For people who speak English as their second language, what was the hardest thing about learning English?

What's hardest is figuring out all the different meanings and pronunciations of words. For example, when I was first learning English, I thought 'phone' was spelled, 'fone'. That's one, and then words like 'thought', 'sign', etc, that have u, g, h, and other letters that you wouldn't expect to be there. Also, the different dialects in regions. French was my first language, and I live in the south. I still find it hard to understand some hardcore northerners.

In Spanish we have the Spanish Royal Academy, which tell us how to use the language, we have certain rules that we can not "break", but in English is not the same, you can change some things and the language changes through usage, and everybody accepts it.

Grammatically, verbs and tenses are not so difficult but you can get a little bit confused some times

English is my first language but I know tons of people who learn english as a second language. My friend's first language is spanish and she had a tough time when she was working at a fast food joint because apparently the "May I" in "May I help you?" sounded like something dirty in her language. Also, to her the words seem to go backwards so sometimes she sounds like she's talking like Yoda when she's just using the grammatical format of her language.

Also, I notice there are some sounds she can't pronounce like the Y in yoyo (She says "jojo") and for some reason she can't say bedroom (She says "beth"room)

For me, the spelling was not hard. I was born here in the USA, but coming from Mexican parents, my first language was Spanish. The hardest thing for me in improving my English was when I was in 4th grade, up until then I could not pronounce the "ch" properly; I assume you have heard of people saying "sh"eetos (cheetos), "sheating" (cheating), etc. That was one of the phrases I remember struggling with the most, just as I find people who are trying to learn Spanish finding the "r" (rolling their tongue) also hard to do.

1) the main problem is the language they use regulerly as their first language. they can't use the second language (english)becouse the most of the people around can't uanderstand english.

2) second one is The Grammatically & spelling

I'm a native English speaker....but my impression is also that verb forms and tenses are the hardest. After foreign speakers have mastered everything else, they can still have trouble with this.

For example, we have at least four ways to refer to future events: I will go, I will be going, I am going to go, and I go (as in, "When I go to Chicago, I'll visit you"). Easy for us--confusing for others.

It will be interesting to see what non-native speakers say!

The hardest part was not being allowed to learn English. When I set foot in the school (this is kindergarten too) immediately was place in ESL classes, the problem was they weren’t teaching us English but Spanish. I was very angry my entire life, they just made it difficult for me in high school to get straight A’s in my English class; I had to study more than the average person.

well i think the hardest thing was learning that in words like Daze the second letters a vowel and it ends in E. so the vowel has a long sound

but then learning a word like Have, were the rule doesnt follow

I am English but I had 2 wives who spoke English as a second language.

Their problem was tense. They rarely understood past or future tense.