There are many reasons to learn English. It truly is a global language. In many countries, once you are fluent in English, tremendous opportunities open up. At the same time many people have hard time learning English as their second language. Let’s just explore a few reasons for it.
Before this post scares you away, I want to let you know that adults actually can learn a foreign language a lot easier and quicker than children. Yes, you read that right. If you can just put away the myth of it’s much harder to learn another language when you are older, and have the right frame of mind for learning a language, you can accelerate you learning process a lot. Here is an excellent post about learning another language by Tim Ferris.
Now, to the reason for this post.
- English phonetics are very confusing
English is such a mix of various languages, it overtime evolved in to a language that encompasses elements of those root languages. For example, if you are a Korean speaker, the language is comprised with 24 characters and each of those characters almost always are pronounced the same way. There are slight variations, but each of those variations live in the same rule 99% of the time. If you are a Japanese speaker, the language is comprised with 45 basic syllables, and each of those are always pronounced the same way every time.
However, if you look at English, there are various situations that a same word is pronounced differently. Let’s look at “resume” as an example. Does it mean “beginning to do or pursue again after a pause or interruption” or does it mean “document used and created by a person to present their background, skills, and accomplishments”? Now, you may argue that the latter is actually written as “Résumé”, but you first try to type that on the keyboard.
Ok, another example, “knight”. Let’s assume that you don’t know English, however, you learned how to pronounce each character. And the word “knight” was presented to you. Let’s say, right before learning about “knight”, you just learned how to say “night”. How would you pronounce “knight”? See? English is not a phonetic language… Ok, I’m exaggerating a little, but English is very hard to learn by just reading it, because of these variations and exceptions are so common. One reason why it’s important to learn English by interacting and a lot of listening.
- Verb phrases are very confusing
Let’s think about the word “take”. It has one meaning. Now, what about the phrases “take on”, “take off”, “take care”, “take care of”, “take over”. Now these all have very different meanings. A lot of the languages will have completely different word for each of these. However there are many situations that a slight variation in the prepositions being added to a verb creates different, sometimes drastically different meanings in English. That’s another reason why English is a lot easier in an interactive environment. Of course, all the languages are much easier to learn interactively, but English is more so compare to many languages.
Here in Hawaii, there are a few ESL Hawaii English School that can help with learning English very effectively. Attending those immersive classes can definitely accelerate the learning curve when it comes to English.