Is the English language really hard?

Is the English language really hard?

Did you know that the longest English word that can be spelled without repeating any letters is uncopyrightable? Let that sink in for a moment. How do you cope with such a language which is not even in the top 20 hardest languages in the world, yet it has countless different aspects surprising you occasionally, especially when writing? So, being a very mysterious language, English provides an enormous sphere where many errors and mistakes are quite natural if you are an ‘outsider’ to the language. What you need to do is to understand the very features of English – which the name English used for the language is actually older than the name of the country England – and adopt yourself to it.

            Let’s start with an example: according to a study, slightly over 10% of the whole English language is just the letter E. This may sound calming as one would suggest that knowing all about the letter E will smooth over the struggle of writing in English. But will it really? To testify that, come take a look at this sentence full of the letter E:

-          He believed Caesar could see people seizing the seas.

There are seven different spellings of the sound ‘e’ here. So, if you listen to this sentence and try to write it down, you are going to have a hard time if you do not know about the words within this sentence. In another example of the letter E, the word ‘Mercedes’ has three different pronunciations and you read it as “Mur-sed-ees”. Therefore, do not be fooled into assuming that English is a quite easy language with certain letters and a fixed word structure. You will be deadly mistaken if you do so.

Besides this complex pronunciation challenge – by the way, did you know that pronunciation is the most mispronounced word in the English language? Funny, right? – English language is getting richer and richer each day. 1 new word in every two hours and around 4.000 new words are added to the dictionary annually. This means that there are more and more words to consider when writing. This might be positive or negative for you, depending on how you receive this info. For example, the word ‘Google’ is accepted as a verb in the language, which means searching for information online.

-          I am going to google her name to check whether she was lying or not.

Who would have thought? Not even the founders of Google – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – probably. Yet here it shows up as a functioning word. This is just an example, but there are tens and hundreds of words are added to Oxford dictionary every year. That is to say, you have to stay up to date to keep a modern and impressive writing continuum.

When these two arguments and examples are considered, it is obvious that you should not take the English language for granted. You may run into perfectly strange cases when you least expect it!