English - The reason why it is so hard to learn

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DeepShadows

#363676 Sat, 12 May 07 12:42 AM

Is it true that of all modern languages, English has the most words?

DeepShadows

Joined on Wed, May 9 2007

New Member (02)

Grammar Geek

#363694 Sat, 12 May 07 01:40 AM

I don't know if it has more words, but it has so many examples like wind (wrap around) and wind (what blows outside) and so many strange spellings that I wonder how anyone can master it!

Grammar Geek

Joined on Tue, Jan 10 2006

Pennsylvania, USA

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Barbara, who answers in American English.

CalifJim

#363714 Sat, 12 May 07 03:15 AM

English does have a lot of words compared to many other languages, but speakers of English use about the same number of words in everyday conversations as the speakers of any other language. So English really isn't that hard to learn after all!

If you can handle 10,000 words well, you doing fine. You should be able to communcate fairly well. For really good understanding and fluency, a mastery of 20,000 would be wonderful. Most native speakers know 150,000 words at least passively.

CJ

CalifJim

Joined on Mon, Aug 2 2004

California

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"There are no facts, only interpretations" - Nietzsche

Conversations, Numbers

julielai

#363723 Sat, 12 May 07 04:04 AM

CalifJim wrote:
If you can handle 10,000 words well, you doing fine. You should be able to communcate fairly well. For really good understanding and fluency, a mastery of 20,000 would be wonderful. Most native speakers know 150,000 words at least passively.CJ

Just out of curiosity, how did educators/linguists come up with these figures? (Word count of some sort, probably?) How do I find out how many words I know? Tongue Tied [:S]

julielai

Joined on Sun, Oct 24 2004

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Sesquipedalian

#363741 Sat, 12 May 07 05:10 AM

English has the highest voabulary of about 500.000 but most of them are scientific, archaic and literary words. So, to say that English is a difficult language to learn because it has the most words is right down wrong. In fact English is by far the easiest language that I know of.

Sesquipedalian

Joined on Sat, Apr 14 2007

New Member (15)

Sesquipedalian

#363745 Sat, 12 May 07 05:15 AM

Dude, only a small number of native speakers know 150.000 words even passively. The average person's vocabulary doesn't even remotely approach that figure. Those who know that many words must be writers and linguists, most people don't even bother to look up unknown words.

Sesquipedalian

Numbers, Vocabulary

Grammar Geek

#363944 Sat, 12 May 07 04:58 PM

You might find these articles interesting: http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/howmany.htm and http://www.slate.com/id/2139611/

One of the good points they both make is that it's hard to define a "word." Is a can the same word as the verb can meaning to fire someone, and is the verb can when you preserve fruit another word altogether? Are sing, sang, and sung three words? Do sit and sitting count as one word or two? Depending on how you define what a word is, how many you know will vary dramatically.

Grammar Geek

Verbs, Articles

Kathrin

#363953 Sat, 12 May 07 05:13 PM

Yes, it is true: about 500,000 and it develops really fast, faster than the others. But this takes into account only the words in the dictionary, so it could be questionable. German is for example one of the languages, in where one word could be created by every individuals complettly new and the dictonary contains only 300,000, otherwise it is imposible to print every combination, they are too much. Practically German has much more than 300,000.

But the high number of words is not the reason for English to be so hard to learn, it is the variety of the language, not only the number of words. And the variaty is breathtaking: many words for the same phenomenom like (pullover, jumper, sweater) or (cover letter, covering letter, motivation letter) and much worst, idioms, high number of preposition in opposite to French, phrasal verbs etc. With other words: it is a bit of a challange. But the truth is: German is even worst and Japanese even a bigger challange, so enjoy it:-) At the moment I am learning French and I am happy: so easy:-)

Kathrin

Joined on Fri, May 11 2007

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Is it me or is it the universe? It could be the universe but I am not sure thus I have been still wondering and drinking tea. However, the tea is getting cold.

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Sesquipedalian

#364060 Sun, 13 May 07 02:54 AM

French is not easy, neither is German for that matter. How can a language be easy if every noun is either masculine, feminine or androgenous without any systematic pattern. How can a language be easy if you can't construct a sentence if you don't know the gender of a given word? Does your language have 100.000 nouns? Multiply it by 3 because you never use them alone. I used to study Russian, German and Spanish so I know what I'm talking about, French is no different from those languages in terms of preposterous grammatical hodgepodge. You have to be an expert in the above-mentioned languages to be able to correctly say something like 'I want to send this letter to my good friend' - something even the lamest English learner can say and write hands down. (2 nouns, probably of 2 different genders thus probably different cases, go figure)

(Edited: Please avoid using profanity in your posts.)

Sesquipedalian

Genders, Nouns

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