about English.
And I'm sure a lot of you find this interesting.
And remember that if you want my help with one of these hard parts the pronunciation of English then please sign up for my membership, particularly Listening Time, Supermember or one of the higher tiers and you'll get my pronunciation training in which I help you pronounce things more like a native speaker.
So please check that out.
That link is down below.
And you can also find the link down below for my US Conversations podcast, in which I talk to different English teachers from all around the country.
It's a lot of fun.
It's great practice for your listening.
And you can take classes with those teachers as well.
So that link is down below.
Thank you all for listening to this episode.
And I'll talk to you on the next episode of listening time.
