Quote:Believe it or not, it's said that the English language is one of the (if not the) hardest languages to learn (foreigner or not). I think that adding more words would complicate things for others trying to learn English.
I think that this is somewhat of a myth. Yes, English has its hard parts, such as no where near regular pronunciation, but its grammar is relatively easy (or so I've been told). English is my native language, so I guess I can't say, but I know that most people don't like being told that their native language is easy, which might explain this whole "English is one of the hardest languages to learn" things. I used to think it was, too, before I learnt about other languages.
Here is the most difficult language to learn for a native English speaker (in my opinion):
Finnish. The language of the Finns, whose only relatively similar language is Estonian. Even then, it does not contain the same mutual intelligibility that Norwegian/Danish/Swedish, English/Scots, Spanish/Catalan, Serbian/Bosnian, ect have. The reason that Finnish would be so difficult is that it utilizes FIFTEEN of the 18 grammatical cases (ablative, nominative, genitive, ect), whereas English only uses one or two, which have only really been retained in pronouns. Okay, so clearly the grammar is complicated, because adjectives & nouns are inflected to agree with the conjugation of verbs. Let's look at an example sentence:
Itämerensuomalaisten kielten, joihin suomikin kuuluu, yhteistä oletettua kantamuotoa, kantasuomea, puhuttiin Suomenlahden molemmin puolin jo ennen ajanlaskumme alkua.
I have no ****ing clue what that means, so don't ask me! But, we can obviously assume that the reason the words are so long, is because of all the suffixes implemented so that they agree with each other. For example (THIS IS TOTALLY HYPOTHETICAL), let's assume that "-u" means "of". Let's assume that "yhteis" means "cat" and "tä" represents the definite form of the noun. So, if we assume that "kuulu" means "house", we can see that "kuuluu yhteistä" means "[the] house of the cat". A bad example, but since I don't know Finnish, I can't explain it more thoroughly.
Okay, grammar aside, what else is important when analyzing a language? Its pronunciation. Personally, I find Finnish to be a very bland language pronunciation wise, much like English. Perhaps that's because I'm used to Swedish, which contains unique prosody wherein words are pronounced with a regular up-and-down voice alongside its actual pronunciation. You can hear Swedish here (btw, that is the original version of the film 'The Invisible' which Hollywood of course had to make a remake of because apparently they think Americans can't read subtitles.). Anyway, my point is, I didn't find any difficulties with Finnish pronunciation. However, my findings may be a bit unfair to everyone else, because I know English, Swedish, and German pronunciation.
Spelling might be difficult at first, but once one remembers all of the case prefixes/suffixes, it should be easy to plug them into the base word. If one learns the spelling when they learn the word's meaning, they should have no trouble.
Okay, I don't know why I just wrote all that, but I have nothing more to say about it for now. Say what you will :b