This question may be quite controversial, but in my opinion English is a very difficult language. When we talk about difficulty, people usually think about only one particular aspect of the language (the one that gives them the most trouble). For example, people say that Chinese is difficult because you have to learn thousands of different characters. However, in the case of English, it is probably a combination of several different features that makes it challenging.
Some people say that English has complicated grammar, but that’s not true. For example, the “irregular verb be” has the most possible forms that English verbs can have in principle: be, am, are, is, were, was, been a being (i.e., 8 different forms in total; most verbs have only four).
On the other hand, être (to be) in French has 40 different forms! (Just for the record: être, étant, été, suis, es, est, sommes, êtes, sont, étais, était, étions, étiez, étaient, fus, fut, fûmes, fûtes, furent, serai, seras, sera, serons, serez, seront, serait, serions, seriez, seraient, sois, soit, soyons, soyez, soient, fusse, fusses, fût, fussions, fussiez, fussent).
Although many people have a problem with the English tense system, it is only necessary to realize what the grammatical constructions express without trying to translate them literally into English. For example, the construction “I have been doing something” expresses that you have been doing something continuously in the past and are still doing it. Once you understand such a concept, it is easy to apply it to any other verb because it is formed quite regularly, unlike most other languages with a large number of irregular forms.
There are also no grammatical genders and inflections of nouns in English, i.e. the shape of nouns and articles do not change with the function they hold in a sentence. Compare the following sentences in German and English:
| The table is big. | Der Tisch ist groß. |
| I like the colour of the table. | Ich mag die Farbe des Tisches. |
| It’s on the table. | Es ist auf dem Tisch. |
| I see the table. | Ich sehe den Tisch. |
In English, we only have one form of “the table”, whereas in German “der Tisch” (the table) changes depending on which case it is in. And that was only the masculine table; similarly, in German, you need to learn the feminine and the plural inflections. That’s a total of 16 forms for what we express in English with the simple “the”. The same is true for adjectives and other word forms, so English grammar can be considered quite primitive compared to other languages.
The English writing system is quite possibly the worst in the world
So what is it that makes English so difficult for students? The answer is: a combination of vocabulary, notation and pronunciation. In most languages, there is an institution that issues reforms to the rules of notation as the language evolves. In English, however, there is no such central institution, and the rules of notation are mainly governed by influential dictionaries such as Webster’s Dictionary or The Oxford English Dictionary.
Unfortunately, by the time these dictionaries were created (in the 19th century), English pronunciation had already been evolving for several hundred years. The authors of these dictionaries, however, merely produced a summary of the notation already in use, instead of proposing a new notation that corresponded to the pronunciation of the time. This trend has endured to the present day, and English has been written, apart from a few minor changes, in much the same way since the 17th century, although many words are pronounced quite differently today.
This poses a much greater problem for students learning English than for native speakers, because native speakers know how to pronounce words correctly; they just need to be able to write them down correctly, which is not such a problem in this day and age of spellcheckers.
Learners of English, on the other hand, encounter most new words first in written form. It is often possible (even convenient) to infer the meaning of an unfamiliar word from context without looking up the exact dictionary definition with the pronunciation explained, and so students tend to guess the correct pronunciation and then use it. Unfortunately, such guessing is usually wrong.
Complicated pronunciation makes the situation worse
One of the reasons why students so often guess pronunciation incorrectly is the unusually large number of vowels that English has, which must be distinguished in order to understand the speaker correctly.
For example, all of the words “bed”, “bet”, “bad”, “bat”, “bud”, and “but” are pronounced differently and mean quite different things (the pronunciation is, in the same order, /bɛd/, /bɛt/, /bæd/, /bæt/, /bʌd/, bʌt/; note that the “d” at the end of a word is not pronounced in English as a “t”).
The fact that English is often not written phonetically does not help the situation. How is one supposed to remember a vowel that doesn’t exist in English when it is sometimes written as oo (book), sometimes as u (put), o (woman), ou (would), and who knows how else?
In addition to the problems mentioned above, there is another one – in English, there is no way to write down the accent. In English it’s simple, the accent is always on the first syllable. In English, it’s basically completely irregular, and some words can even change meaning depending on the position of the accent.
The accent itself wouldn’t be such a tragedy yet, but the pronunciation of vowels also changes with the accent. For example, “angel” is pronounced /ˈeɪndʒəl/ (ejn-džl), but “angelic” is pronounced /ænˈdʒɛlɪk/ (æn-dže-lik).
To make matters worse, there are a huge number of regional dialects of English, which differ significantly in vowel pronunciation, intonation and accent position (to the extent that Scottish English and American English are essentially almost mutually unintelligible languages, although they are spelled exactly the same). Unfortunately, the student has no choice but to learn to understand all the commonly represented dialects, because sooner or later he will encounter them.
