When we learn other languages, there are things that are easy to remember and use. But others, on the other hand, require a great effort and it is very difficult for us to use them correctly. What we unconsciously do when learning another language, especially as adults, is to compare with our mother tongue. If we find similarities or commonalities, everything seems natural. Otherwise, we need clear rules that help us assimilate new concepts and expressions. But even the rules have exceptions... that's why we ask ourselves, what is the most difficult thing about English?
If you have read "nursery rhymes" or story books in English to your young children, you will have come across unusual words and expressions that you do not know. Even if you have a good level of English, you may not have been able to read them correctly, how is it possible?
This does not happen in Spanish or Euskera, the Basque language: you always know how to pronounce a written word and vice versa, write a dictated word, since they are one of the so-called transparent languages, the ones that are written as they are said. But this is not the case with English, which is an opaque language. Here there is no correspondence between letter and sound. Each grapheme (one or several letters) can be pronounced in several ways.
Not everything has an equivalent when we compare two languages, but we must not see it negatively, but appreciate the linguistic richness and try to think of both separately. But yes, it will be the characteristics of the English language that differ the most from our mother tongue that most attract our attention. What we can do is use curiosity to help us remember them. For example, "false friends" should not be a problem without a motivation: remember as interesting that "sensitive" means sensible and instead "sensitive" is the English word for sensitive.
These are the rules, words and expressions that will help us better understand English speakers. We will appreciate how much they tell us about their way of being and thinking. Because people make languages and vice versa.
Is it easy or difficult to learn English?
It is a recurring theme that is always talked about. The people I know who have Spanish or Basque as their mother tongue generally consider English as an easy language, French and Spanish as difficult, and German or Basque as very difficult, but this is a very misleading perception and very subjective.
We can say, generalizing, that English is an easy language to understand and speak at a basic level. This makes many people see it as an easy language. However, as the study of the language progresses, its complex structure and vocabulary are better understood, and it is not so simple anymore, as is logical. Part of the complexity is due to its origin, since English is the sum of several languages that are very different from each other. It is the mixture of the languages of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes tribes with Latin, plus the Viking languages and the French of the Normans, almost nothing.
One thing is to understand oneself and be understood in a language, that is, to communicate, and another is to express oneself correctly, fluently and precisely, both when speaking and writing. This is without mentioning the pronunciation and oral and written comprehension, the richness of words or the grammatical complexity of each language.
If we dare to watch a movie or read the original version, for example, JK Rowlings (Harry Potter), JRR Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings) or Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice), of course, the English language will not even seem easy, neither simple nor simple. On the contrary, we will find an expressive language, rich and full of nuances, just like any other language.
How many words does English have?
It is not possible to affirm how many words a language has because it is a changing data that evolves in any living language. In any case, since the question is very common, and although no one can give a precise answer, we can approach it to have a general idea about the richness of the language.
As a reference, we can look at the amounts of words that are in the reference academic dictionaries of languages. It is not exact either, since new words are missing and they do not collect many words of local use either. But let's think that “local” means that, for example, Australian words in English or Mexican words in Spanish, used by millions of people, are not in the dictionary.
On the other hand, some dictionaries collect old words that are not used. A normative dictionary is not the same as a cumulative one. The dictionary of the RAE (Royal Spanish Academy) is academic, but not the Oxford Dictionary, which includes, in addition to current English, many words from Old English which, obviously, is no longer used. In the case of Castilian or Spanish, we have both dictionaries: the normative and the cumulative or NDHE that collects the history of the Spanish language and that yields more than 40 million records. However, there are countries that only have one or the other, so discerning the number of voices in a language is even more difficult.
The English language has several reference dictionaries (there is no language academy for English) and the largest is the Oxford English Dictionary, which has more than 700,000 entries, but as we said before, they contain Old English words because a thousand years of language are included. Of course, most of those words are no longer used. We speak then more of a cumulative dictionary than a normative one. From the United States, recently, in a study carried out between Harvard University and Google, more than a million words were collected.
The Spanish or Castilian dictionary, in its last revision in the RAE, contains nearly 100,000 words and of the total entries, 19,000 are Americanisms, which makes the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy an international dictionary that is as Spanish as Argentine, Ecuadorian or Mexican. . Nor does the Normative Dictionary include, by far, all the words used in Spanish-speaking countries.
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