English being called easy. (people, German, Russian, Swedish)

[Mahhammer]

I've heard time and time again about how English is supposedly so easy for lacking conjugations, gender, cases, and adjective inflections. But aside from the gender which is also absent from Farsi and Afrikaans, I don't see it. A boat has no wheels, so it is easier? Analytical grammar is..... not?

English is also called a pidgin for being "blockier" and this too riles me. In some ironic twist, Chinese is called hard despite being free of any tenses, gender, plurals, cases, conjugations, articles, and any verb or noun forms. 1 word= 1 word in Chinese. Many Asian languages other (not the agglutinating ones) such as Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Burmese, and the Chinese dialects are completely analytical.

This has caused me some trouble because whenever I hear any Chinese, it triggers the thought of how people snub on English yet ignore those other languages
Have they considered English may have more to it?

Edit:Some info to give people an idea before they talk 'bout stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_grammar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_grammar

[Sonnenwende]

I think people who think English is easy are:

1) Native speakers who don't know any better

or

2) People who speak another simplified Germanic language like Dutch, Swedish, etc and have been learning English since childhood.

I've been hard pressed to meet any German who called English 'easy'. In fact, one of the first conversations in person with my husband was about how I spoke English all the time because it was so hard. He was pretty drunk at the time, but still.

[Max96]

If you think English is hard, try to learn Russian/Ukrainian. 6 (in Ukrainian - 7) cases, 3 genders, 3 declensions (in Ukrainian 4, but Russian also have a couple of words what are called "differently declinable"), only 3 tenses, but you have to consider number (there are only two numbers, however, in those language - singular and plural) and sometimes gender, movable stress, most consonants can be either hard or soft (palatized), vowel reduction (only in Russian, not Ukrainian). Only spelling is easier in Russian/Ukrainian than in English.

[chilaili]

That's a new one! I've always heard English is one of the hardest languages to learn because it's so inconsistent and breaks the rules all the time.

[aliss2]

Originally Posted by chilaili

That's a new one! I've always heard English is one of the hardest languages to learn because it's so inconsistent and breaks the rules all the time.

I'm a native speaker so it isn't an issue for me but this is what I love so much about French - the RULES, thank goodness, the rules make it so much easier. Even if the rules are arbitrary (gender), they are there and generally don't change.

Part of the problem with English is that it is so widely-spoken without a concrete standard.

[dunno what to put here]

Originally Posted by chilaili

That's a new one! I've always heard English is one of the hardest languages to learn because it's so inconsistent and breaks the rules all the time.

I've heard both from different people.

Originally Posted by aliss2

I'm a native speaker so it isn't an issue for me but this is what I love so much about French - the RULES, thank goodness, the rules make it so much easier. Even if the rules are arbitrary (gender), they are there and generally don't change.

Part of the problem with English is that it is so widely-spoken without a concrete standard.

There are standards really, but a lot of different variations are accepted. For example, whom should be used in certain situations, but mostly isn't nowadays, so saying "Who are you going to invite?" instead of "Whom are you going to invite" would be acceptable, even if it isn't strictly correct.

[tpk-nyc]

English also has an enormous vocabulary (the only language that regularly uses a thesaurus) and multiple ways of saying the essentially the same thing—with very subtle differences.

[CARPATHIAN]

Is the easiest to learn for at least one reason: is so widespread that you involuntarly hear it every day even in non-English speaking countries.


The same way a native language is learned by a child because he hears it around him all the time.

[Neuling]

Since English is just an auxiliary language for non-native speakers, they probably don't claim to speak it perfectly when saying they find it easy
One thing that makes it simple is that it uses Latin letters, compare that to Arabic or Tamil or Chinese...
Another aspect is phonetics. English doesn't sound exotic, at least not to Europeans. No idea what Asians think about English, though...
With other languages the difficulty lies with tones, some West African languages for instance have 5 or more different tones that decide on the meaning of the word, that requires a lot of attention since most people are not used to paying attention to tones.

[scobby]

To make the comparison between french and english language,there's no doubt that english is much easier,much faster (to learn) than french language