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Subject:Myth? From:bdoonan -at- coreco -dot- com To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com Date:Wed, 10 Nov 1999 08:43:42 -0500
Jonathan Soukup [SMTP:jsoukup -at- airmail -dot- net] wrote:
>> I think almost everyone has heard the phrase, "English is the hardest
>> language to learn," but I've never actually seen it in print. Does
anyone
>> know who said it or where it is published? Is this something that we, as
>> Americans, have made up to make us feel better about ourselves? I don't
>> know.
This simply is not true. I live in Quebec and have been witness many many
times to English people learning French and French people learning English.
It is, without exception, agreed that French people have a much easier time
learning English than vise versa. This, in fact, is a common topic in
Quebec between the French and the English which has been expanded to other
languages as well. The bottom line is that English is one of the easiest
languages to learn. Why? Because our grammatical rules/verb tenses and our
"exceptions to grammatical rules" are fewer/less involved compared to other
languages.