Basic characteristics of English. Can you say that it is an easy language to learn?

What makes you think that English is a world language?

Today English is the language of the world. But it’s only few hundred years that English become a world language. In Shakespeare’s time it was a provincial language of secondary importance with only 6 million native speakers. The language was not thought to be very important by the other nations of Europe and was unknown to the rest of the world.

English has become a world language because of its establishment as a mother tongue outside England in all the continents of the world. The exporting of English began in the 17^th century with the first settlements in North America. The discovery of America by Columbus was an example of how the pursuit of gold was absolutely the greatest geographical discovery. In the footsteps of Columbus, many enterprising gold-miners rushed in America.

Above all it is the great growth of population in the USA assisted by massive immigration in the 19^th and 20^th centuries that has given the English language its present standing in the world.

Nowadays over 300 million people speak English as a mother tongue. English is the most widespread language in the world and is more widely spoken and written than any other language. In a number of speakers (400 million) it is second only to Chinese It is the official language of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, of the United States of America, of Australia and New Zealand. English is used as one of the official languages in Canada, the Republic of South Africa and the Irish Republic It is also spoken as a second language by many people in India, Pakistan. The number of second-language speakers may soon exceed the number of native speakers, if it has not done so already. And also there are people who are forced to use it for a practical purpose and who have learned English as a second language in a society that is mainly bilingual.

As for basic characteristics English has them three: simplicity of form, flexibility and openness of vocabulary. Old English had many inflections to show singular and plural, tense or person. It was like modern German, French, and Russian etc. But over the centuries words have been simplified and now verbs have very few inflections, adjectives do not change according to the noun. As a result of the loss of inflections, English has become a very flexible language and the same word can use as many different parts of speech. And the last characteristic is openness of vocabulary. This involves the free admissions of words from other languages and easy creation of compounds and derivatives.

At present no other language on Earth is better suited to play the role of world language. English is the major international language of communication in such areas as science, technology and business. The language has penetrated deeply into the international domains of political life, business, safety, communication, entertainment, the media and education.

Basic characteristics of English. Can you say that it is an easy language to learn?

Nowadays over 300 million people speak English as a mother tongue. English is the most widespread language in the world and is more widely spoken and written than any other language. In a number of speakers (400 million) it is second only to Chinese It is the official language of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, of the United States of America, of Australia and New Zealand. English is used as one of the official languages in Canada, the Republic of South Africa and the Irish Republic It is also spoken as a second language by many people in India, Pakistan. The number of second-language speakers may soon exceed the number of native speakers, if it has not done so already. And also there are people who are forced to use it for a practical purpose and who have learned English as a second language in a society that is mainly bilingual.

As for basic characteristics English has them three: simplicity of form, flexibility and openness of vocabulary. Old English had many inflections to show singular and plural, tense or person. It was like modern German, French, and Russian etc. But over the centuries words have been simplified and now verbs have very few inflections, adjectives do not change according to the noun. As a result of the loss of inflections, English has become a very flexible language and the same word can use as many different parts of speech. And the last characteristic is openness of vocabulary. This involves the free admissions of words from other languages and easy creation of compounds and derivatives.

I have often heard people saying that English is an easy language to learn. I have also heard that Chinese is the most difficult, and many speakers of languages are proud to say that their language is one of the hardest of all. But is this true? Are some languages harder than others?

It depends on many things; Chinese, for example, has no tense, but it has a writing system that is very different from the systems used in English. One thing might be harder, but another is simpler.

With English, I feel that it is an easy language to pick up at the start. Many students can start speaking it fairly quickly and progress rapidly through the early stages. This might be because it seems not to have the complexity and abundance of grammatical rules that many languages have.

However, this is also one of its difficulties; having mastered the basics of English, many students then find it hard to reach the very high levels, because there are so many exceptions to everything and so many funny little rules.

All in all, I'd say it is easy to begin with, but it gets a lot harder. if your goal is to reach fluency, then English is not an easy language. It has an enormous vocabulary, its spelling system is a mess and there are many tricky little rules.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 2263