The purpose of this article is to put language difficulty into perspective for native English speakers struggling with foreign languages. Languages like Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, or even easier languages like Spanish, can seem very difficult, just because we're not used to them. English seems sooo easy and simple, but that's because we've been raised with it. Here are ten reasons why English is actually one of the hardest languages in the world.
THE WORLD'S CRAZIEST SPELLING SYSTEM
English spelling is extremely counter-intuitive! Why is it that words like "through", "trough", and "though" sound so different? It seems like for virtually every "rule" a prescriptivist writes down to try and model English spelling, exceptions can be found.
The fact is, although it's possible to make rough guesses at English spellings using phonetics, in order to really know English spelling, you have to memorize the spelling of every word. Even words whose spelling seems straightforward and simple, you still memorize (maybe subconsciously without even trying) just because otherwise when you wanted to spell it, you'd have no way to know it was simple and straightforward.
There is a method to the madness of English spelling. It's based on etymology. Based on how a word is spelled, we can make guesses about where the word came from. German, French, Latin? Maybe somewhere more exotic like Japanese? This is very useful, because it keeps spelling consistent between different English-speaking nations.
English is pronounced rather differently in the United States, in Britain, in Australia, and in India. If, as so many people have suggested, spelling reform were attempted, which nation would be the standard? At most one nation could enjoy perfectly phonetic spelling. The others would just switch from one bizarre spelling system to another. And even for that one country, the spellings would become obsolete as the pronunciations of words changed. Even in the United States, pronunciations vary from dialect to dialect.
So, there's good reason for the English spelling system. It's one of the most successful spelling systems in the world, because of its flexibility and its strength across wildly differing dialects. But that doesn't mean it's easy to learn! For a foreigner trying to learn English, spelling is extremely difficult!
THE SOUND SYSTEM IS SO RICH
When you study a foreign language, you're liable to run into sounds which aren't present in your native tongue. Part of the challenge is learning, mechanically, how to produce these sounds. In Japanese, there's a different "R" sound, which actually sounds something like a mix between "R", "L", and "D". In Mandarin, there are a dozen sounds which are all really hard to learn. German is famous for its hard gutteral sound, which we'd have to master if we wanted to get Johann Sebastian Bach's name right.
Generally, more exotic new sounds mean more difficulty learning a language. English has a very rich set of sounds. It has the ability to string consonants and vowels together almost arbitrarily. Take a look at the word, "strengths". There's only one vowel out of six or seven consonants, depending how you count! Again look at "squirrel". A very difficult word for foreigners to learn to pronounce.
And this is only made worse by the crazy spelling system. Not only are there a million sounds to learn, but there's small indication from a word's spelling which sounds are involved.
And, going the other direction, some foreigners must learn to identify certain sounds which they consider distinct. For example, English actually has two distinct "L" sounds, but we as English speakers can't hear the difference because we never need to in order to understand the language. But to, e.g., a native Russian speaker, suddenly there are two sounds floating around and both are to be considered identical. It's similar to learning Japanese, where the "g" of "go" and the "ng" of "thing" are treated as being identical.
SUBTLE ORDERING
In English, there are subtle ordering requirements which even English native speakers aren't consciously aware of. We get them right every time, because we subconsciously know about them through practice, but that just makes it all the harder for foreigners, since these rules are so subtle and hidden.
The best example is adjective ordering. Compare, "a cute little puppy" to "a little cute puppy." The first is fine, while the second sounds wrong. How is a foreigner to know which order to use?
Can you explain it to them? (There is actually a method, but it's rather complex and better to just learn subconsciously)
WHICH SYNONYM TO USE??
Because of its diverse, promiscuous etymological origins, English has lots of synonyms which, just from a dictionary definition, seem very similar if not identical in meaning. Part of becoming a master English speaker, is knowing which words to use when. Although synonyms are grouped up in a thesaurus, that doesn't mean the words are identical. Even if their official meanings are identical, different synonyms convey subtly different moods and ideas.
You can watch a movie or see a movie, but you can only watch TV, never see it. You can't view either of them, even though when you watch either of them, you become a viewer (and never a watcher, much less a seer!) Try explaining that to someone who speaks Arabic!
STRESS
In English, the entire meaning of a sentence can be changed by placing stress on a word. For example:
For native speakers of stressless languages, it's very difficult to even hear the stress at all. This counter-balances Mandarin's dreaded tone system which English speakers always cite as evidence of Mandarin's horrid difficulty.
POETIC, OLDER ENGLISH IS EVERYWHERE
In order to be really fluent in English, you can't just learn modern English, you must also know a little bit of older, more poetic English. Not actual "Old English", since that's a whole other language entirely, but "older" English.
Here in downtown Columbus, there's a church which advertises with the message: "Which part of 'Thou shalt not' don't you understand?" This slogan always makes me laugh, because, having studied languages, I've come to see how the slogan must be extremely confusing to most ESL speakers. The truth is that, for a lot of speakers, "Thou" and "shalt" are both unfamiliar. And the fact that by stringing them together in essentially the same structure as "You will not", you end up creating a command-- that's even worse!
Older English shows up in literature, plays, poetry... even video games.
WHAT'S UP WITH THESE QUESTIONS??
In English, it's very strange how the whole grammar of a sentence changes when the sentence is put in question form. "It is warm" becomes "Is it warm?" Notice how the "it" and the "is" are switched. To us, this is totally natural because we've been raised with it. To a lot of speakers of other languages, the whole device seems needlessly difficult.
Continuing with the "It is warm" example, there actually is a valid question, "It is warm?" It's interesting to ponder the difference in meaning between "It's warm?" and "Is it warm?" In the latter, the speaker genuinely doesn't know whether it's warm. In the former, it seems almost like the speaker thinks it's not warm, and is asking for re-confirmation.
These kinds of subtle distinctions make English a pretty difficult language grammatically.
IRREGULAR CONJUGATIONS OF VERBS, AND SIMILAR PHENOMENA
Some people who study Spanish think the verbs there are bad. English is stuffed full of irregular verbs! How come the past tense of "buy" is "bought", and the past tense of "sell" is "sold", and neither "buyed" nor "selled" are real words?
And that's just the "usual" conjugations of verbs, i.e., past tense and third person singular. There are other verb conjugations, but they're just so irregular we don't even acknowledge them as conjugations. For example, taking an adjective and forming it's "-ness" quality. As in, deriving "swiftness" from "swift". This process is as irregular as you can get. "Strong" doesn't become "strongness", it becomes "strength", even though its opposite, "weak", does become "weakness". "High" becomes "height", and if you mess up and say "highness" instead, it sounds like you're talking about some bizarre royal bloodline!
Sometimes you can even "undo" a conjugation and end up with a whole new word than what you started with. The word "truthiness", for example, has recently been popularized. Another example is "awesomeness". "Awesome" is actually derived from "awe": something is awesome if it inspires awe (at least, that's the original meaning). So in theory, "awesomeness" and "awe" should be the same thing, and "awesomeness" shouldn't even be a word since it should be redundant, and yet, they don't mean the same things and "awesomeness" is a word.
THE CASE OF THE LEFTOVER CASES
Being derived from German, which has a heavy case system, English originally had its own heavy case system. English cases have mostly been phased out, but the remnants of a case system still exist, which almost means in English it's the worst of both worlds.
Let me explain what cases are. Cases are different "forms" for words to indicate what function they serve in a sentence. For example, in the sentence "the cat ate the fish", "the fish" is the "object" (it's getting eaten), and "the cat" is the subject (he's doing the eating). There are no cases here; in order to tell who did the eating and who got eaten, we have to look at word order. If the sentence were "the fish ate the cat", the meaning would be very different!
In a cased language, "the cat" might have different forms, to indicate whether the cat is the subject, object, or something else (German has four different cases and Russian has even more). Similarly with "the fish". The advantage of a cased system is that word order is more flexible. The forms of the nouns tell us what roles they play, so the order of the sentence is less crucial. The downside of the case system is that it's more complicated, and there's more to memorize.
As I said, English is mostly case-free. But, there are leftovers from the old case system. That's why we have "I", "me", "mine" and "my". And why we have "you", "yours" and "your". And why we have "he", "him", and "his", and "we", "us", "ours" and "our". In each of these groups, it's really the same word, just in different forms- different cases. So, part of learning English is learning a case system, even though it's only used for a handful of words.
And English doesn't even get the positive advantages from its case system. Even in a sentence entirely using cased words, like "I hit him", word order is still important-- "Him hit I" is totally incorrect unless your name is Yoda.
Incidentally, the leftover case system also explains the annoying "who"/"whom" dilemma, which many native English speakers are confused by, not to mention ESL speakers!
WHAT KIND OF WORD IS THIS, ANYWAY??
One of the most difficult things about English, is the fact that there's very little in the way of signals to tell you what kind of word a word is. For example, in Japanese and Spanish, all verbs have similar endings. Not so in English.
The lone exception is the English adverb, which often ends in "-ly", but even this isn't a universal rule, and adverbs are about the least important words in a language anyway.
In English, the same word can even fall into multiple categories. "Trust" is a noun, but also a verb. "Quiet" is both a noun and an adjective (even though its opposite, "loud", is only an adjective). "Abstract" is all three!
In fact, almost any adjective can be used as a noun, just put "the" in front of it: "The dead shall walk the earth." And any noun can be used as a verb, like in the famous example, "I'll cookie you!" The possibilities are endless, as long as you're creative. All this makes English a lot of fun- but it also definitely makes the language complicated!
CONCLUSION
If you ever find yourself stressing out over learning a foreign language, just be glad you don't have to learn English as a second language!!
Here are some other articles I've written. Warning, they're all in English, that cursed language of doom!
Will The Languages Of The World Ever Merge?
The Four Conditionals In Japanese
The Sound Of Your Native Tongue
Training Self-Discipline
THE WORLD'S CRAZIEST SPELLING SYSTEM
English spelling is extremely counter-intuitive! Why is it that words like "through", "trough", and "though" sound so different? It seems like for virtually every "rule" a prescriptivist writes down to try and model English spelling, exceptions can be found.
The fact is, although it's possible to make rough guesses at English spellings using phonetics, in order to really know English spelling, you have to memorize the spelling of every word. Even words whose spelling seems straightforward and simple, you still memorize (maybe subconsciously without even trying) just because otherwise when you wanted to spell it, you'd have no way to know it was simple and straightforward.
There is a method to the madness of English spelling. It's based on etymology. Based on how a word is spelled, we can make guesses about where the word came from. German, French, Latin? Maybe somewhere more exotic like Japanese? This is very useful, because it keeps spelling consistent between different English-speaking nations.
English is pronounced rather differently in the United States, in Britain, in Australia, and in India. If, as so many people have suggested, spelling reform were attempted, which nation would be the standard? At most one nation could enjoy perfectly phonetic spelling. The others would just switch from one bizarre spelling system to another. And even for that one country, the spellings would become obsolete as the pronunciations of words changed. Even in the United States, pronunciations vary from dialect to dialect.
So, there's good reason for the English spelling system. It's one of the most successful spelling systems in the world, because of its flexibility and its strength across wildly differing dialects. But that doesn't mean it's easy to learn! For a foreigner trying to learn English, spelling is extremely difficult!
THE SOUND SYSTEM IS SO RICH
When you study a foreign language, you're liable to run into sounds which aren't present in your native tongue. Part of the challenge is learning, mechanically, how to produce these sounds. In Japanese, there's a different "R" sound, which actually sounds something like a mix between "R", "L", and "D". In Mandarin, there are a dozen sounds which are all really hard to learn. German is famous for its hard gutteral sound, which we'd have to master if we wanted to get Johann Sebastian Bach's name right.
Generally, more exotic new sounds mean more difficulty learning a language. English has a very rich set of sounds. It has the ability to string consonants and vowels together almost arbitrarily. Take a look at the word, "strengths". There's only one vowel out of six or seven consonants, depending how you count! Again look at "squirrel". A very difficult word for foreigners to learn to pronounce.
And this is only made worse by the crazy spelling system. Not only are there a million sounds to learn, but there's small indication from a word's spelling which sounds are involved.
And, going the other direction, some foreigners must learn to identify certain sounds which they consider distinct. For example, English actually has two distinct "L" sounds, but we as English speakers can't hear the difference because we never need to in order to understand the language. But to, e.g., a native Russian speaker, suddenly there are two sounds floating around and both are to be considered identical. It's similar to learning Japanese, where the "g" of "go" and the "ng" of "thing" are treated as being identical.
SUBTLE ORDERING
In English, there are subtle ordering requirements which even English native speakers aren't consciously aware of. We get them right every time, because we subconsciously know about them through practice, but that just makes it all the harder for foreigners, since these rules are so subtle and hidden.
The best example is adjective ordering. Compare, "a cute little puppy" to "a little cute puppy." The first is fine, while the second sounds wrong. How is a foreigner to know which order to use?
Can you explain it to them? (There is actually a method, but it's rather complex and better to just learn subconsciously)
WHICH SYNONYM TO USE??
Because of its diverse, promiscuous etymological origins, English has lots of synonyms which, just from a dictionary definition, seem very similar if not identical in meaning. Part of becoming a master English speaker, is knowing which words to use when. Although synonyms are grouped up in a thesaurus, that doesn't mean the words are identical. Even if their official meanings are identical, different synonyms convey subtly different moods and ideas.
You can watch a movie or see a movie, but you can only watch TV, never see it. You can't view either of them, even though when you watch either of them, you become a viewer (and never a watcher, much less a seer!) Try explaining that to someone who speaks Arabic!
STRESS
In English, the entire meaning of a sentence can be changed by placing stress on a word. For example:
- I entered my room.
- *I* entered my room.
- I *entered* my room.
- I entered *my* room.
- I entered my *room*.
For native speakers of stressless languages, it's very difficult to even hear the stress at all. This counter-balances Mandarin's dreaded tone system which English speakers always cite as evidence of Mandarin's horrid difficulty.
POETIC, OLDER ENGLISH IS EVERYWHERE
In order to be really fluent in English, you can't just learn modern English, you must also know a little bit of older, more poetic English. Not actual "Old English", since that's a whole other language entirely, but "older" English.
Here in downtown Columbus, there's a church which advertises with the message: "Which part of 'Thou shalt not' don't you understand?" This slogan always makes me laugh, because, having studied languages, I've come to see how the slogan must be extremely confusing to most ESL speakers. The truth is that, for a lot of speakers, "Thou" and "shalt" are both unfamiliar. And the fact that by stringing them together in essentially the same structure as "You will not", you end up creating a command-- that's even worse!
Older English shows up in literature, plays, poetry... even video games.
WHAT'S UP WITH THESE QUESTIONS??
In English, it's very strange how the whole grammar of a sentence changes when the sentence is put in question form. "It is warm" becomes "Is it warm?" Notice how the "it" and the "is" are switched. To us, this is totally natural because we've been raised with it. To a lot of speakers of other languages, the whole device seems needlessly difficult.
Continuing with the "It is warm" example, there actually is a valid question, "It is warm?" It's interesting to ponder the difference in meaning between "It's warm?" and "Is it warm?" In the latter, the speaker genuinely doesn't know whether it's warm. In the former, it seems almost like the speaker thinks it's not warm, and is asking for re-confirmation.
These kinds of subtle distinctions make English a pretty difficult language grammatically.
IRREGULAR CONJUGATIONS OF VERBS, AND SIMILAR PHENOMENA
Some people who study Spanish think the verbs there are bad. English is stuffed full of irregular verbs! How come the past tense of "buy" is "bought", and the past tense of "sell" is "sold", and neither "buyed" nor "selled" are real words?
And that's just the "usual" conjugations of verbs, i.e., past tense and third person singular. There are other verb conjugations, but they're just so irregular we don't even acknowledge them as conjugations. For example, taking an adjective and forming it's "-ness" quality. As in, deriving "swiftness" from "swift". This process is as irregular as you can get. "Strong" doesn't become "strongness", it becomes "strength", even though its opposite, "weak", does become "weakness". "High" becomes "height", and if you mess up and say "highness" instead, it sounds like you're talking about some bizarre royal bloodline!
Sometimes you can even "undo" a conjugation and end up with a whole new word than what you started with. The word "truthiness", for example, has recently been popularized. Another example is "awesomeness". "Awesome" is actually derived from "awe": something is awesome if it inspires awe (at least, that's the original meaning). So in theory, "awesomeness" and "awe" should be the same thing, and "awesomeness" shouldn't even be a word since it should be redundant, and yet, they don't mean the same things and "awesomeness" is a word.
THE CASE OF THE LEFTOVER CASES
Being derived from German, which has a heavy case system, English originally had its own heavy case system. English cases have mostly been phased out, but the remnants of a case system still exist, which almost means in English it's the worst of both worlds.
Let me explain what cases are. Cases are different "forms" for words to indicate what function they serve in a sentence. For example, in the sentence "the cat ate the fish", "the fish" is the "object" (it's getting eaten), and "the cat" is the subject (he's doing the eating). There are no cases here; in order to tell who did the eating and who got eaten, we have to look at word order. If the sentence were "the fish ate the cat", the meaning would be very different!
In a cased language, "the cat" might have different forms, to indicate whether the cat is the subject, object, or something else (German has four different cases and Russian has even more). Similarly with "the fish". The advantage of a cased system is that word order is more flexible. The forms of the nouns tell us what roles they play, so the order of the sentence is less crucial. The downside of the case system is that it's more complicated, and there's more to memorize.
As I said, English is mostly case-free. But, there are leftovers from the old case system. That's why we have "I", "me", "mine" and "my". And why we have "you", "yours" and "your". And why we have "he", "him", and "his", and "we", "us", "ours" and "our". In each of these groups, it's really the same word, just in different forms- different cases. So, part of learning English is learning a case system, even though it's only used for a handful of words.
And English doesn't even get the positive advantages from its case system. Even in a sentence entirely using cased words, like "I hit him", word order is still important-- "Him hit I" is totally incorrect unless your name is Yoda.
Incidentally, the leftover case system also explains the annoying "who"/"whom" dilemma, which many native English speakers are confused by, not to mention ESL speakers!
WHAT KIND OF WORD IS THIS, ANYWAY??
One of the most difficult things about English, is the fact that there's very little in the way of signals to tell you what kind of word a word is. For example, in Japanese and Spanish, all verbs have similar endings. Not so in English.
The lone exception is the English adverb, which often ends in "-ly", but even this isn't a universal rule, and adverbs are about the least important words in a language anyway.
In English, the same word can even fall into multiple categories. "Trust" is a noun, but also a verb. "Quiet" is both a noun and an adjective (even though its opposite, "loud", is only an adjective). "Abstract" is all three!
In fact, almost any adjective can be used as a noun, just put "the" in front of it: "The dead shall walk the earth." And any noun can be used as a verb, like in the famous example, "I'll cookie you!" The possibilities are endless, as long as you're creative. All this makes English a lot of fun- but it also definitely makes the language complicated!
CONCLUSION
If you ever find yourself stressing out over learning a foreign language, just be glad you don't have to learn English as a second language!!
Here are some other articles I've written. Warning, they're all in English, that cursed language of doom!
Will The Languages Of The World Ever Merge?
The Four Conditionals In Japanese
The Sound Of Your Native Tongue
Training Self-Discipline
Posts
10 comments:
Did you know you're the dawg?! Brilliant article.
I loved the part about stress within a sentence. I've been thinking for a while of stress within individual words as an analogue to tone in tonal languages, but the stress on words within a sentence, that simply hadn't occurred to me...despite, of course, using it every day. Funny how you can know the hows of a language your whole life but have 0 clue about the whys...
Oh! The part about contemporary English not being enough was also spot-on. Japanese are Chinese are like that, too...the arcane is always alive in the modern.
Anyway, great stuff. A much-needed antidote to the incessant whining of some English speakers learning and "learning" other languages -- hey, there goes another vocalizable distinction in meaning for the same word.
Your comments on English spelling were also really insightful. Charles Bliss (and many others, no doubt) have discussed how English merely purports to be using a phonetic (表音) writing system wile reely beeing clowsur too logugrafikniss (表意). And like you said, it's everywhere, even in names...kids I went to school with loved to regale me with the differences between Jensen/Jenson/Johnsen/Johnson...it's already kanji, if you will...
Live long and prosper :D.
Again, I find your thoughts about English, being a native speaker, very interesting.
You seem to have a thing with verbs :) Yes, there are irregular verbs in English, but again, not big deal for speakers of other languages with a far more complex verb system, like romance languages. The same with the inversion of verb and subject in questions, which is fairly standard as it happens in most European languages ... in Spanish there is not a "rule", since the S-V-O scheme is pretty flexible, but still, quite common. German and French are two examples where this swictching happens quite often.
Yep, English spelling *is* a nightmare, but one gets used to it. To be honest, I just can't remember *how* I was taught into it as a child, but I know for a fact that if I had to learn it as an adult, it would be a lot harder to learn. It is almost as there were no "spelling" at all :)
French is also nightmarish at first, but then you realize that despite its somehow bizarre nature, it is also quite consistent. MOre than English, at least,
There are to seemelingly simple grammar structures which get me in a lot of trouble in any language I've ever in touch be: the imperative (ie, giving commands to some one, like "don't you open the window") and the comparative (my car is bigger than yours, his is the biggest car)... fairly simple in English, but somwhow I always get stuck with this in *any*language ! :), even Galician which is also an official tongue where I live.
It's kind of lucky that English is not phonetic, because it is used in many different countries with different accents. French has a similar probably with being really non-phonetic. Japan is quite a bit more homogeneous and so they have a phonetic language.
Perhaps it's not luck at all?
Excellent essay. I have a couple points. In the word "strengths" i count 8 consonants, or 6 if you count only unique consonants... I don't know how you could arrive at 7.
Secondly, I'm curious as to what the two "L" sounds are in English. I can't picture what the difference might be.
Finally, you raise a good point about the problems making English a phonetic language, and it touches on one of English's great strengths (as you mentioned), its universality and not only its historical backing in multiple languages but its ability to incorporate words from other languages and still have at least a similar spelling to their native spelling (French words, for example, like rendezvous).
Well I don't think you speak some other language besides English. Everything you mentioned also works for Dutch and German.
Like "is it warm?":
Dutch- Is het warm? Het is warm!
German- Ist es heiß? Es ist heiß!
And another thing, the Dutch dictionary is bigger than the English one and the difference between the German spoken in Hamburg and Berlin is greater as British English and American English.
So can I keep talking about your statements. But anyway, it was a good read.
"Well I don't think you speak some other language besides English."
We don't use "some other" in this case. It's superfluous. It only implies 1 other language, even though "some" means more than one by itself, when juxtaposed with "other language" it reverts to a singular reference. Thus the superfluous usage. Just use "other". Pluralize "language". It makes more sense. Also, due to the change in wording, we need the word "can" before the word "speak". So the sentence will be: "Well, I don't think you can speak other languages besides English".
"So can I keep talking about your statements."
What is this? This is not proper English.
What does that mean? Is it either:
1. A statement: "so I CAN keep talking about your statements."
or
2. A question: "So, can I keep talking about your statements?"
Look, English has the greatest regional and dialectal variety of any language on the planet. It has, by far, the largest vocabulary. It's an easy language to speak badly and hard language to speak properly- as you have demonstrated with your mal-usage (previous poster).
With that being said, I encourage you to continue learning languages. It is good exercise for the brain, widens your worldly views and allows you to peer in to other cultures that you may have previously found bizarre. All the best... but please, try to respect each language for what it is. Belittling English will just get you smashed by people like myself who have a healthy respect for all languages.
My English is just bad bcause I never really learned it. But what I just wanted to say is that English doesn't has the greatest regional dialects or the largest vocabualry. I respect every language I just thought the article wasn't completly true. Your respond sounded like you were the one without any respect to other languages(and people who don't speak English perfect like you). Because I don't believe you speak smething besides English because you didn't react on the question.
Another interesting thing about the english language (and probably other languages), as indicated by Anonymous Poster 1 and Anonymous Poster 2: Conversations that take place in the written word, but using spoken-word conventions, can easily be misunderstood in terms of what the writer's intentions are.
"Well I don't think you speak some other language besides English. Everything you mentioned also works for Dutch and German...."
the original post that began with this sounded a little antagonistic. The next poster made a point of picking up on this. But as Anonymous Poster 1 pointed out later, they did not intend that. They only intended to point out some things they disagreed with in the article.
Maybe if this conversation had taken place verbally, with the exact same sentences, Anonymous Poster 2 would have interpreted it more sympathetically, and also given more consideration to the fact that Anonymous Number 1 is speaking with English as a second language - and thus a perfect example of the points being made in this article, like the importance of stressed words and case systems.
Another thing:
Back to the sentence "It is warm." Look at the structure of the sentence. The subject of the sentence is "it." But what, exactly does "it" refer to? Typically this would mean the weather, but we use the word "it" as a sort of placeholder noun when no other noun will suffice.
e.g. "It is natural to want to travel."
A clearer phrasing might be "The urge to travel is natural."
The first sentence is a far more common phrasing, however. It's an interesting language, to be sure.
I am a native speaker of the Georgian language and have an almost native knlowedge of the Russian language as well. Russian is universally considered to be one of the hardest languages to learn but compared to Georgian it is a walk in the park. Take a peek if you are curious http://www.armazi.com/georgian
I can honestly say that having tried to learn other foreign languages reinforced my conviction that English is so far the easiest language to learn. I hear that Turkish is also highly regular one but have never tried it.
1. Craziest spelling system seems to be a big problem and I have seen some textbooks try to introduce spelling rules in the first lessons. I simply used to write the transcribtion next to the original word and learn both together. After learning about 500 words or so you get a clue on how a word is pronounced.
2. Sound system is O.K. - not too difficult except for a few crazy consonants such as two versions of th and stranger sounding t and d and a few vague vowels. In Georgian we have only 5 distinct wovels - aiueo. In Georgian we also have both Spanish/Italian tkp and more English like tkp so it was fairly easy to learn how to pronounce words.
Your example with "Strength" made me smile. Let me introduce you to this Georgian verb to illustrate how difficult it is both to pronounce and to grasp its meaning
gagvifrckvna - he has peeled that for us:g-a-gv-i-frckvn-a. Note not only the large cluster of consonants but also the fact that it shows the subject and both direct and indirect objects as well as whether or not any of them are in singular or plural cases. This is not the way Japanese omit the pronouns whenever understood.
3. Subtle ordering - both Russian and Georgian have it. Not a big deal.
4. Synonims - This is always an issue with a new language. The way to deal with it to read and listen to a lot of stuff and you will pick them up without conscious effort.
5. Stress - again both Russian and Goergian have it.
6. Poetic English is not used everywhere. There are a handful of sentences used very infrequently and you can pretty much guess them from the context. This is how I learned them as well.
7. That was a bit hard until my English teacher explained how the English sentences were constructed and she gave me a formula for statements and a formula for questions. English language ALWAYS follows the formula.
8. Irregular conjugation is just a fact of life. You tackle them by studying in groups of 5 and it takes a few weeks to finish them. It is not an ongoing processs to learn them. Still it is much easier than a verb conjugation in French or Spanish.
9. Leftover cases are still a blessing over having 7 cases in Georgian and if I remember correctly 6 cases in Russian. I tried to learn Estonian once and was defeated by sheer multitude of the cases they use there. Talk about a nightmare.
10. Being locked in a strict morphological form is no easier. I was always fascinated and admired the ability of English to assign new morphological roles to the most commonly used forms. On the other side I have spent a lot of time understanding and learning to correctly use "To Get".
11. I think that you missed one of the biggest reasons why English is hard. I found and still find articles incredibly hard to use and never to be learnt. Rules that exist are very limited, guesswork does not always work, trying to substitute one for a and this for the also fails to deliver all the time. Neither Georgian not Russian have any articles and as I hear from some Chinese people they also find articles difficult to master.
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