Is English a difficult language to learn if it is not your first?

It’s less difficult than French or German. English is relatively easy to learn at the beginning, but it becomes quite complicated at the advanced level. And English spelling is harder than Spanish or Italian or even German spelling.

One thing is the pronunciation.

The bandage was wound around the wound.

The buck does his business around the does.

You get my drift.

English is a toughie, sure. I’m not sure if it has more or less rules than German but the rules are far less absolute. Everything in English has exception after exception, all the vowels are constantly pronounced differently (comapred to Spanish, say, where an E is always pronounced “ay” and an A is always pronounced “ah”).

It is often said that English is the most difficult language to learn but that it almost certainly untrue. It tends only to be Enlgish speakers that say it and most linguists point toward Scandanavian languages as the most difficult.

It is hard language to speak after 2 AM.

I don’t believe that any language is inherently more difficult to learn than any other. The difficulties in learning a second language are the result of socio-cultural and pragmatic differences (how the language is used) and systemic differences (how the language is constructed) between your first language (L1) and second language (L2). If you speak Italian, Spanish and Portuguese are rather more simple to acquire than Chinese or Japanese, for example.

I guess that a really complex writing system such as in Chinese, Japanese and Arabic could be considered as inherently difficult, but the written language follows the spoken.

I’d argue that written English is more difficult than most other languages that use the Latin alphabet. English orthography can be very difficult because of all its inconsistencies. In a language like Turkish, each letter only makes one sound and that letter always makes that sound, no exceptions. That simply can’t be said for English. I’m not sure I’m familiar with any other language where two words can be spelled the same way and have different pronunciations (read vs. read, wind vs. wind, etc.) or where one combination of letters can have over 6 different sounds (through, rough, cough, thought, though, bough), etc.

That said, I agree with @the100thmonkey that the difficulties in learning the language as a second language are only in comparison with your first language.

No question about it. I don’t know about German but try to teach English and you will see it is not as easy as we think it is.
If incorrect usages of words are entered in the dictionaries as just acknowledgement of their existance, and teachers are using them as correct usages then it makes it even much more difficult than it needs to be.

You ask that question while China sleeps and it’s hard for me to answer it before all the good answers are taken up! The first two answers are definitely correct and what my high school students struggle with most.

As a non-native English speaker, I’d say it’s not, especially because it is so easy to find someone to practice with.

@flo: what?