Am I biased or is English the easiest language to learn? In trying

English has several weird rules of its own. I don't know much about German, but I can imagine the frustration of someone whose native language isn't English when they learn that all the most common and important verbs in English have inconsistent past tense forms, just as an example.

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>>78296724
masculine and feminine isn't completely arbitrary, also doesn't German have 3 genders?

Oh and someone once told me English is the easiest to learn, hardest to master. His reasoning was that English has simple grammar but an incredible amount of exceptions.

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>having a gender for inanimate objects in the first place

>>78296724
>Am I biased or is English the easiest language to learn?

You're biased, english has bunch of shitty weird rules to follow and too many exceptions. Plus its weird Franco-Germanic mongrel language with no real close relatives.

>>78296724
easy to learn, hard to master
English has the largest vocabulary of any language, it is unique in its complexity

>tfw never going to learn another language
I feel like such a retard being monolingual. English is the most disjointed inconsistent language ever, yet I can't pick up a second language to save my life despite being able to keep track of all the incomprehensible rules of English that speakers of other languages struggle to grasp.

>>78296961
What are you trying to/want to learn? Just stay dedicated. No language will have as many resources or be as useful or be as commonplace as English but it's not impossible.

>>78296724
Easiest to speak, but difficult to master because of many convoluted rules.
Or so I've heard.

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Tenses are very hard

>>78297177
tenses were* very hard

>>78296961
You live in a time where it has never been easier to learn a new language. Use duolingo, read /int/ generals of the language you want to learn and use imtranslator to help with words you don't know. It is fun.

>>78297192
he may still be learning tbf

>>78297057
I've tried learning Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and French, at separate times. I got furthest with Japanese and Spanish and once in a blue moon I can hear or read something in one of those languages and know what it means.

I've also used services like HiNative and Hellotalk and spoken through text to people, explaining English grammar to them in their language, and I think I'm at least decent at it. At the very least I have a good grasp on linguistics in general, and my efforts in foreign language learning have definitely had a part in that. So I feel like I'm capable of acquiring another language, but I can't get any one language to stick no matter how much I try. I can't get "comfortable" with them like other people do after they've spent as much time as I have.

The more German I learn the more difficult English looks in retrospect.

>>78297297
You're stretching to thin. Focus on one. I'd recommend Spanish because of how useful it is in America. When you can understand it to the point where you're comfortable calling yourself fluent you can move on.

>>78296961
There's a critical time for language acquisition during childhood where you can pretty much learn any language easily if you're exposed to it. That's why English feels effortless to you. It's also why people who grew up in families that spoke foreign languages can easily be fluent in multiple languages.

When you get older, that ability goes away, but it's still not impossible to attain fluency.

>>78296724
English is BY FAR the easiest language to learn. The "le english is hard" maymay is just a bunch of liberal drivel. English is the simplest, most logical language commonly spoken in the first world. Any moron can learn it. Meanwhile Japs/Chinese are still learning their own God damn language through highschool (millions of kanji).

>>78296724
>my native language seems to be the easiest to me.
What a surprise.
English is quite fucked up. Just see how you spell words and how you actually pronounce them.

It's scary how many Russians are so poor at English. If you look at any thread about Russia, there's always one uneducated faggot who can only write in Russian

>>78296724
>In trying to learn German and there's like 4 different words for "the" and "you", not to mention all the arbitrary masculine and feminine words you have to memorize.
>I started learning German this Wednesday: the post

>>78297472
I would say more than half of real Japanese on int cannot write a proper sentence in English.

>>78297426
Can you explain to me why the plural of goose is geese, yet the plural of mangoose is not mangeese?

>>78297472
what do they have to say? im interested what we miss

>>78297462
A lot of English words are spelled the way that they were originally pronounced in old/middle English. But the pronunciation changed over time.

On the other hand, I don't understand how Japanese can understand anything when there's so many words that are pronounced exactly the same. Searching up a word like きせい on Jisho gives me like 20 different meanings

>>78297540
The clue is in the word uneducated. Most of the time it's just senseless shitposting

>>78297597
When spoken, by pitch(and context) and when written, by Kanji.

>>78297341
yeah, you're right. I do try and focus on one at a time, this is over a long period of time. but indeed it would have made more sense if when I started learning Japanese in [spoiler]2006[/spoiler] I instead went with a language with more familiar structure, orthography and speakers near me. but I was young and over-ambitious, and I'm still thankful for what I learned.

I've written a decent amount of material in Japanese on Lang-8 explaining English expressions and grammar, and the fact that I was able to answer questions and use the language to help
others gave me confidence, but it just never seemed to stick. I also learned to read Cyrillic and Hangul, and my experience with Japanese made Chinese orthography come more naturally. It seems I'm better at learning about languages than learning how to actually use them.

I love languages, so I've enjoyed the experience. I just wish I could learn to reliably use at least one besides my native tongue.

>>78296724

>and there's like 4 different words for "the" and "you", not to mention all the arbitrary masculine and feminine words you have to memorize.

That's how most languages work

>>78297502
Why is this? Japan is a first world country with close ties to the US in both government and business. I thought the younger generations there would speak excellent English.

>>78297516
They don't come from the same root. "Mongoose" is more or less an Anglicisation of a south Indian word (can't recall off the top of my head)

>>78296724
verbally it's the easiest language to learn

but in written form it can be a bit confusing if you're not too intelligent

>>78297817
It's very hard to go between two languages that are so different. Also, most of them are forced to learn English at school. If you're forced to learn a language you don't care about, you'll forget it all pretty quickly. I hardly remember any French at all from school.

It amuses me when foreigners get confused over homographs/homonyms/homophones

It's really all about context
I read a book last week (read pronounced red)
I like to read books (read pronounced reed)

learning the language to understand contexts and tenses is easy, it just takes a bit of time to go through them all

what really bothers me is when dumb twats think that iron is pronounced the same as irony, despite the two words originating from completely different languages

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>>78297516
it's almost as if they come from different languages...

>>78296724
Indonesian is also easy to learn. They repeat the same word twice to indicate plural. Very funny to hear.

>>78297426
You seem to not know what liberal means, hence your completely and utterly nonsense statement...

>>78297597
bs... the English language got fucked by the French, that is why your spelling and pronunciation is so much fucked up

>>78298088
You miss the point.

English is inconsistent.


There's also the problem with pronunciation.
You have your own surnames to attest to that, if there is anything positive about Spanish, is that it's pretty consistent, a syllable is pronounced the same, regardless of the position. Unlike English.

It's easy for native English speakers to understand broken English so non-native speakers often overestimate their skills