For non-native speakers of english

[Syri79]

In fact I am confused how native speakers come to a point where they use "should of" instead of "should have"

I think it comes down to people in some areas shortening "should have" to "should've", and as a result, some people then going on to spell it out as it sounds, either unaware or just not thinking of the fact it's a contraction.

[Deleted]

The only thing i really struggled a bit with was making people hear the difference between my pronounciation of words like chin vs. shin..

[Explicit Teemo Nudes]

Okay a good example of this phenomenon is when you are watching ice hockey. Picked a video from youtube with couple of example spots in it:

Anytime you say "powerplay" in the middle of Swedish:


Anytime you pronounce an English name. In this occasion, a Canadian guy who has a Swedish surname, yet still the commentator pronounces that name with an English accent god damnit, "Jason Krog". It's an especially juicy example of the "idiocy" as the name isn't fully English and furthermore he continues with the Czech name "Petrasek" in the next sentence with plain Swedish accent:

I think names should be pronounced as they are pronounced from whatever country that person comes from(if you know how to).
If his name was Krog before he came to Sweden, I think it should be pronounced with an American English accent. If he married to a Swede and got the name that way, it should be said with a Swedish accent. :P

I don't think it's weird to use a Swedish accent when pronouncing the name of a Czech person simply because most people wouldn't know how that would sound if it was said by a Czech person(a sports commentator should maybe know though?).

I don't really know how you would say "powerplay" with a Swedish accent, so can't comment on this. I had to watch the video twice to even catch him saying it :P

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I really can't think of anything right now that I find particularly challenging in english; it's grammar rules are all pretty simple. Sometimes I struggle with pronunciation (like whether to stress the first or second syllable for example, because sometimes this is inconsistent in english).

One example is I cannot memorize how to pronounce 'either'. I always mix between 'I'-ther and 'E'-ther, and I don't know why.

Wouldn't most Brits say I-ther while most Americans would say E-ther?

[Girrag]

What was the hardest part in learning english for you?

Nothing was too hard except articles. I just don't understand them. There's nothing like that in Russian.

[Puupi]

Nothing was too hard except articles. I just don't understand them. There's nothing like that in Russian.

Eh...no articles in Finnish either, but never had an issue with them. Odd.

PS. Burn Jita. Jita 4 sucks.

[Deleted]

Spelling was definitely the hardest part, since there are really no rules, you just have to memorize each word. And the written form is only vaguely related to the spoken one. Also dyslexia. Thank god for spellcheck, I guess.

[Sigxy]

You can blame that one on the French.

Well they should've come up with something else instead of stealing bad words. :<

[roflwaffle]

"should of" instead of "should have"

its a sound thing, "should have" = "should've" which when said sounds more like "should of"

[Noradin]

English merely has a high skill ceiling. However, it is fantastically apt to be a lingua franca simply because it is very easy to reach a level of mutual unerstanding.

Simple =/= easy.
And I was speaking about its use as middle language for machine translation.

[Lupinemancer]

English was never that hard for me, I have a knack for learning languages, so never really struggled with it.

[Independent voter]

George Takei the guy who played Sulu speaks Japanese well except the Japanese say he has a Texas accent. I can't even wrap my head around that.

[Explicit Teemo Nudes]

My biggest problem in spoken english was to learn how to stress the word (uNIted sTAtes of aMErica). In my native language, words don't have to be stressed, they are spoken on the same tone. Without stressing the words, or worse, stressing them incorrectly, you can confuse native speaker.

there doesn't seem to be a rule, you just have to know the word and how it's pronounced.

hehe. This makes me think of a really nice video of the Swedish pitch accent that even I, as a Swede, found interesting. https://youtu.be/lXp7_Sjgm34
The best part is at 10:00 after hearing him explain how the pitch accent works :P


Oh! A word I always say wrong in my head is "character" even though I know it is wrong.
I say "sharacter" :P
So yeah, reading English is easy, but to then actually pronouncing the words out loud is not easy - especially now that it has been a long time since I finished school so now I'm not used to speaking English at all.

[Poganin]

There were a few things that took me a very long time to master:
1) pronouncing the "th" sound correctly,
2) understanding and using the present and future perfect tenses correctly (no such tenses in Polish, so understanding what is meant by them, as well as applying them in practice correctly took me forever. I still make mistakes sometimes, but at least I immediately spot them now).

Now, one thing I don't understand is how more and more people are mistakenly using third person singular verb form with third person plural nouns. It's become really widespread online over the last couple of years.

[Sevyvia]

Didn't really have an issue with anything when learning it, but that was like 20 years ago when I started reading English books. Later on, I developed issues with how many letters to put in various words. I wrote hilarious as hillarious for a long while. Embarrassing vs embarassing. A couple others. But I've fixed it up since. Still not perfect, but then, most people aren't perfect even with their native language.

[Deleted]

I still sometimes mess up prepositions (in, on, at). Other than that, most difficulties are pretty random and are usually caused by gaps in my vocabulary depending on the subject; I could discuss about medieval warfare more easily than about cooking. Still I'd say I'm doing fairly well; if my native language skills would be "100%", then my English would perhaps be around "85%" or above, if you know what I mean.

[TheCount]

English was pretty easy, I grew up with Spanish.
I think the most awkward part was trying to pronounce some of my relatives names in English
Jorge and Jamie were the fun ones.

[ashblond]

English is the easiest language I have ever learned.

The only thing strange is some words' spelling in British English, e.g. centre, metre, etc. I am sure they come directly from French. While this spelling makes sense in French, it makes no sense in its English pronunciation.

And the American English spelling center, meter, etc. makes much more sense in English pronunciation.

[Mehrunes]

The part where spelling makes no sense from the perspective of pronunciation and vice versa. More of an annoyance than difficulty though.

[Deleted]

When words aren't written as they're spelled. The different way of pronouncing the alphabets didn't help with that one but overall it wasn't that hard. Then again I have no idea about all the grammatical rules of the language and instead i just try to write stuff that sounds passable.

[stream26]

For me difficult area is collocations (words that are usually used together). They are impossible to explain in most cases but make all the difference. Example: make a mistake - many people say do a mistake.