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A. Learners whose first language is Chinese (completely unrelated) or Russian (distantly related) will find English much harder. This is roughly true of languages all around the world.
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B. However, a friend told me English is considered one of the most difficult languages to learn because it contains so many words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings. I’d love to see your opinion about this.
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C. As languages spread and grow, they are more likely to rely on clues like word order than on word-endings. So “big” languages are “simple”. Under this schema, English fits both criteria: relatively big and relatively simple.
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D. JOHNSON gets mail. Tom K. asks:
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I had always understood English to be a reasonably easy language to learn because it lacks many of the features that make other languages difficult.
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E. If you learn a language geographically close and from a common ancestor of your first language, there will be fewer nasty surprises, at every level from sound to sentence.
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F. Johnson is sorry to disappoint, but the boring answer is “it depends”. Whether English is confusing or easy mostly depends on the learner’s native language. A native speaker of German or Dutch—Germanic languages closely related to English—will find English relatively straightforward.
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G. This kind of inflection is not a terrible proxy for that slippery idea of “difficulty”. Where are the world’s hardest languages, then? One study, by Gary Lupyan in 2010, looked closely at inflection. It found that highly inflected languages tend to be spoken by a small number of speakers, and have few neighbours. But languages with big groups of speakers systematically tend to have fewer inflections.
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H. Would it be possible to describe a language’s “difficulty” in the abstract? English-speakers often point to a language like Latin or Greek. Next to them, in one important respect, English is easy.
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I. Why is that? The hypothesis is that as a language spreads over centuries, it is learned by many non-natives. Adults, learning a foreign language imperfectly, avoid using non-necessary endings. And many endings in any language are non-necessary, if other clues can be recruited to do the same things that word endings do.
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J. The distinction involves a language’s “inflectional morphology”, or the bits added to a noun or adjective or verb to make it match up with other pieces in a sentence. An English verb has a maximum of five forms, whereas verbs in Spanish or Latin can take dozens of forms. An English noun usually has only two forms (singular and plural), whereas the Greek or Russian noun takes numerous forms showing grammatical gender, number and case.
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