When I hear people say that this language is easier than that language, I hold my tongue—most of the time. One time in particular, someone said that English and Spanish are easy languages to learn, and Italian is more complex and very difficult. I pointed out to this native speaker of Italian that she spoke neither of the two. I wasn’t trying to be rude, but she fumed nonetheless.
After years of contending with this false belief held by many, I just say, ‘If a language is spoken by people, it is complex, whichever language or people it may be.’ Then I say ‘full stop.’ And if I remember, I smile to alleviate the sting.
So, where is the complexity and difficulty in the grammar shown in the image above? Well, the complexity is in the two objects where one is the benefactor of the action of the verb, indirect object, and the other is what the verb executed its action on, direct object. The difficulty is in the order, or position, these objects have in a clause and whether there is need of a preposition. Compare the following:
The baker baked me a cake.
The baker baked a cake for me.
Notice the ‘for’.
Of equal importance is the fact that there needs to be a subject of the verb, and its position must be found before the object. This may not be the case for many languages.
The level of difficulty here is relative to your native language. Let's take Italian, for example. The Italian language allows for ‘for me the baker baked a cake’ or ‘a cake for me baked the baker’ or ‘the baker for me the cake baked’ or 'for me baked a cake'. How do you get someone to do less than what they are used to doing? How do you unteach them syntactic flexibility? How do you transmit to a person the importance of including the subject in a sentence when they often omit it in their native language? How do you convince native speakers of Italian that in English those formations don't make sense when in their minds they make perfect sense?
Not only are there aspects where restrictions must be applied, what about introducing new concepts altogether? Take the future tenses in English, for example, where the choice between one form or another does not depend on when the future event should take place but when the speaker made a decision about committing to the event on or where an opinion comes from! Now that’s complex and difficult!
They same is true when native speakers of English learn another languge. Different language, different way of getting your head around things.
What do you find most challenging about the English language?
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