Learning English and its problems

[Mycernius]

I am curious in what many of you found to be the hardest part of learning English. The reason I ask because during my Japanese lessons, sadly finished, my sensei mentioned that when she learnt English at school her biggest problem was with phonetics how they correspond to various spellings ie: is the letter C an S as in cease, or a K as in cat. Not something that you have in Japanese. た is said ta and doesn't change for example.
I can imagine other problems would be spellings, especially between British English and American English. Is it colour or color, travelling or traveling? How do you know which is right or wrong? Even pronunciation varies depending on where you are. Route as in root or route as in rout. Then there is the correct use of colons, semi-colons, commas, etc.
This isn't just open to non-english speakers. I do know a lot of native English speakers also have problems with various words and rules, and not just the young. Mention double negatives, a personal gripe, to some people and they look at you as if you are talking elvish to them.

[misa.j]

Vocabulary and fluency are the two of my biggest problems.

English has such a rich vocabulary by itself, and the words from other languages are often thrown in many written materials. Not knowing meaning of the words makes it hard to grasp the whole sentence. I can vaguely guess from the context, but it can get frustrating sometimes because I don't really read with a dictionary in my hand.

My pronounciation is getting better now, but I still pose as I talk by searching for the word that should come next.

[Blututh]

As far as spelling differences between American English and British English, the worst that could happen is: (a) If you are in the United Kingdom and use an American spelling, they will just confuse you with an ignorant American who can not spell correctly [they believe their version of English is "correct"]; or (b) If you are in America and use a British spelling, they will either confuse you with a British person or will just assume that you read a lot of classical literature, in which case their respect for your intellect will probably increase .

The spelling differences of American English and British English are the least of your worries. My mother tongue is American English, and I would not envy someone who is learning English as a second language!

[Sensuikan San]

I had a Spanish speaking colleague once (from Chile) who told me that the hardest thing he had to grasp was the "negative-interrogative" question ... as in:

"You can, can't you?"

"You do, don't you?" etc. etc.

Personally ... I wouldn't know, would I?

ジョン

[Crazy Russian]

As you know, there is British and American English.

The English language was 'invented' in England. So let's speak only, and write only in, British English.

To tell the truth, using American English drives me (as well as most of the Brits) a little bit mad.

To find out the differences between British and American English you can here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America...sh_differences

[Bucko]

These are the biggest problems that Japanese seem to have with English:
- pronounciation of 'v', 'r', 'l', 'th' and sometimes 'h' and 'f' (some say 'hood' instead of 'food')
- double consonents and ending a word in a consonent. English syllables in general really. For example, the the single syllable word 'school' is usually said in 3 syllables by Japanese - 'sukuru'.
- English grammar in general, especially irregular verbs
- irregular spelling
- prepositions - when to use 'in', 'on', 'at'

[Kyoko_desu]

For me, the hardest part of English grammar is articles such as "a"("an") and "the". When writing English sentences, I sometimes don't know which one to use, or not to use any of them.
To figure out this, you need to know if the noun is countable or uncoutable, and this is another problem for me.

As for the pronunciation, L and R sounds drive me crazy.
"light" and "right", "play" and "pray" sound the same to me unless I'm listening REALLY carefully. When speaking, yes, I try my hardest to pronounce them correctly, but when I'm not careful enough or in a lazy mood, my Enlgish turns into Engrish....sigh

[Minty]

Originally Posted by Mycernius

I am curious in what many of you found to be the hardest part of learning English. The reason I ask because during my Japanese lessons, sadly finished, my sensei mentioned that when she learnt English at school her biggest problem was with phonetics how they correspond to various spellings ie: is the letter C an S as in cease, or a K as in cat. Not something that you have in Japanese. た is said ta and doesn't change for example.
I can imagine other problems would be spellings, especially between British English and American English. Is it colour or color, travelling or traveling? How do you know which is right or wrong? Even pronunciation varies depending on where you are. Route as in root or route as in rout. Then there is the correct use of colons, semi-colons, commas, etc.
This isn't just open to non-english speakers. I do know a lot of native English speakers also have problems with various words and rules, and not just the young. Mention double negatives, a personal gripe, to some people and they look at you as if you are talking elvish to them.

French and German are much harder to learn than English, but I drop German because unexpectedly I married a Frenchman, which I now study French.

My English is like Michelle Yeoh's, fluent but you can tell it is not my first language, my biggest problems are the tenses, I get confuse sometimes, and sometimes I know the rule but accidentally make mistakes

My husband is one of the few French I have met who speaks better than functional English; he also doesn't have a very strong French accent like the others when they try to speak English. He makes grammar mistakes but he never lived in English speaking country before, if he goes to live in Australia I think within a year those problems would be fixed.Considering his first language is French which is much closer to English than my first language.

[Alma]

Originally Posted by misa.j

Vocabulary and fluency are the two of my biggest problems.

mine too. i never found English to be hard to learn, because it was part of my life i think always - through tv, of course. i had really bad ''official'' education in schools, but i learned it by myself, and still do, so I'm quite satisfied with my knowledge so far, but still, need to improve. silly, now i fell like i wrote those sentences completely wrong

[d3jake]

(THird from the bottom, (might change), the post with the quote at the top.
http://www.carookee.com/forum/C.F.D....5.0.01105.html

For a game that I like (Descent 3) I'm part of a clan (my name should be "{CFD}d3jake" but I don't want to change it...just in case.) and out of all three of us, the other two are German and their English is less than perfect, but I'm helping them along!

[misa.j]

Originally Posted by Alma

i had really bad ''official'' education in schools, but i learned it by myself, and still do, so I'm quite satisfied with my knowledge so far, but still, need to improve.

In Japan, they take English classes for six years at the least, but I doubt more than 10 % of the high school graduates even have a basic conversational skill.

On the side note about learning English; I've read that at some colleges in the US, some classes are taught by non-native English speakers, and the students are dropping out of the classes because they can not understand what the lecturers are saying. I can kind of understand how the students feel, it must be hard to follow classes like engineering or mathmatics.

[MeAndroo]

Originally Posted by misa.j

On the side note about learning English; I've read that at some colleges in the US, some classes are taught by non-native English speakers, and the students are dropping out of the classes because they can not understand what the lecturers are saying. I can kind of understand how the students feel, it must be hard to follow classes like engineering or mathmatics.

It does seem that those fields have a larger proportion of foreign born teachers and teacher's aides, but it isn't exclusive to colleges. My high school AP Calculus teacher was so bad that half his students dropped the class, including me. I was pretty disappointed since I had always done pretty well in math (it was simple to me before college) and could've used the extra units. Ah well.

[godppgo]

Originally Posted by misa.j

On the side note about learning English; I've read that at some colleges in the US, some classes are taught by non-native English speakers, and the students are dropping out of the classes because they can not understand what the lecturers are saying. I can kind of understand how the students feel, it must be hard to follow classes like engineering or mathmatics.

Out of my 5 years of college in Canada and 1 year graduate school in the U.S., I say the number of native-English speaker professors I had were no more than 15 (50 courses in total taken approximately).

The interesting thing about engineering and math courses I had is that they were mostly taught by non-native English speaker profs. This can actually work in students advantage. I remember I had a Vietnamese prof for my first year math class. His English was so broken that he can only speak simple phrases and was not able to link his sentences into complete sentences or paragraphs. Some of his favorite phrases include "you put this number in, and later will get this" or "put numbers in this equation and everything will come out, easy!" or "this number increase, the curve go up, trivial!"...etc. So instead of those annoying complicated, jargon-filled text, his inability to use English at a high level actually simplified the stuff for us!

[bossel]

I don't really remember what it was like in the 1st years of English at school, but nowadays my main problems are the differences between American & British English. Actually, I wouldn't care very much, but for my studies I need to write British (& my mainly American internet experience interferes a lot).

Regarding my pupils: most of them have problems with the pronunciation of th.
Other problems I encounter quite frequently are false friends, adjective/adverb-differentiation & tenses (esp. those that don't exist in German -> progressive).

Originally Posted by godppgo

The interesting thing about engineering and math courses I had is that they were mostly taught by non-native English speaker profs. This can actually work in students advantage.

Native speakers as teachers are highly overrated, anyway. Better to have a competent non-native speaker than some native speaker without educational skills.

[Glenn]

False friends? You're talking about grammar?

[bossel]

Originally Posted by Glenn

False friends? You're talking about grammar?

Not familiar to you? Hmm, maybe it's a German English term, then.

False friends are German or English words which have similarities to words in the other language, but the meaning is different.

A famous example would be Unternehmer (entrepreneur):

unter = under
nehmen = to take

Some German pupils then would translate Unternehmer as undertaker.

Here is a list of false friends.

Table, from left to right:
German word - correct English translation - false friend - correct German translation of false friend

[Glenn]

Ah, I see. I've never heard that term before in that context. That's interesting. I can see how it would be frustrating, too. Some of those words' meanings are nothing alike!

[osias]

it's usually called false cognates

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_cognate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend

[osias]

Originally Posted by godppgo

Out of my 5 years of college in Canada and 1 year graduate school in the U.S., I say the number of native-English speaker professors I had were no more than 15 (50 courses in total taken approximately).
The interesting thing about engineering and math courses I had is that they were mostly taught by non-native English speaker profs. This can actually work in students advantage. I remember I had a Vietnamese prof for my first year math class. His English was so broken that he can only speak simple phrases and was not able to link his sentences into complete sentences or paragraphs. Some of his favorite phrases include "you put this number in, and later will get this" or "put numbers in this equation and everything will come out, easy!" or "this number increase, the curve go up, trivial!"...etc. So instead of those annoying complicated, jargon-filled text, his inability to use English at a high level actually simplified the stuff for us!

I was also taught by many non-native English speakers in school, the advantage is that you become tolerant to different "englishes". I can understand Indian English, French English, Chinese English, Moroccan English...etc.

The teacher who taught me AP Calculus in high school was French, he spoke broken English, but I had no problem at all..Language does not give me an excuse..Basically, I use foreign languages to pursue my studies, but I can still manage it..

Maybe some native speakers complain too much?

[Glenn]

Originally Posted by osias

it's usually called false cognates

That makes a lot more sense to me.

[bossel]

Originally Posted by Glenn

That makes a lot more sense to me.

But there is a difference between false friends & false cognates. What I meant with false friends doesn't fit the description given for false cognates in Wikipedia. False cognates wouldn't really pose a problem for German learners of English.

[Glenn]

Maybe I should have read the page then.

[Edit] Yeah, after reading it, I realize that I should have known better. Anyway, that's still the first I've heard of false friends (I guess because it's not an issue with English and Japanese).

[osias]

It seems that some people make a clear distinction between "false cognates" and "false friends", (which is technically correct,) but others use the two interchangeably.

Although perhaps not technically accurate, the term "false cognate" is sometimes used to describe a false friend. The difference between a false cognate and a false friend is that while a false cognate means roughly the same thing in both languages, a false friend generally means either the opposite (Welsh ie = "yes" vs. Japanese iie = "no") or something completely unrelated.

http://www.ebroadcast.com.au/lookup/...e_cognate.html

[AOIRO]

I'm afriad if it's too late to post and put some MONDAI-TEN on my learning English.
I'm somtimes confused which I have to use "Fukusuu-kei" or "Tansuu-kei"
For instance,
I want to say in English, "Sono tomodachi to isshoni tanoshii kaiwa wo tanoshin de ne" using Conversation in the sentence. Can I say, "I hope you will have a good conversation with that friend."? or "I hope you will have good conversations with that friend."? I want that person to enjoy a various topis of conversation, so should I use Fukusuu-kei or just simply Tansuu-kei?
Also another problem is; Kako-kei or Genzai-kei
For instance,
"Kinou Kanojo ha Choco-pa ga tabetai to itta."
In English -> She said she wanted to eat Choco-pa.
"Kinou kanojo ha kyou no party de Choco-pa ga tabetai to itta."
(*the party has not started yet.")
In English -> Yesterday, she said she wanted to eat Choco-pa in today's
party.
Or Yesterday she said she wants to eat Choco-pa in today's party.
How about this;
Kanojo ha kyou no party de saisho Choco-pa ga dabetai to itta ga, ima ha Chocolate cake ga tabetai to itta.
Yesterday she first said she wanted to eat Choco-pa in today's party but now she wanted to eat chocolate cake.
Or Yesterday she first said she wanted to eat Choco-pa in today's party but now she wants to eat chocolate cake.
I'm afraid I'm explaining what my Mondai-ten is well. If so, please help me with this. Arigato.

[KrazyKat]

I haven't taught any English, so I wouldn't place too much trust in what I say but,

With conversations, we will tend to put it in the singular(tansuu-kei) even if a number of topics are covered. The plural (fukusuu-kei) would be used in the case of these people meeting and talking over a number of seperate occasions.

I'm having a bit of trouble thinking throught the first examples of the next point, so I'll go straight to the last one:

Kanojo ha kyou no party de saisho Choco-pa ga dabetai to itta ga, ima ha Chocolate cake ga tabetai to itta.

Yesterday she first said she wanted to eat Choco-pa in today's party but now she wants to eat chocolate cake.

I think that the first one is in the past becuase she no longer wants to eat it. The second is in the present because it is something that she wants now.

So now lets come back to:
She said that she wants to eat choc-pa at today's party.

The same as the example above. However, I think that
she said that she wanted to eat choco-pa at today's party
would be acceptable if for example we found out that she was no unable to (perhaps that there will be no choco-pa)

I hope all thats right, and at least somewhat helpful.