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Why Learning English is Hard

by David

Have you heard of homophones? These are words that sound the same, but are spelled differently and have different meanings. English has a lot of homophones, which can make learning English a lot harder than it would have to be.

  • boar (wild pig)
  • Boer (a South African of Dutch descent)
  • boor (tasteless buffoon)
  • bore (not interesting)

See Alan Cooper’s list of Homophones for more inspiration.

And that’s the number #1 reason why English is hard to learn.

24 March 2007 3:35 pm
Cats: English, Language Learning, Wordiness
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2 Comments  leave one »


25.Mar.2007 - 9:14 pm

Yep, I definitely would not want to have to learn English as an alternate language. Although, I think Chinese comes pretty close to being the hardest language to learn, since it is tonal and because of its large number of characters.

  
Zach
#1
26.Mar.2007 - 12:27 am

I’d have to agree with you on the Chinese thing. There are also some other hardish languages like Finnish with I hear has lots of cases- nomitive, dative, genitive, possessive etc. and even the word “no” is inflected and seems to act like a verb.

  
David
#2

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