English is shit once you try teaching it (English sucks pt. 2)

Now I thought Chinese was the worlds hardest language? What do you mean it's better than English? Well Chinese has a lot of things that are very difficult about it, characters and tones being the major ones for us whiteys. But once you get beyond them it has quite a lot of advantages the ways in which the grammar is structured and the way they create words are refreshingly simple.

Of course as native speakers we think English is simple. But we have been exposed to it for a long long time. All the rules, exceptions to rules and inconsistencies contained there within are completely natural to us. But to second language speakers English is very difficult. Firstly there is the ridiculous irregular verbs system where to change the tense requires you to learn extra words. E.g. go, went, gone. fly, flew, flown. speak, spoke, spoken.

Secondly although English is a 'phonetic' language, it is not by any means consistently so. Contrast the sound 'ough' makes in the following words: thought, drought, though, trough, rough, through, dough, enough, cough etc. If you try to teach any letter to sound rule you always come up with numerous exceptions.

Thirdly in terms of vocabulary English has a whole lot of extra words you need to learn. Because the word changes based on whether it is used as a noun, verb, adjective or adverb. For example happiness, happy, happily. Anger, Angry, Angrily. Sometimes -ness can be added to a word to denote a noun but not consistently. Consider I am weak this is my weakness. Yet I am strong this is my strength. There are numerous examples of this but they are natural to us so to find examples is actually quite difficult.

Anyway consistent and simple rules are great for the language learner. It feels like once you have mastered a rule a large part of the language is now under your command and conquered. Yet in English you can learn a rule then learn all the ways in which you can't use the rule. So everytime you learn a rule you don't really feel like you get much in turn.