Why do people believe English is the hardest language on earth to learn?

There always seems to be a group of people in every country who believes that their language is the hardest. I've seen it with Russians, with Chinese, with Polish people and with Americans. They also seem to be a little bit proud of that fact. Some of them even spoke other languages, but many did not.

I think it's part of human nature. Their language has to be special in some way because they're the one speaking it. If they want to think of it as difficult, they focus on the hard parts and leave out the contradictory facts.

You believe that because it's your native tongue. Other people see it differently. Let's look at the differences between Korean and English, for example. (My fiance is Korean, that's why I know this)

Koreans verbs don't have the same type of endings that English has. The only time a verb in Korean changes endings is determined by who you are speaking to (age, social position, relationship) and whether it's past, present, or future. In English, the ending of a verb is determined by the speaker (I. you, he/she/it, we, you plural, they) and past, past perfect, present, present perfect, future, future perfect, etc.

So you start to see? Also, English had about 450,000 words in it. And all of them come from different languages, so it's extremely difficult to pick out a pattern. Other languages like Korean, or more or less homogeneous, from one source.

The difference between English structure and Korean structure is incredibly different. Does that help?

Think about it. There are no uniform rules of conjugation, and almost all words have to learned how to spell uniquely. Consider "laugh" and "though". Why do the "gh"'s at the end of both of those words make different sounds. Consider the words "right" and "write". Pronounced the same, but spelled completely different. This does not occur in other languages. Or even the word "Miami" Two "i"'s, but each makes a different sound. We do not have accents to modify our vowels, you just have to know that the word is pronounced the way it is.

who does ? English has a hard pronunciation, the rest except for some details is easy, i agree with the guy above me everybody wants to believe their language is the hardest so it makes it special.

I'm Slovenian but i don't think English is the hardest language on earth to learn! It's pretty easy actually!

Maybe you just weren't lucky with the foreigners you met.

Well then maybe they don't know many other languages..they should try to learn Slovenian or Dutch!!!

I think just like you! I don't know why people say that english is hard, even there's people who says that english is harder than spanish.

Just look any romance language, all they have conjugations, masculine and feminine.

Tú estás/estés/eres = you are

Tu stai/sia/sei = you are

If you speak any romance language, english grammar isn't hard, pronunciation, I think french pronunciation is harder than english.

theres lots of reasons, but its all a matter of opinion.

one thing that's hard about english is homophones. how many languages do you know where you can say "see," "sea" and "c" all the same way, but they're all completely different? or "hare" and "hair"

also, the various contractions are confusing for ESL...their, they're, there. your and youre. stuff like that.

we just have some confusing ways of expressing ourselves in english. i read this stuff once in a book....

flammable and inflammable mean the same thing. yet consistent and inconsistent are opposites.

we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway.

and there were definately other things, i just forget them

Little things like the fact that inflammable and flammable mean the same thing, where 99.9% of the time, the prefix in- is used to signify an opposite.

A lot of languages have similarities in sentence structure where English has a different sentence pattern and is harder to understand sometimes.

I think is the moust simple and easy to learn. Im Uruguayan and here almoust everyone speaks english. so i disagree.