Non-native English speakers, what is your opinion on the difficulty of learning English?

I am a Polish native and thanks to satellite tv I am partially bilingual (English, obviously), so all I had to do was to polish up my English (pun intended :D) – I never actually had to learn much. Grammar’s a b*tch with all the tenses and their nuances, and some discrepancies in how you read words with the same endings can leave an English learner scratching their head (take the words mouth, and Plymouth for instance – seriously wtf?!).

English is actually easier for me to think in a lot of the times. Polish, by comparison, sometimes seems to me like the Entish tongue from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings universe – takes a lot more syllables to say what you mean.

Another thing English is great for is creating new words. Just splice two nouns together and voila.

To introduce myself, I’m a university student living in Korea, hence my native language is Korean, and I’ve never lived in an English speaking country. So I’m perfectly eligible to comment on this one.. I guess.
I think there are many variables or factors that contribute to making English a difficult language, that you should take into account considering this matter.

1. Any foreign language, whether it is Chinese or English or Dutch,
is bound to be difficult IF it is learnt after you are relatively mature or grown up.
Because it means conscious or intentional efforts, which should be repetitive,
to absorb all the words and all the expressions, all the habits and ways of thinking, feeling of the target language. It would be weird if it weren’t hard.

2. How different is your native language from English? This one question is enough, more often than not, to determine if one is going through or not a hard time learning English.
For example, Korean is different from English in so many ways, no in every way insomuch that it almost feels like a language from another planet, grammar, culture, pronunciation, vocalization, history, whereas Korean language does share some or a lot in common with Japanese or Chinese. Japanese is likened to a cousin language to Korean, reading a sentence, you remove a Korean word and put Japanese one and it is a graceful, accurate Japanese sentence. Chinese, which makes use of a different grammar structure,
is still quite similar to Korean. A lot of Chinese words and expressions are understandable
to Koreans, and only the way of reading words differs. More than anything, Korean, Chinese, Japanese all use Chinese characters, namely, HanZi. 漢子, which has a long, shared history in Korea, Japan and China. Like so many French words have formed a great portion of English. I’ve never studied European languages before so I can’t compare them with English.

3. Last but not least, you should think if he/she is a good language learner.

Conclusion? Yes English is so Xamn difficult to me.

Interesting question and fascinating answers. I salute you all.

I have the right to write, right? Where can I wear this ware? I fed the dodo doe dough. Ok that last one was a stretch, but having taught ESL, I have seen the difficulty learners have with homophones, verb declension and sentence structure. To this day the name Bob Loblaw makes me laugh.

@Tachys Don’t fear my dear the bear is not here.

My mother tongue is Danish, I’ve had English in school since the 3rd grade. It came very naturally to me, although there still is some grammar I’m confused about, but I’m also still confused about some of the Danish grammar. I find it easy to write in English, but I sometimes think it’s hard to speak it, because I have to think fast and my accent sounds funny. But overall, it has been an easy language to learn compared to German and Spanish. German was very hard and after 4 years, I still can’t keep a conversation. I’ve only been learning Spanish for one year and I think it’s much more hard to learn than English, but better than German.
I think some of the reason why English came so naturally, is because the people in the tv speaks it, in the songs etc. and I think that’s why it’s easier for Scandinavian people to learn English than it is for German, Spanish, Italian etc. to learn English. In those countries they put Spanish (or German, if Germany) voices on the English movies, where we in Scandinavia don’t mind reading subtitles.

@tups Don’t think of your accent as being “funny”. It’s probably Danish. Many English language first people find foreign (to them) accents quite charming.

@Sunny2 Our teachers tells us to pick an accent, either American or English, but I would actually rather sound like a Dane speaking English, ‘cause that’s what I am. Maybe you’re right. :)

All in all I think English is hard as well as easy.

The grammar seems relatively easy. There are only a few tenses and word order in sentences is very constant. It makes it easy to pick up on the language and manage to get by in conversations, while guessing at the meaning of certain words.

The written language is a challenge, though…
The way words are written and irregular verbs are being construed is very complex. As I tried to indicate above, English is very inconsistent in translating the spoken sounds into written language.
Should I write piece, peace or peas? Dear or here? Bear, air, heir or lare?
Should I merge words or not when expressing a compound? Like news paper or newspaper?

On top…to speak and write perfect English is made harder by certain constructs in my own language that seem like English to me, but in fact are wrong. You will hear many Dutch refer to a media projector as to a beamer, for instance. It is the Dutch word for projector, that is derived from the English verb ‘to beam’.

Many Dutch also are tempted to make English words ‘more English’. As an example: say ‘interpretator’ instead of interpreter, because interpretator just sounds ‘more English’ to us.

On a final note:
Time comes, I think, to wonder if setting the rules for English is still the exclusive domain of England, the United States and some other English speaking countries. Having become an international language, I feel that by now the Dutch version of English, or the German, or the Indian may each be just as valid a version as the one spoken in the UK or the US.

And to add… I speak Dutch, English, German and have a rudimentary understanding of French.
(That is… I can read French, but find it hard to speak and virtually impossible to write.)