The hardest aspect of learning English as a second language | Hacker News Reader

The hardest aspect of learning English as a second language

thelanguagenerds.com

56 pointsColinWright94 comments

Nah, it's a small quirk, but it exists in many other languages. Phrasal verbs are the real trap. Keep up, keep off, keep out, keep on, keep out,... Rather uncommon in other languages and very easy to make mistake, sometimes very embarrassing one..

My words exactly. There's over 3000 phrasal verbs in English and memorizing them is pain in the hole (plus it makes no sense). The only effective way of learning them is to submerge yourself in the language by listening to plenty of audiobooks or moving abroad where English is spoken natively.

I'm Polish myself and hit a hard wall with phrasals when I moved over to Ireland 13 years ago. I still keep discovering new ones every now and then despite living here for over a decade.

We kind of do the same thing, only in the form of prefixes (podać, wydać, zdać, zadać, oddać, poddać, nadać, przydać etc. and on and on it goes). Ultimately it boils down to the same thing - little syllabic bits altering the meaning of the verb.

Yes, It's exactly the same in German. So I guess I don't agree with this comment thread at all - It's just learning vocabulary. I never felt like this is a specific problem when learning English. I much more agree with the article: Spelling + pronunciation is just fubar and the greatest annoyance.

You are right, didn't realize we do the same in most Slavic languages and it's common in German too. It just always seemed to me that it's much more common in English. But I have no numbers to support that, so I might be completely wrong.

I managed to learn the pronunciation and phrasal verbs, but prepositions still get me from time to time...

> The only effective way of learning them is to submerge yourself in the language by listening to plenty of audiobooks or moving abroad where English is spoken natively.

That's the only way to learn the quirks and idioms of any language really.

I think a big reform to change the language to write how you speak would happen someday but postponing it will make it harder when it will have to be done or maybe a new artificial international language that is consistent would solve this.

I personally have problems with the double L , I never know when to use 1 or 2, like in until and still , I always guess wrong and have to use spell check to fix the problem. Similar for other inconsistent usage of double letters.

> write how you speak

If you write how you speak I will not be able read what you write and vice versa. English has a wide range of dialects, nare you going to try to impose on on the rest of us. Someone like me used to broad West Country speech would spell rather differently than a Glaswegian for instance. Should we have diacritics to indicate stress? If so will you choose the common US (stress the ultimate syllable) or British practice (stress the ante-penultimate syllable)? In British English, the name Bernard is pronounced with the final vowel as an unstressed, almost elided, obscure vowel; but it is a stressed long a in US English.

I often see people demanding that English be written phonetically. Many of those people seem to be unaware that their own languages also have dialects and that they would be equally unable to write phonetically in a way that would satisfy all users of that language.

There have been numerous attempts at consistent auxiliary languages. None have become very popular. The only 'widely' used auxiliary is Esperanto and that has already shown itself to be subject to all the same evolutionary forces that drive changes in natural languages; people must invent new words and then they disagree about how to spell them, how to use them, what gender they must have; slang is created and eventually becomes normalized in some communities but not in others, etc.

> I often see people demanding that English be written phonetically. Many of those people seem to be unaware that their own languages also have dialects and that they would be equally unable to write phonetically in a way that would satisfy all users of that language.

Spanish is largely written as it's spoken. Even with its many accents and dialects, holding a spelling bee would be ridiculous because of how easy it is to deduct writing from pronunciation.

That being said, if it was reformed to the point where it absolutely was written as spoken, it would become very ugly.

I understand your point about regional dialects, I think the main issue is with old or borrowed words. I was inspired by the fact in Romania we had such a reform where the alphabet was changed and the rule of write how you speak was added. The accents are not written and regional languages have their special way of speaking certain words or even some special grammar but you learn in school the correct thing and the national radio/TV will speak correctly so there is no issue except with small children that would make small mistakes in the first year of learning to write. I don't expect this too happen soon and when it will happen the present generations would be the ones that would have to suffer the transition for the benefit of the new generations.

So if you can get objective and think about 150-300 years in the future , do you think there will be no changes to cleanup things in the language ?

> think about 150-300 years in the future , do you think there will be no changes to cleanup things

You can change it and clean it up all you like but that won't stop its evolution and a hundred years later the spelling and pronunciation will be out of sync again.

I don't mean that we should necessarily avoid reform but what you get when you do a serious reform is a new language that is different from all the dialects and it must either be imposed from above or be in some way sufficiently attractive for people to adopt it. And then you have another dialect.

See also the xkcd joke on standards, I think it applies here too: https://xkcd.com/927/

But did esperanto start with the defacto position that English has: the dominant worldwide language (at least economically speaking and certainly technologically).

I guess what I'm saying is maybe they should take a swing at making something similar to esperanto, but with a focus on making it as understandable by an english speaker as possible.

> In British English, the name Bernard is pronounced with the final vowel as an unstressed, almost elided, obscure vowel; but it is a stressed long a in US English.

I don't think you can generalize the US pronunciation this way. Source: This was my grandfather's name.

Agreed. That was rather my point, and I defer to your more specific knowledge.

The point is that there are many ways to pronounce the same word even within one country.

Bulgarian language seems to me extremely phonetic, to the point I can correctly write and read words and I still don't know what they mean.

I agree that having a more comprehensible writing system would help, but I also suspect that any serious attempt to change it now would be counter-productive.

If you don't get all the countries with an official interest in the language to agree to the change in sync, you're going to create a mess for proficient speakers and an even worse mess for learners by increasing the volume of spelling you have to learn. And even if it does work out, you're still going to create a mess for learners - especially the ones who don't have enough money to replace all their materials all at once - by creating an orthographic horizon.

I've also got my doubts about whether the end goal is even possible. 100 years ago, there was an effort in the UK to try and come up with a new native English alphabet in order to try and address this same problem. One of the reasons it failed was that, even within one country, the language's pronunciation wasn't regular enough to come up with a spelling system that's phonetic for all speakers. Since then, the gamut of pronunciation that can be considered official has only widened, meaning the possibility of creating a truly phonetic writing system for English has only become more remote.

It would be cool if a new, unambiguous and simple language was developed to talk exclusively to computers instead of natural languages. Something like Loglan/Lojban.

Since it would be taught everywhere, people might start using it as lingua franca. It would certainly be better than Esperanto, which is not better than other natural languages despite being artificial.

I don't think there are many languages with a large disconnect between spelling and reading. There are some exceptions in most languages, but nowhere near as bad, in my experience.

The Romance languages for example have pretty clear spelling rules. It's not 1 letter : 1 sound, but usually 1 group of letters : 1 group of sounds, such as "ll" in Spanish or "ill" in French or "ch" in Italian&Romanian. There are usually exceptions around loanwords and old names, and sometimes different sounds that native speakers don't realize they pronounce differently (e.g. in Romanian a final 'i' in a word is usually a semi-vowel, while 'i' in the middle of a word is a full vowel, but most Romanians you ask would tell you that it's the same sound, even if they pronounce and hear it differently ).

Spelling is a difficult part of learning English language, more so if your language has a what-you-read-is-what-you-pronounce pattern like Indian languages. Anything that uses Devnagari or other Indian scripts have one and only single way to pronounce things which is super consistent because every alphabet has one and only one sound and it does not vary with context.

I would reckon that even more than spelling, the subtleties of stressed and unstressed intonation of syllables in English is perhaps more difficult to grasp,for example most Indian speakers would find it almost impossible, as generally the Indian languages lack those (unless we consider prosody).

I personally feel stress is an ambiguous term for the concept, for English atleast it is more about the duration of a sound, rather than the intensity of it.

> more so if your language has a what-you-read-is-what-you-pronounce pattern like Indian languages

I don't know Indian languages, but this can be subjective. A Mexican friend once told me that Spanish is easy because you pronounce it the way you write it... What he did not tell is that LL, J, H, B/V are all pronounced different in his language.

The rules in Spanish are easy. LL being different from l and rr different from r are the only hard ones (and r/rr is only different because you are allowed to do the advanced tongue roll, but it is correct without) J and H are different from the English pronunciation once you learn what is correct it always applies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Spanish#cite_note-App...

"/b, d, ɡ, ʝ/ are pronounced as fricatives or approximants [β, ð, ɣ, ʝ] in all places except after a pause, /n/, or /m/, or, in the case of /d/ and /ʝ/, after /l/. In the latter environments, they are stops [b, d, ɡ, ɟʝ] like English b, d, g, j but are fully voiced in all positions, unlike in English. When it is distinct from /ʝ/, /ʎ/ is realized as an approximant [ʎ] in all positions"

Although the rules may be easy for native speakers who grasp them intuitively, they can be a lot more complex for speakers of other languages, who are used to different "easy" rules.

They may be pronounced differently than in English but at least they are pronounced in a predictable way i.e. the same letter (or diphthong) will always result in the same pronounciation.

G and J are the biggest inconsistencies in Spanish, in my opinion.

Native English speaker here, this is my first time ever hearing about phrasal verbs.

After learning French and Spanish (wow there is such a thing as a subjunctive tense?) I started to understand how ridiculous English is, but this? wow.

Subjunctive is a mood not a tense. And it is experiencing something of a revival in English.

You can have subjunctive in the past as well as in the future.

All languages are ridiculous to varying degrees. Why do tables have gender? Why do the French continue to write final t's and s's when they stopped pronouncing them two centuries ago? Why must adjectives agree with their nouns? Why do many languages not have any way of easily referring to someone without mentioning their sex. Why do declensions exist when auxiliary words can perform the same functions?

No, it's not a small quirk. It's a repeated error with several different, completely unrelated cases.

Only English surnames need to be spelled when pronounced or pronounced when in written form because you can't possibly know how to pronounce them by just reading them (and don't blame this on immigration)

Mandatory: English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.

Even as a native speaker, that was still a linguistic speed bump.

Sadist!

You may enjoy [1].. or not.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...

edit: english version

True!

Forvo can help with this. Recorded pronunciations for words and phrases, crowdsourced from native speakers, with information about their gender and home region. (Useful for fine-tuning your pronunciation and intonation.) It has an app, and, if you're the flashcarding type, the website lets you download MP3s.

Beyond that, I think all I can offer in consolation is that English orthography does have an internal logic; there are guidelines you can use to tell when "ea" is pronounced /ɪ/ and when it's pronounced /ɛə/ or /e/. It's all subtle enough that it's useless to try to actually learn them - thinking about that stuff will just slow you down, which is worse than making the occasional pronunciation error. But, over time, you will develop an instinct for it, and it will all eventually start feeling natural. Same for stress accent.

Problem is English is not a phonetic language. There is not much you can do with only 26 characters. In my native language you pronounce what you wrote.

There are phonetic (or near-phonetic) languages that use 26 (or fewer) characters. Spanish comes to mind.

Ha! The number of letters has nothing to do with it, as evidenced by maaaany other languages that are phonetic with no more letters.

I feel like if we had rules in place from the start, we could do everything with half as many characters.

Actually we need twice as manager characters, but we would need a lot less in any given words. Even decided Capital and lower case were different letters not different ways to write the same letter we would still need more symbols.

However that wouldn't help either. As a Mid-westerner I pronounce "about" differently from someone from Boston (they do something like a-boat). We no longer can reform spelling unless we also reform pronunciation as well.

German or Spanish manage to have extremely divergent dialects while still having phonetic spelling of the standard written dialect.

But English pronunciation rules are regular enough to be able to say that "ghoti" should be pronounced "GO-tee". Word-initial "gh" is always pronounced as a hard g. The argument that "o" can be pronounced /ı/ comes from a vowel reduction rule in unstressed syllables. And pronouncing "ti" as /ʃ/ comes from the yod-coalescence that fricatizes /t/, /d/, /z/, and /s/ in certain cases, namely where the previous syllable ends in one of those consonants and the next one begins with a /j/ ("y") sound. Since "ti" is word final here, there's nothing to fricatize it.

English spelling does have quite a few rules, and it follows them far more than people realize. The main real problem is our proclivity to borrow foreign words and insist on using foreign spelling and pronunciation for them. The other main issue is that we conserved the spelling of English from Middle English, so you have to map the pronunciation shifts to spelling rules--and some words ended up being weird exceptions to the pronunciation shifts (e.g., "father" went in a different direction from the other "-ather" words, like "lather" and "rather").

>(e.g., "father" went in a different direction from the other "-ather" words, like "lather" and "rather").

In my dialect (north eastern corner of the West Country) all three sound the same except for the initial.

Otherwise I agree with everything you said.

How come the English never tried for a spelling reform? Such reforms were implemented both in Sweden and Germany to simplify spelling. Like the article says, bear really should be spelled bair.

Maybe because English doesn’t have a “central authority” as opposed to for instance French with the Academie Francaise? That makes reforms difficult/impossible.

Good luck getting the Americans, Canadians, British, Indians, and Australians to all agree on something.

I mean, we already disagree on spelling for some words, the name for the letter 'Z', and what to call dwellings in multi-family properties, so we're not off to a great start...

When the German spelling reform was enacted in the German Empire in 1902, German was spoken in many countries outside of it. In fact, it rivaled English as the Lingua franca for the scientific world.

We have tried spelling reform, at least a dozen times. They tend not to stick, however, perhaps in large part because radical changes that impact the spelling of nearly every single word tend to engender a lot of resistance. Smaller changes (such as changing hiccough to hiccup in American English, or through to thru) are more successful.

I disagree, "bear" should be spelled "bear" and "air" should be spelled "ear". "Ear" should be spelled "iar". Basically, a phonetic alphabet.

I concur on spelling being the Achilles' heel of English. We actually subject children to contests ("Spelling Bees") in which they must spell English words without recourse to automated correction or a dictionary. Because native speakers commit spelling (along with typographical and grammatical) errors so frequently, automated spelling and grammar checkers are an essential feature of word processors and text entry systems. Dyslexia seems to be more common among English speakers vs. speakers of more phonetic languages.

I doubt spelling is a competitive sport in saner languages, though I imagine that character writing (and reading) contests could be a thing in languages with large numbers of written characters.

Like long division, both spelling and character recall can be delegated to technology, but I'm not sure what I think of this as a general principle. I use spelling checkers and I like phonetic character input methods, but I dislike grammar checkers.

That's fine until you need to distinguish between your/you're, to/too/two, their/they're/there, its/it's, and similar problems. Maybe people think it doesn't matter, or that it won't matter, but it always disrupts my flow when I see errors like that.

Clear, effective communication is best when there are no, or at least very few, grammatical errors to distract the reader, and in the cases given above, and more, spell-checkers don't help.

>That's fine until you need to distinguish between your/you're, to/too/two, their/they're/there, its/it's, and similar problems. Maybe people think it doesn't matter, or that it won't matter, but it always disrupts my flow when I see errors like that.

That only matters to you because you were taught different spellings for those words.

Consider the word 'read'; it's pronounced like 'reed' when used in the present tense, and like 'red' when used in the past tense, but spelled the same in either case. Does that disrupt your 'flow'? I'm willing to bet it doesn't, because you were taught the same spelling for both those words (and they are different words!)

Now consider the word 'about'. It can mean 'almost', as in "I'm about to arrive", or it can me 'regarding', as in "This book is about...". If you were taught the 'regarding' definition of 'about' is spelled 'abowt', I'm sure you would have added 'about/abowt' next to 'to/too/two' as something that disrupts your flow when misused.

> That only matters to you because you were taught different spellings for those words.

Are you going to claim that the difference is no longer relevant? If so, I'm going to disagree, but recognise that there's no point in debating the issue. Language mutates over time, differences become irrelevant, other differences and distinctions emerge. Even so, using newer forms can significantly impede understanding.

If that's not your point then I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Let me say it differently.

The comment to which I was replying said:

> ... both spelling and character recall can be delegated to technology ... I use spelling checkers ...

My point is that spelling checkers don't help in the cases I sight. Sorry, cite. If someone uses "you're" when they mean "your" then it disrupts my flow when I'm reading and impairs effective communication, and likely I'm not the only one.

So using a spelling checker is useful, and indeed, I use one, but they do not solve all the problems.

You are correct that "read" being pronounced in different ways according to the context does not disrupt my flow in the same way, but that observation does not diminish my point that spelling checkers do help in all cases.

re 'about' - it can have a lot more meanings than those two.

e.g. 'about his person' (carrying something with you) 'he is about' (he is close / near) 'he is out and about' (he is some distance away)

etc.

Aren't these all the same definitions, merely indicating an approximation?

"I'm about to arrive" -> "I'm close to arrival but not here right now".

"This book is about..." -> "This book is roughly this short approximation, because I can't fit the entire synopsis in a sentence,..."

"About his person" -> "Close to him, possibly so close as to be carrying it"

"He is about" -> "He is somewhere around here, but not in this exact spot"

"He is out and about" -> "He is out somewhere in this area"

"Gone walkabout" -> "Traveling with no specific destination"

"Roundabout" -> "Traffic control method that encourages vehicles to take a more circuitous passage, rather than directly crossing an intersection"

The context of the word changes the interpretation, but the essential function of "about" is the same in each case.

And of course, this granddaddy of all gripes on English punctuation, which was written 100 years ago now: https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem.... (This link was chosen because it has audio links for each section of verse. The German speaker doesn't nail the pronunciation of all the words, but gets very close, to the point that most differences are possibly a matter of regional dialect.)

This is interesting...while reading this line of the poem:

"Tear in eye, your dress will tear."

I could physically feel my brain rewinding and re-defining the leading "Tear" when I encountered "in eye".

(I am a native speaker of American)

That's why garden-path sentences are easier in English, I guess.

It's definitely not the hardest aspect. Just learn each word and its pronounciation independently. The spelling is just a mnemonic. If you can remember the gender of each word in your native language, or where the stressed syllable is, you can remember how to pronounce each English word as well.

For me the hardest part is using articles (the/a/none) which don't exist in my native language. I still don't understand the exact rules of their usage and usually just insert whichever article sounds the best.

For what it's worth, that's how native English speakers deal with articles, too.

One of the anomalies of English is the spelling bee. I can't really speak any other language, but I've been told that the idea of such a bee in most languages wouldn't make any sense because everything is spelled - if not exactly how it sounds - then with a consistency that makes the spelling simple. Here, all we have (even for English speakers) is brute force memorization. If you don't know how vacuum is spelled, then good luck guessing.

I think the most difficult aspect of learning English depends on (A) the learner and (B) the goal. If your aim is to learn the language to a sufficient degree that you can handle business customers at an upscale hotel in a non-English speaking country, you're going to have different concerns to somebody trying to emigrate to and fit in with a community in the north of England.

Lately, my favorite comments about English as a second language come from Finnish comedian Ismo, regarding his take on the most complicated word in the English language: Ass.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU

(Reasonably SFW; the set is from a normal TV talk show.)

Since english is so massive at this point with its absorption of so many other language subsets, has anyone ever tried to standardize a base vocabulary subset that matches a "bare minimum expression" of another language but selects words for consistent conjugation and pronunciation?

From childhood, the baffling 'ghoti'.

It's pronounced 'fish' [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

One of my favorites is the 'silent e'.

Bear and bare. Pronounced the same. Bar, car. Bear care.

And then there's the 'f' sound. Comes in many disguises.

Fish, tough, cuff, cough, phone.

Spanish, as a second language, is such a relief.

The Chaos Of English Pronunciation by Gerard Nolst Trenité:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw

Pronunciation consistency is pretty important too. "I deer you to slap the beer" does make sense because both /ɛr/s (?) have been remapped to /ɪr/s (?)

Amusingly, in my dialect 'ear' is pronounced like 'eer', not like 'EE-ur.'

American Southeast?

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a correct sentence in American English[0]

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...

it all depends from which language you're coming from, some will have it easy, some will have it hard, on different things

Not really. Nobody will find English pronunciation/spelling easy, unless they're coming from English.

Coming from French. I find English spelling easy. I mainly learnt by myself, reading stuff on internet and books. Could not care less about correct pronunciation though, and I have the thickest 'cliché' french accent. But which of the native English accents would be the correct one anyway? So I decided to consider mine not worse than any. H does not exist by the way.

I'm not sure what you mean, you seem to conflate pronunciation and accent. How do you pronounce "bow", "tear" and "row"? When you say you find spelling easy, you mean you find it easy to spell an unknown word when you hear it? Because I'd really like to see that.

Not sure if the distinction between accent and pronunciation is very relevant here? I have a particular/personal 'French' accent that heavily influences the way I pronounce words. As stated, it mainly comes from the way I learnt : I often straight up applied french pronunciation (but with some basic informed knowledge of what could be the proper way) to what I read. So, to answer your examples, I pronounce those exactly like the french "beau", "tire" and "rot".

For me, English has been a mostly literary language for years with most spoken forms coming to me with simultaneous subtiles. So, it's rare that I encounter a new spoken word that I haven't read before, but with time and familiarity you develop some kind of heuristics I guess (and enough of English comes from French that there is no need to be too lucky).

I now live in Japan and used to guide, in English, foreign tourists in Kyoto. Amusingly only native speakers seemed to sometimes have difficulties to understand my strange pronunciation/accent.

> So, to answer your examples, I pronounce those exactly like the french "beau", "tire" and "rot".

That's where the problem comes in: You can't pronounce those words without context. "A row of people was watching the row". "A tear in the painting brought a tear to my eye", "I bow to your skills with the bow".

I can : all the same to me. Context, mostly, makes me understood

I mean, yes, all languages are easy if you don't care much about correctness.

> I'm not sure what you mean, you seem to conflate pronunciation and accent.

The concepts are interrelated. If, for example, a given language uses a single representation for two sounds, it is perceived only as accent.

The difference between sh and zh in South American pronunciation of 'yo' (Argentina and Uruguay) is perceived as accent for a Spanish speaker. But they are entirely different consonants for a Polish or Russian speaker.

L and R are just accents of the same letter in Japan, and different consonants in English.

And some people (like some French) have an accent because there are sounds they can not produce.

TLDR: Similarly spelled words are pronounced differently, like in an old Gallagher bit: https://youtu.be/X74j1wK_sa0

that's small time. even identically spelled words are pronounced differently, see polish (shoe polish) / Polish (nationality)

Or entrance versus entrance, alternate versus alternate, refuse versus refuse, and more.

Edit: Sorry, I should perhaps not leave that hanging. These depend on your emphasis. More specifically:

* en-TRANCE (hypnotise) versus EN-trance (doorway);

* AL-ternate (switch between) versus al-TER-nate (the other thing);

* re-FUSE (to decline) versus RE-fuse (rubbish).

Not to mention the multiple meanings of "lead", "set", "row", "bow", and more.

Even worse are bow, row, lead, etc. English is crazy.

If you're going to mention 'bow' one should also remember 'bough' for additional fun.

When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.

When the bow breaks, the army will fall.

When the bow breaks, the actor will fall.

That's a homophone, not a homograph :/

Meh, try learning french in your late 30s from 0 as your 4th (actually 5th) language. Of course the goal is not some basic grocery-shopping level but fluency and all the quirks that come with it.

Unfortunately this experiment excludes several groups from participating. Those past late 30s who didn't learn French as 4th/5th language, those knowing more than 4/5 languages, those who learned French as their 2nd or 3rd language, and French.

Nobody said it would be easy to achieve, i am still in the process of getting there. Its more about that such things are in possibly all languages out there, this is normal. Definitely all I've encountered so far.

Plus you forgot all other french-native speakers other than French nationals, which are much more numerous than French themselves.

That is very true, I forgot about native speakers who aren't French! Good spot.

French seems equally terrible - are there spelling bees in France?

In any case, I shall blame French (and William the Conqueror) for much of the madness of modern English spelling.

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