Friday, June 10, 2005
How Easy Is English?
There are some things about this article that I disagree with, namely the last paragraph, but I feel overall it's an interesting take on language learning. Published in the Nagasaki Beat, April 2005.
How Easy is English?
By Danny Krieger
Is English and easy language to learn? This is a question I have been asked frequently and I’ve heard passionate arguments for both sides. And in Japan people often ask me (expecting the answer to be yes), is Japanese difficult?
In my travels, I have found that lots of the beliefs that people hold about their own language and language in general are suspect. For example, in South America and Japan, many people who I spoke to regarding Spanish and Japanese believe that their language was difficult to learn. When I learned how to speak Spanish, people remarked that I must be a genius because Spanish is “so complex.” And Japanese people are sometimes in awe of the fact that I can speak Japanese because they picked up the idea somewhere that foreigners can’t speak Japanese. Some Japanese people tell me that even they do not speak Japanese well, so how could a foreigner possibly do it?
What is going on here? Is it that people want to believe that their language is difficult because it’s self validating to speak a hard-to-learn language? I have heard many native speakers makes such a claim, but I have seen little evidence to support it. Whenever I hear such a declaration, I don’t bother disagreeing. Especially when their belief portrays me in a flattering light. But when I encounter people who make the claim that English is an easy language to learn, as I often do, then I feel that I ought to put my two cents in. This is not because I am defending English as a native speaker. The reason why I have a problem with this view is because it is inaccurate to say that any language is easy or hard to learn.
Such a claim oversimplifies the matter by ignoring some key points about language learning. The difficulty level of learning a language is relative. No language is easy or hard across the board. Languages can only be easier or harder depending upon who is doing the learning. In my view, there are at least five variables that affect language learning:
a. Age: for anyone under 12 years old, learning a language just happens if they can get lots of exposure to it. Just about anyone under 12 years old will become a native speaker if they are immersed in it.
b. Languages previously learned: for someone who speaks Korean, Japanese is easier to learn than English for the simple reason that Japanese and Korean are related, whereas English and Korean are not. So this learner will encounter some similarities between Korean and Japanese, which will result in Japanese being easier to learn. Sometimes even when languages are not related, they can still bear similar features, which make it easier for the learners, but not easy. It’s never easy to learn a language. Even children who, according to Steven Pinker, are “language geniuses,” don’t find it easy; it takes children many hard wrought years of trial and error before they get it right. It was easier for me to learn Spanish than Japanese because of similarities with English.
c. Language aptitude: let’s face it; some people are just better at learning languages than others. Ability to learn languages is akin to something like musical ability, some people have it and some don’t. It does not correspond to intellectual ability either.
d. Quality and quantity of exposure; the more one is immersed in a language, the more opportunity one has for learning it. Taking a class once a week for three hours just may not cut it. Good instruction helps, but language class is the slow boat to China of language learning. Speaking a language is not an academic subject. It is not information. It consists of procedural knowledge: how to do things with a language.
e. Motivation: the drive to learn a language can make all the difference.
By applying this reasoning to language learning, it logically follows that there is no such thing as an easy language or a hard language. Only relatively easier or harder languages, depending on the variables that I just mentioned. But this fact is not widely known and people continue to insist that their language is highly complex while other languages are easy or difficult to learn. The fact is: it takes a tremendous amount of work to learn any language. Each language has its own peculiarities, which result in certain features being challenging for learners. To believe that English is an easy language to learn, one must [not] ignore the following eight points.
1. Correspondence between spelling and pronunciation is sometimes nonexistent. Silent letters are all over the place. Also, the same letter-clusters are often used for various sounds: “ough” can produce five different sounds: dough, bought, rough, through and hiccough. You can spell “sh” in 14 different ways; shoe, sugar, issue, mansion, mission, nation, suspicion, ocean, nauseous, conscious, chaperon, schist, fuchsia, pshaw.
2. English has about 150 irregular verbs (they don't use the regular –ed suffix) and must be memorized individually. By contrast, Japanese has only two (kuru and suru).
3. Non-count nouns confuse non-native speakers. Why can’t you say corns? Well, the fact is that you can. But if you do, you are no longer talking about a vegetable, but a painful area of harden skin on your foot, as in: “I have two corns on my big toe that are killing me!”
4. English pronunciation is very challenging for most non-native speakers because it consists of about 17 vowels, as compared with Japanese and Spanish which each have the same five vowels. English consonant clusters are also difficult, as well as the stress patterns of English.
5. Prepositions are a mess. This is one feature that most non-native speakers never master. We say: in the morning, in the afternoon and at night. For a learner of English that just doesn’t make sense. Or how about: on a bus, on a plane, on a train, but in a car. Is there logic operating here? You can say, "The book is on my bed." But would a person be on your bed? They could be, but if you said someone was in your bed you’d be talking about a different situation.
6. Colloquial spoken English is highly idiomatic. Phrasal verbs (get on, give up) and idiomatic expressions (under the weather) among other weird ways of putting things are abundant in spoken English and cannot be understood by merely looking at the individual words. I once heard a native speaker ask a Japanese person, “What were you doing in San Francisco? Just kicking it?” Her reasonable response was, “Kicking what?” These clusters of words need to be learned as one unit of meaning, as a multiword word.
7. Article usage, especially “the” (the most frequently used word in English), is probably the least mastered, most elusive feature of English.
8. Modals (could, can, should, would, will, have to, supposed to…) are a very difficult system to get a command of.
Now you may think that I’m going to propose that English is difficult, but not so fast. I will only go so far as to say that it depends upon the five things that I mentioned which make a language easier or harder. As far as English features that are relatively easier to get the hang of, consider the following:
1. Adjectives: English adjectives are comparatively user-friendly. Simply insert the adjective before a noun or after the verb "to be” and you’re pretty much good to go. Compare this with Japanese, where adjectives are of two kinds, get tensed, and require one of two suffixes when listed in a series (-de and –kute). Or Spanish, in which adjectives are marked by number and gender. English adjectives let the learner off the hook by requiring no special treatment.
2. Writing: English has 26 easy-to-learn characters. Seven-year-old Japanese children master them quickly.
3. Verb inflection: the maximum number of forms that a verb can consist of in the worst-case scenario is five. For example: write, writes, wrote, written, writing. In Spanish, a verb can assume more than 50 forms, which not only include information about time, but also person and mood.
4. Formality: the majority of English words are neutral with regard to formality. For example, “you” can be used in any situation. Lots of other languages like German and Japanese require a whole array of "yous". In Japanese, the difference between colloquial and very polite language is so distinct that someone who is fluent in colloquial speaking often finds polite speech incomprehensible.
So the next time someone tells you that English or Japanese is easy or hard to learn, be polite and don’t try to debate it. It will fall on deaf ears and may result in a rapid wave of hostility coming your way (I know this from experience). But you will know the truth about this issue and hopefully that will give you some satisfaction. And if that satisfaction does not suffice, show them a copy of this article.
How Easy is English?
By Danny Krieger
Is English and easy language to learn? This is a question I have been asked frequently and I’ve heard passionate arguments for both sides. And in Japan people often ask me (expecting the answer to be yes), is Japanese difficult?
In my travels, I have found that lots of the beliefs that people hold about their own language and language in general are suspect. For example, in South America and Japan, many people who I spoke to regarding Spanish and Japanese believe that their language was difficult to learn. When I learned how to speak Spanish, people remarked that I must be a genius because Spanish is “so complex.” And Japanese people are sometimes in awe of the fact that I can speak Japanese because they picked up the idea somewhere that foreigners can’t speak Japanese. Some Japanese people tell me that even they do not speak Japanese well, so how could a foreigner possibly do it?
What is going on here? Is it that people want to believe that their language is difficult because it’s self validating to speak a hard-to-learn language? I have heard many native speakers makes such a claim, but I have seen little evidence to support it. Whenever I hear such a declaration, I don’t bother disagreeing. Especially when their belief portrays me in a flattering light. But when I encounter people who make the claim that English is an easy language to learn, as I often do, then I feel that I ought to put my two cents in. This is not because I am defending English as a native speaker. The reason why I have a problem with this view is because it is inaccurate to say that any language is easy or hard to learn.
Such a claim oversimplifies the matter by ignoring some key points about language learning. The difficulty level of learning a language is relative. No language is easy or hard across the board. Languages can only be easier or harder depending upon who is doing the learning. In my view, there are at least five variables that affect language learning:
a. Age: for anyone under 12 years old, learning a language just happens if they can get lots of exposure to it. Just about anyone under 12 years old will become a native speaker if they are immersed in it.
b. Languages previously learned: for someone who speaks Korean, Japanese is easier to learn than English for the simple reason that Japanese and Korean are related, whereas English and Korean are not. So this learner will encounter some similarities between Korean and Japanese, which will result in Japanese being easier to learn. Sometimes even when languages are not related, they can still bear similar features, which make it easier for the learners, but not easy. It’s never easy to learn a language. Even children who, according to Steven Pinker, are “language geniuses,” don’t find it easy; it takes children many hard wrought years of trial and error before they get it right. It was easier for me to learn Spanish than Japanese because of similarities with English.
c. Language aptitude: let’s face it; some people are just better at learning languages than others. Ability to learn languages is akin to something like musical ability, some people have it and some don’t. It does not correspond to intellectual ability either.
d. Quality and quantity of exposure; the more one is immersed in a language, the more opportunity one has for learning it. Taking a class once a week for three hours just may not cut it. Good instruction helps, but language class is the slow boat to China of language learning. Speaking a language is not an academic subject. It is not information. It consists of procedural knowledge: how to do things with a language.
e. Motivation: the drive to learn a language can make all the difference.
By applying this reasoning to language learning, it logically follows that there is no such thing as an easy language or a hard language. Only relatively easier or harder languages, depending on the variables that I just mentioned. But this fact is not widely known and people continue to insist that their language is highly complex while other languages are easy or difficult to learn. The fact is: it takes a tremendous amount of work to learn any language. Each language has its own peculiarities, which result in certain features being challenging for learners. To believe that English is an easy language to learn, one must [not] ignore the following eight points.
1. Correspondence between spelling and pronunciation is sometimes nonexistent. Silent letters are all over the place. Also, the same letter-clusters are often used for various sounds: “ough” can produce five different sounds: dough, bought, rough, through and hiccough. You can spell “sh” in 14 different ways; shoe, sugar, issue, mansion, mission, nation, suspicion, ocean, nauseous, conscious, chaperon, schist, fuchsia, pshaw.
2. English has about 150 irregular verbs (they don't use the regular –ed suffix) and must be memorized individually. By contrast, Japanese has only two (kuru and suru).
3. Non-count nouns confuse non-native speakers. Why can’t you say corns? Well, the fact is that you can. But if you do, you are no longer talking about a vegetable, but a painful area of harden skin on your foot, as in: “I have two corns on my big toe that are killing me!”
4. English pronunciation is very challenging for most non-native speakers because it consists of about 17 vowels, as compared with Japanese and Spanish which each have the same five vowels. English consonant clusters are also difficult, as well as the stress patterns of English.
5. Prepositions are a mess. This is one feature that most non-native speakers never master. We say: in the morning, in the afternoon and at night. For a learner of English that just doesn’t make sense. Or how about: on a bus, on a plane, on a train, but in a car. Is there logic operating here? You can say, "The book is on my bed." But would a person be on your bed? They could be, but if you said someone was in your bed you’d be talking about a different situation.
6. Colloquial spoken English is highly idiomatic. Phrasal verbs (get on, give up) and idiomatic expressions (under the weather) among other weird ways of putting things are abundant in spoken English and cannot be understood by merely looking at the individual words. I once heard a native speaker ask a Japanese person, “What were you doing in San Francisco? Just kicking it?” Her reasonable response was, “Kicking what?” These clusters of words need to be learned as one unit of meaning, as a multiword word.
7. Article usage, especially “the” (the most frequently used word in English), is probably the least mastered, most elusive feature of English.
8. Modals (could, can, should, would, will, have to, supposed to…) are a very difficult system to get a command of.
Now you may think that I’m going to propose that English is difficult, but not so fast. I will only go so far as to say that it depends upon the five things that I mentioned which make a language easier or harder. As far as English features that are relatively easier to get the hang of, consider the following:
1. Adjectives: English adjectives are comparatively user-friendly. Simply insert the adjective before a noun or after the verb "to be” and you’re pretty much good to go. Compare this with Japanese, where adjectives are of two kinds, get tensed, and require one of two suffixes when listed in a series (-de and –kute). Or Spanish, in which adjectives are marked by number and gender. English adjectives let the learner off the hook by requiring no special treatment.
2. Writing: English has 26 easy-to-learn characters. Seven-year-old Japanese children master them quickly.
3. Verb inflection: the maximum number of forms that a verb can consist of in the worst-case scenario is five. For example: write, writes, wrote, written, writing. In Spanish, a verb can assume more than 50 forms, which not only include information about time, but also person and mood.
4. Formality: the majority of English words are neutral with regard to formality. For example, “you” can be used in any situation. Lots of other languages like German and Japanese require a whole array of "yous". In Japanese, the difference between colloquial and very polite language is so distinct that someone who is fluent in colloquial speaking often finds polite speech incomprehensible.
So the next time someone tells you that English or Japanese is easy or hard to learn, be polite and don’t try to debate it. It will fall on deaf ears and may result in a rapid wave of hostility coming your way (I know this from experience). But you will know the truth about this issue and hopefully that will give you some satisfaction. And if that satisfaction does not suffice, show them a copy of this article.
I still can’t believe he publicly displayed his affection for me!
