Yeah, everyone seems to agree except mchaza.

hey, i started speaking english as a baby, so i cant be that hard to learn.

First, I have already specifically said I am NOT arguing that English is "the hardest". I'm arguing that it's a DIFFICULT language, and far from being "the easiest".

Moving on, it has absolutely nothing to do with alphabet whatsoever. 

For one, your statement about "different alphabet = hard to learn". The Korean alphabet is incredibly simple.

ㄱ = k/g sound

ㄴ = n

ㄷ = d

ㄹ = l/r

ㅁ = m

ㅂ = b

ㅅ = s

ㅈ = j/ch

ㅊ =  ch

ㅌ =  t

ㅍ = p

ㅋ = k

ㅎ = h

ㅏ = short a

ㅓ = short o

ㅜ = long u

ㅗ = long o

ㅣ = long e

ㅡ = the hardest letter in the Korean alphabet, makes a funny short u sound from the back of the throat

ㅛ = "yo" (long o)

ㅕ = "yo" (short "o", kinda sounds like "yaw")

ㅠ = "yu" (as in yu-gi-oh)

ㅑ = ya (short a)

ㅐ = long a

ㅔ = long a

ㅒ = yay

ㅖ = yay

And that's basically it. You don't have letters that can make multiple sounds, you don't get dipthongs, it's pretty cut-and-dry. There are a couple more rules, but nothing that can't be taught within an hour. The biggest part to learning the Korean alphabet is memorizing the new symbols and what they mean, and most new students to it learn it within a week max. It's extremely simple. In fact, Koreans take incredible pride in the simplicity of their alphabet and how easy it is to learn, claiming that "anybody with any language background can learn it in a morning". Of course, learning it and remembering it are two entirely different things, but still. It's proven to be incredibly simple for nearly anybody to learn.

(2) When it comes to learning the Roman alphabet, most Koreans and Japanese already know the alphabet by adulthood and can easily read text using it, because it has so deeply pervaded their culture.

So, it has nothing to do with alphabet whatsoever. Rather, it has everything to do with the fact that different cultures have entirely different ways of thinking. Again, to use Korean as an example, (1) verbs don't conjugate based on the subject (first, second,  or third person, singular, or plural, that is).  They can be conjugated the same way regardless of who or what you're referring to. (2) Verbs ALWAYS come at the end of the sentence. (3) They use markers in a sentence to denote what each noun's role is in a sentence - subject, object, topic, destination, location, etc. (3) Korean, as does every other Confucian culture, has different vocabulary for usage based on a person's cultural position in relation to the speaker. People who are older than you or in positions of authority over you are supposed to be spoken to with the honorific register. Meanwhile, friends and subordinates, you can speak to them with the "familiar" or "rude" register. Equals and people you don't know, you use the "polite" register to speak with them. Additionally, there are formal and informal conjugations for everything as well, on top of all of that.

Korean isn't the only language out there that's incredibly complicated like that. You can transliterate other languages into their local text to make it so you don't even have to worry about the different alphabet at all, and it won't help whatsoever. Outside of the European languages - which ALL have very close cultural ties - you run into vastly different cultural development, which drastically changes the way the language developed. When you're dealing with cultures that are different at their very basis, you're going to find a very different situation when it comes to learning the languages.

And every single person arguing this situation except for Troll Whisperer has absolutely zero input from outside European language and culture, so it's pretty stinking obvious they're all going to think it's easy. I've said it multiple times before and I'll say it again - English is formed out of nearly every other European language. It borrows rules from all of them, mixing them together. Since it's developed from them, it CAN NOT be that difficult to learn for people that know those languages or similar ones (like Tagalog, which was developed from Spanish and the Phillipine aboriginal languages). Take languages that have a DIFFERENT background, and the people speaking them will have trouble with ANY of them. And most of those people will say English is the most difficult of the European languages, which makes sense since it's so much more complicated than the rest.

Look at bolded.

Especially and special aren't as connected as you think. Especially is used to single out one person, place, or thing. Specially isn't very common at all. It is just the adverb form of special.

- All you guys need to take showers, espescially you! Meaning everyone should take a shower, particularly you though.
- I want you to take your shower spescially. Meaning when you take your shower, do it in a special manner.

Yeah, it is usually much more complex actually...

So I misstated a couple things. :rolleyes: The point still stands entirely.

The statement about the be-verbs was more differentiating European languages in general from other languages, a thing that complicates them all. I'm aware of the ser/estar issue in Spanish (estar isn't really complicated at all, though... ser's the funny one. And I guess grasping which is more appropriate is a bit funny too). I don't remember how the be-verb works in German, it's been too long since I studied that one.

I love how you guys are basing your entire arguments off of personal opinions and not off of actual factual data obtained from real non-European language-learners. There are obvious fallacies behind your logic. Yes, there are a lot of funny rules that don't exist in English while they do in other European languages, but English likes to go against its own rules constantly. We have more exceptions to the rule than any other modern language, and as I've already said, it's because English is developed from a multitude of languages.

Anyways, where I work - a US federal government facility - we deal with a number of different languages. The languages are broken down based on the difficulty level behind learning them, into four different categories.

CATEGORY 1: Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, Haitian Creole, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish

CATEGORY 2: Bulgarian, Dari, Farsi (Persian), German, (Modern) Greek, Hindi-Urdu, Indonesian, Malay

CATEGORY 3: Amharic, Bengali, Burmese, Czech, English, Finnish, (Modern) Hebrew, Hungarian, Khmer (Cambodian), Lao, Nepali, Pilipino (Tagalog), Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhala, Thai, Tamil, Turkish, Vietnamese

CATEGORY 4: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean

People who can't spell in their primary language shouldn't be allowed in college, really

HAUhuahuaUHAA


I think you never seen a brazilian speaking portuguese on the internet.

It IS another language!

Every word that can be abbreviated is abbreviated. And there are a lot of people who change letters of the words. Like "c" to "k"(which don't even exist in portuguese).
Eg.: Nobody writes "você", but "vc" (means "you")

Albert Einstein had trouble spelling, I guess he shouldn't have been allowed in college either huh?