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Aug 30, 2024 · 1. English is not similar to your native language. Learning English will be most difficult for students whose native language is very different from English. The more different your native language is from English, the more you will have to learn in terms of vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and cultural knowledge.
- It Just Makes No Sense!
- Exceptions to Rules
- The Order of The Words
- Pronunciation
- Emphasis
- Homophones
- Synonyms Aren’T Necessarily Interchangeable
- Idioms
- Traces of Archaic English
- Regional Dialects
One of the reasons why English is known for being difficult is because it’s full of contradictions. There are innumerable examples of conundrums such as: 1. There is no ham in hamburger. 2. Neither is there any apple nor pine in pineapple. 3. If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught? 4. If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitar...
One of the hardest things about English is that although there are rules, there are lots of exceptions to those rules – so just when you think you’ve got to grips with a rule, something comes along to shatter what you thought you knew by contradicting it. A good example is the rule for remembering whether a word is spelt “ie” or “ei”: “I before E e...
Native English-speakers intuitively know what order to put words in, but this is hard to teach to those learning the language. The difference between the right and wrong order is so subtle that it’s hard to explain beyond simply saying that it “just sounds right”. For example, we often use more than one adjective to describe a noun, but which order...
As if the spelling wasn’t hard enough, English pronunciation is the cause of much confusion among those trying to learn English. Some words are very low on vowels, such as the word “strengths”, which is hard to say when you’re not accustomed to English pronunciation. What’s more, words that end in the same combination of letters aren’t necessarily ...
To make matters even more complex, the way in which you emphasise certain words in a sentence can subtly change its meaning. For example, consider the different ways of emphasising the sentence below: – I sent him a letter – a plain statement. – I sent him a letter – used to imply that you sent him the letter – someone else didn’t send it (or “you ...
Confused yet? If not, you will be after this next point. English is absolutely full of homophones – words that sound the same but have different meanings or spellings. We’ve already dedicated an article to homophones, but if you don’t have time to read that, here are a few examples… 1. A bandage is wound around a wound(“wound”, pronounced “wowned” ...
Flick through a thesaurus and you’ll see countless groups of words that supposedly mean the same thing. You’d think that this would mean that they were interchangeable – but you’d be wrong. Even words whose definitions are seemingly in the same ballpark differ subtly – or apply to something completely different, because English words can have multi...
English is a very old language, and over the course of many centuries, interesting sayings have been incorporated into everyday language that make little sense if you haven’t grown up with them. “Barking up the wrong tree”, “the straw that broke the camel’s back” and “raining cats and dogs” are all examples of idioms that add colour to the English ...
Though English does ‘move with the times’, there are still plenty of archaic words floating around that you may well encounter (and they may not be in your English dictionary). “Alas” (an expression of grief or pity) is one of the more common ones, but language of the sort traditionally used in the Bible is also still commonly understood, such as “...
We’d imagine that all languages have regional dialects, but when you add the bizarre pronunciations and unique additional vocabularies of the UK’s many regional dialects, they don’t exactly help the poor folk trying to learn English. It’s bad enough for us southerners to understand people from Glasgow, or even for people from Edinburgh to understan...
82 Most of ESL students have trouble with the articles place for language students to start, and more students (and their teachers) should be aware of the value of English learners’ dictionaries to enhance language skills. Once a noun has been identified as countable or uncountable, the user must then decide whether an article is necessary.
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university. Struggling language learners in this study refers to students who experience problems in the context of reading. In dealing with English language literacy, reading and writing are the last two set of skills that students acquire and are presumably, the most difficult (e.g., Uso-Juan & Martinez-Flor, 2006; Golkova & Hubackova, 2014).
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- Homophones. “Homophones” refer to words that sound the same but have different meanings and often different spellings. For example, the sentence “They’re going to their car over there” contains three homophones: “they’re” (a contraction of ‘they are’), “their” (possessive form of ‘they’), and “there” (referring to a place).
- Irregular Verbs. Irregular verbs in English do not follow a standard pattern of conjugation, especially in their past forms. For instance, the sentence “I read a book yesterday.
- Idioms. Idioms are phrases where the words together have a meaning different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words. For example, the phrase “It’s raining cats and dogs” means it’s raining very heavily and has nothing to do with animals.
- Phrasal Verbs. Phrasal verbs are combinations of words, typically a verb and a preposition or adverb, that together take on a new meaning. For instance, in the sentence “She made up a story,” the verb “make” combined with the preposition “up” forms the phrasal verb “made up,” meaning to invent or fabricate something.
May 7, 2024 · Reason 5: Pronunciation and Accent. English pronunciation is notorious for its subtleties and complexities, often representing a mountainous challenge for learners. With numerous ways to articulate words that contain similar letter combinations, English pronunciation is far from intuitive.
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Jul 16, 2022 · Articles are commonly believed to be best learnt from context, and therefore large amounts of exposure to English should facilitate acquisition. This does not mean, however, that learners exposed to a lot of input do not have problems with articles. In Ekiert's study (2004), learners from an EFL context were compared with those in an ESL ...
