Question:
There is some debating going on between me and Cinzia on the matter of the
subject above, and I thought that it could be interesting enough to deserve a
thread of its own and hopefully some comments from the rest of the illuminated
people of the internet. Come on guys, this is an interesting matter, let's hear your
opinions!
My standpoint is that the main difficulty for students is that the pronounciation
of English is too wild (thanks to that blasted Great Vowel Shift...), and also the
grammar is far more complex than it might appear at first (not to speak of
the millions of idioms that are a student's nightmare).
I also believe that the idea of English being easy to learn (at least for Italian
students) comes mostly from the fact that the very basic grammar rules are in
fact quite easy when compared to Italian. So I agree that it may be easy to start
off with English, but once one moves on it is another story.
So my opinion is:
Is it easy to learn a bad English? Yes.
Is it easy to learn a good English? No.
What do you think?
Answer:
Marco, it all depends on what you mean. I think that perhaps you need to
narrow your questions down a little. If you are just asking whether English
is easy to learn,..I would say no. No language is easy to learn. Just think
of all the vocabulary you need to memorize, not to mention the grammar,
exceptions, idioms etc and that is just HALF of the work. The other half
consists of regurgitating in a logical and coherent form what you have
learned. If you are asking whether English is easiER to learn than other
languages (and this seems to be your question) I would say yes. Just compare
English to ITalian: Italian has genders, English doesn't. The English verb has
5 forms (4 if the verb is regular). How many forms do Italian verbs have? 4
simple tenses in the indicative with 6 persons each, so 4x6 = 24; present
conditional so now we are up to 30. The subjunctive has 2 simple tenses, so
add another 12 which makes it 42 and that's not counting the gerund, present
and past participles and the infinitive. So now multiply 42x3 conjugations and
that gives you 126 and that's not even counting the irregular forms. I don't
know if any of you have studied Italian as a foreign language, probably not. I
taught Italian to Americans for many years and I can assure you that Italian
grammar is overwhelming. By the time you get to the preposizioni
articolate...well, that pretty much clears out the room. And Italian is not
even as bad as some highly inflected languages such as Russian!!! You may say
that that is a matter of memorization, but that's what all languages are. you
may say that English has a lot of idiomatic expressions, but so does Italian.
You just don't know it because it's your language. What I think is difficult
in English is the pronunciation. I am not referring to the various ways of
pronouncing the same group of letters (such as door vs soon), but I am talking
about the sounds themselves. Certain sounds are very difficult to reproduce.
I heard or read somewhere that Mandarin, English and Dutch are the three most
difficult languages as far as pronunciation is concerned. So my answer is no.
It's not difficult to learn good English. However, I want to take this one
step further and say that although good English is not difficult to learn, it's
difficult for a language learner to rise above the level of the everyday
spoken language. It's difficult not because of the nature of the English
language (it would be difficult in any language), but because there are no
books or teachers to help and once one has learned to speak correctly, it's
pretty much up to him to hone his language skills if he wants to "ascend" to a
higher level.
As a closing statement I'd like to say this: I taught Italian to Americans and
English to foreigners in California for many years. Compared to a lot of other
languages English is easy. Big time easy!
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