What do you find the hardest about the English language?

Hobbes

Hobbes

Tucayo
Retired Wiki Staff
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MarioWiki
Henry Tucayo Clay
This may be mostly for non-native speakers but there's always some stuff you find to be hard in your native language. For me, it's always the prepositions. I took a test for a job and the only wrong mark I got was thanks to those goddamn prepositions.
 
1) The bandage was wound around the wound.

2) The farm was used to produce produce.

3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.

4) We must polish the Polish furniture.

5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.

6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.

7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.

8) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.

9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

10) I did not object to the object.

11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.

12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.

13) They were too close to the door to close it.

14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.

15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.

16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.

17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.

18) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear..

19) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

20) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?


Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France . Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig..

And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell?

How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which, an alarm goes off by going on.

English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all. That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.

PS. - Why doesn't 'Buick' rhyme with 'quick' ?
 
English is my native (and only) language, and I seem to be pretty good at it (especially compared to others among the internet)

Comma placement I suppose. I put too many in :P
 
Spelling. Vowels, silent letters, doubled letters, homographs, heteronyms - all so terrible.

I once wrote a whole essay about how English should be allowed to change to more natural phonetic spellings rather than stuffy old people insisting on the "proper" spellings that were only crystallized because the people running the original printing presses couldn't speak the language they were making dictionaries for.

Just sooo glad I'm a native speaker.
 
As someone who grew up learning two languages in school and two outside of school, I never really minded the quirks of English. At the very least, a phantom letter here and there is better than grammatical gender (why is the chair female?? why is the computer male??) and the mess of verb tenses (who even uses passé simple?? isn't it only for fairy tales??)
 
2257 said:
if it makes you feel any better, spanish prepositions arent really easy for me either

nothing in english is hard for me because i was raised by a combination english teacher/lunatic who made sure i knew all the rules before i had enough fine motor skills to actually use them. now i ignore all the rules anyway
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We do have some confusing ones but my problems come especially when using "in", "or", and "at", because in Spanish they are all "en" when indicating a place and I try to remember the general rules but I always end up mixing them.

The hardest thing about Spanish for me would be the conjugation of irregular verbs. Why the hell does "satisfacer" turn to "satisfaga"? Is it correct to conjugate "nevar" as "nieva" or as "neva"? "Negocien" or "negocíen"? Aaaaahhhh *implodes*

For me, the hardest of learning German would be the cases, those damn cases. And the genders, but when in doubt I always used the Spanish genders, which is more than often wrong. In French it's the conjugations as well.
 
genders were always the biggest thing that tripped me up about german when i took it in high school. spanish indicated genders via spelling, with german it felt like you had to memorize every single one. and there were a loooot
 
Dark ProtoMan said:
I before E except after C, anyone?
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I before e except after c
And when sounding like "ay" as in "neighbor" and "weigh"
And on weekends and holidays and all throughout May
And you'll always be wrong no matter WHAT YOU SAY!
 
I remember being astonished when I learnt Italian had 8 versions of the word 'the'.

As a native speaker of English I'm pretty comfortable with all the dumb rules it has. The thing that trips me the most is when you see a word only in print and have an idea of how it's pronounced in your head until you realise you've been wrong the whole time and have to unlearn the pronunciation in your head.
 
Length and strength. I swiped those, but any other day I would've had them wrong.

Also diagramming is kinda hard.

Also unnecessary. I always seem to confuse the C's and the S's.
 
2257 said:
i cant actually remember why i thought spanish prepositions were difficult, because its been like 6 years since i had to use spanish for anything. was it "por" vs "para"? "a" vs "en"? i barely remember what these even do anymore. i do remember, though, that nobody ever bothered to explain to me why sometimes direct objects have "a", so i just used it at random times

i'm studying german rn though. i can deal with genders because spanish has them, and i can deal with cases because japanese has them, but the million different declension patterns are just infuriating. in japanese, every word indicates its case in the exact same way. why can't german do that?
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Hm, that's a good question and I don't actually know how to answer it. Right now, the main difference I can think of is you use "a" when the direct object is alive? Or something that directly receives the action? IDK. "Yo le pago a la señora", "yo le doy de comer al perro", "ella le habla a su mamá" as opposed to "yo pago la renta", "yo como papas", "ella habla inglés"? Not sure, to be honest.
 
Ness said:
Chiaki Nanami said:
was/were at times
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was is singular, were is plural (except for singular they)
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If I may give a criticism of English, it's that its studiers are stubborn beyond belief. Singular they has historical precedence and broad recognition today, but it took me until college to find a teacher that didn't disagree with the mere notion of a singular they. Even then, I had to convince him that it was valid when he first didn't recognize it.
 
I've never actually heard of a singular they. Whenever I speak I say "They were" instead of "They was" because I think of "they" as plural.
 
Laverne Todd said:
I've never actually heard of a singular they. Whenever I speak I say "They were" instead of "They was" because I think of "they" as plural.
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a few people here have they pronouns, i always have split they up into singular or plural
 
one thing i don't understand about the english language is why bologna is pronounced baloney

for a looooong time i thought they were two different things
 
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