Why English Isn’t So Hard
People sometimes ask me “Why is English so hard to learn?”
In this podcast episode, I give 7 reasons as to why English isn’t so hard. It could be much worse!
I should point out that if you are struggling with English, that’s completely normal! Don’t feel discouraged. My aim today isn’t to make you feel bad about your situation, but to encourage you to think positively about learning English.
Reasons
1. Unlike many European languages, nouns don’t have genders. You don’t have to worry about saying El or la, all nouns use the same “the”
2. There isn’t much conjugation. I went, she went, they went. “Went” always stays the same!
3. The tenses don’t really matter. This might attract some attention! Firstly, some more advanced tenses such as past perfect or future perfect are not used so often, so many learners don’t use them and have no problems communicating. Secondly, even without using tenses at all, people can still understand you.
4. Many English nouns and verbs are the same (but sometimes with a little pronunciation difference)
He has produce. He produced that item.
He has a bike. He biked to work.
I have flags behind me. I flagged down the taxi.
5. It has a tiny alphabet – just 26 letters and 44 sounds (compared to Chinese, for example, which has 1000’s of characters)
6. Cognates – words in languages that have similar origin. These words are almost the same in many European languages.
7. It’s such a popular language – there’s an almost-infinite amount of content on the internet and other places, many of them (such as this podcast) are compeltely free!
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Comparing English to Arabic, English is easy. In Arabic every thing have gender even the furniture, so you should determine the gender of the sofa before you saying ” that sofa”
Gender is so confusing! I suppose that’s one reason why Arabic is one of the hardest languages to learn