Top 8 most common misspoilings in the English language

[thetonestarr]

RolStoppable said:

mchaza said:
i go against your statement that the English language is the easiest to learn because i say the English language is the Hardest to learn with even native English speakers have troubles with it and the Whole range of screwed up things like silent letters to words with multiple meanings and to top it off the Americans fought it would be awesome to screw up everything and make their own version of English with different spelling.

But thats what you get when you mix German, french, old celtic,latin and many many more, and add a Arabic letter system.

Japanese is much easier, tho i had to give it up and stick to learning my own language before moving onto others.

I've read posts of yours, so I believe you that English is hard to learn for you. You don't even get the use of "a" and "an" right, so yeah...

But really, English is easy to learn. Verbs barely change (if at all) when using different pronouns and tenses. Plural is similarly easy and there's only "the, a, an" to put in front of nouns, because nouns have no gender in English. Sure, there are some screwed up words and the same vowels or vowel combinations can be pronounced differently, but getting a basic grasp of the language in both writing and reading is simple.

Have you ever even studied foreign languages, outside of simple Spanish, German, or French? Most languages from outsde the European circle of languages English developed from are so drastically different, it's unreal.

Statistically, English is absolutely the hardest language to learn, because (1) we have so many nonstandard spellings, (2) we claim to go by phonics but an incredibly vast amount of the language goes against phonetic rules, (3) how the heck does "was", "were", and "am" develop from "is"?, (4) we're a hodgepodge of quite literally a dozen different languages (though most of our vocabulary originates in five languages, but that's still ridiculous!), (5) we have an incredible number of colloquial wordings, phrases, and sayings, and (6) sentence order is so relaxed. You'd think that would make it easier, but most of the world's languages have strict rules for how they work, so to switch to something that isn't as strict really confuses non-native speakers.

 

Source: I'm a professional linguist.