(10-18-2009, 12:55 AM)SupportMaster Wrote: Some interesting points.
I study Japanese at school and my Japanese teacher has a PHD in English so she's always telling us about the English language. I think one of the reasons why it's more difficult for foreign students to learn English is the fact that many words have alternative meanings and can be confusing to many.
The online translators cannot even comprehend the English language's difficulties, but this is to be expected.
An example of what I was saying above could be the word, 'there'. Or 'their'/'they're'. Pronounced the same way, yet grammatically incorrect if used in the wrong context. I see it almost everyday.
I live in Australia and my teacher wrote a sentence: 'There going to sit over there'. I pointed out his mistake and he attempted to correct it: 'Their going to sit over there'. Wrong.
Perhaps it's not the hardest language to learn, but it's certainly not easy.
I see where you're coming from. I didn't experience anything like this when learning Swedish, because very rarely do words have double meanings. The only time I've encountered something like that is with the word "ande", which can either mean "spirit" or "duck" depending on how you say it. Oh, and "full" (drunk) and "ful" (ugly), but that's just because my pronunciation sucks. So, I used the word 'rusig' for 'drunk' to avoid calling myself ugly ^^
In fact, English's tendency to have a million meanings for one word made Swedish slightly difficult in that sense. The words 'tänka', 'tycka', and 'tro' all mean "think", but had distinct meanings. The same with "faktiskt" and "egentligen" which both mean 'actually', aning/idé which both mean 'idea', att/som/det där, which all mean 'that', and so on
PS: I edited the post.