Ke Yang - Three was a time when learning English was for the purpose of speaking to native speakers.  But today, any time two people do NOT speak the same native language, there is a good change that they both also speak some English.  I think this makes International English even harder, because it is necessary to understand many different accents and ways of speaking.

I am a native speaker but still think that the English I speak is not great.  The hardest thing and the one that I would change is the part of the language that has exceptions for the rules.  I think that there should be more flexibility in the spelling of words and in the rules about all the exceptions.  "NO Exceptions"   

I, too,  suggest that spelling should be simplified, and one way to do it is to use International Phonetic Alphabet for this purpose. 

I think both comments above refer yo the inconsistency in the structure of the language. This manifests in a lot of areas including spelling, grammar and morphology. Homophones, holography, irregular vs regular verbs are  a few examples

Dear Prof,

Let me try my best to answer your question. I am a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese and I have been learning to speak English since I was eight. The most challenging issue when learning English is involved, as I understand, is the prejudice that arises: A local student prefers a 'white' teacher (who knows what he did before coming to China) to a native Chinese teacher of English. I did have the same feelings when I was at secondary level. However, when I get to know more about this language, I feel I have the obligation to eliminate such phenomenon and try to consolidate the role that the nativised variety of English plays in ELT classroom.

Thanks for your article btw

Hi! I would not make the decision to change or not. The question for me reminds me of a trick question on whether I would pick up a $5 note or a $10 note when given the choice. My answer is "pick them both". I probably speak a number of varieties of English, and when encountered with a new one, and if I am going to hang out with that circle of friends, i'm gonna pick that up and add that to my repertoire. At the same time, I suspect I will develop a very personal speech pattern that is all the varieties I speak and neither of them at the same time.  

wherever spelling and pronunciation do not match

I would change the "you" refering to a single or several people.

Dear prof, I think the chlallage that an esl/elf learner faces is the automatic use of his or her first language which definitely affect the learning of target language (e.g English language) .. Being a foreign language learner myself I faced many difficulties when I started learning English language ... a learner fist needs to overcome the interference of the first language then everything will be ok ... From my point of view, English language like many other universal languages has some shortcomings but this does not mean we need to eliminate them

George Stoica ·  I know that the language will change only very slowly.  But my thought was that if teachers understand the hardest things about EFL/ESL, we can know better what to focus on as we teach.

Ke Yang - Three was a time when learning English was for the purpose of speaking to native speakers.  But today, any time two people do NOT speak the same native language, there is a good change that they both also speak some English.  I think this makes International English even harder, because it is necessary to understand many different accents and ways of speaking.

English is my second language. I would say perhaps that it would be easier to learn it if each word is spelt the way it is pronounced.

English as a language needs to be more flexible. It is an international language--it is now a tool, a commodity. It is a lingua franca . Please make it simple and straightforward. The hardest part is , while you are using this language, it tends to keep your other creative faculties in-active, because you are more concerned about grammar, syntax etc.. Of course flow of any language is always important. 

accents, or pronunciation

Spelling and pronunciation obviously. 

English is one of the youngest languages. As  a lecturer of  "History of English Language" course, and as a linguist from Turkey, I can easily say that, its irregularities are quite natural considering foreign influnces it has undergone so far begining with the Christianising of the island in 595 AD. During that period which went on for about a century English people not only borrowed lots of Latin words but got the habit of borrowing words from other languages regardless of the soruces. During Norman reign in Middle Enlish period between 1150 and 1500, lots of French words found their way into English. And during modern period, begining with the Renaissance, English got lots of LAtin and Greeck words as a result of translations made from Ancient Greek and Roman classics. English scholars wer not happy with orthograpy problems those loan words caused in 16th, 17th and 18th centuries but they could not establish a language academy as French did in 1635 or Italians did in with Accedemia della Crusca in 1582. Thus lack of corrolation between spelling and pronuncion of English words remained as a heritage for the following generations and for those whoever want to learn it as a second language. There have been some attemps to get rid of this liability but they have failed because, as Mulcaster by whom the rules of current English spelling were first set forth by in his 1582 publication Elementarie,:said, "the final authoriy in language use is public approval"

As for what I would change, is the lack of exposure to English for teh students who try to learn it as a foreign language in their own countries. Thanks to Internet, they have begun to make use of this opportunity even if it is not so natural as a communication in real circumstances.

Assoc. Prof. Bekir Savas

Kocaeli University

Department of ENglish Language and Literature.

TURKEY

What I would change is the whole approach to using English as a lingua franca, as it is regarded in most western countries.

In my point of view, using a single language as a lingua franca, gives way to recurring cultural, economic and political colonization from English-speaking countries, and spreads blatant disadvantages to the non-speaking  countries in any international scene.

The fact that there are core learning problems for EFL or ESL students, is, a blatant symptom of conflicting history and mindsets.

Using only English or any other language to disentangling the world’s communication needs is, at best  expensive for  any non-speaking country today in terms of education.  Many educatonal systems are largely driven by the need to mtach the fictitious global English speaking demands.

On the other hand, Englsih-speaking countries’ curricular systems are not eroded by the increasingly forced demand of being artificially bilingual.

My colleague posed, that he would change the lack of exposure  to English for the students who try to learn it as a foreign language.

Quite the contrary, I would change the exposure of English speaking citizens to learning other languages, for the benefit of mutual understanding, cultural, political and trading  equity and the benefit of a vast majority of people and countries.

Here is a link to an article I came across recently about how and WHY English changed so much after the Normans invaded England.  

https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages

Make it phonetically consistent (e.g. rough > ruff, through > thru, though > tho). Reduce the (vast) number of words of Latin origin and replace them with English equivalents.

Dear Professor Marek,

I grew up speaking English and Thai, and I think both languages are the same in that both languages have dialects; I have difficulty understanding dialects. So if I could change, I would wish both languages to remain the same everywhere they're spoken, so I wouldn't have to try to  learn language varieties--especially varieties of English; I misunderstood what I heard, and got misunderstood many times.   

Sincerely,

Cameen

Get rid of plural markings e.g. .......s.....ies.......zero.....ee......es.........

I agree with Jhy

Dear Michael,

as an EFL speaker, I would warmly recommend to all natives to learn the language of the country in which they teach. I think that certain key concepts can only be clarified using learners' mother tongue. For example, an English native speaker in Italy should also speak some Italian. In my experience, it would be much easier to make students understand the present perfect tense, for instance.

Hope it makes sense.

Regards, Antonio 

As an ESL user,  i would prefer that English has consistent sound for words like fair,  fear,  fare, air, ear etc 

From my point of view -as a no-native English teacher - language accents  hinder my students motivation as they find difficult to understand natives even though their feedback is high. Therefore, I encourage them to listen to different English(es) accents foollowing  D. Crystal advice about the new trend of Global English

I speak English as a second language, taught English as a second language for a year. I keep learning new languages to remind myself how hard it is to learn a language, so I guess those native teachers should do the same (at least learn the students' mother tongue).

Back to your question I found these the most difficult as an EFL speaker:

1. Native English accents that EFL speakers are not familiar with e.g. Glaswegian accent

2. Loads loan words from all kinds of languages

3. Vowel reduction and assimilation 

Just reading through what others have said and the following came across my mind. 

Not sure why words like chair sounds similar to the third syllable in the word furniture (ture)?

A very interesting question.

The idea that individuals should be able to choose which areas of a language should be changed is very inviting to language learners but is not practical simply because as individuals we have so many different backgrounds and desires. As many have mentioned the learners' own mother tongue (L1) has an influence on learning difficulties and interferes with their understanding of L2 whether it is English or any other language.

Some comments appear to blame the language for these problem and suggest that it should not be the Lingua franca. It is not completely unique in its global use but it is the most widely used. In the past it may have part of the colonisation by the English speaking countries but as the world becomes more interlinked through commerce and travel, they is a need for a single language to facilitate communication.

Returning to the question, now the number of non-native speakers out-number the native speakers by a significant amount. The number of English learners in China alone is greater than the total number of native speakers. India, Malaysia and Europe all have a large number of learners. The English language is longer "owned" by the English speaking countries such as the UK or America but instead it will be the non-native countries that will determine the future direction of the language. English is a living language probably more than any other mainly for the reason above.

I believe that the language will adapt according to the needs and desires of the diverse cultures and native languages around the world. It will probably be simplified, mainly the complex grammar, and the vocabulary will develop differently in different areas due to L1 interaction but there will be a corpus of words which be common to everyone and that will be basis on which we all talk to each other.

Gary -- Again, my original point was NOT that we should change the language, but rather that be understanding what elements of the language are hardest for students, we can better understand what and how to teach. :-)

Michael

Sorry to go off topic and as many other commentators have said, the problems of learning English depend mainly on L1 interference. For Chinese students it is mainly verb tense, subject verb agreement and the articles because these are not present in the language and word order as it is different in Chinese. There are of course many others and individual students will have certain problems that are unique to them due to fossilisation of errors which have not been corrected. I try to teach them as individuals but knowing general areas of difficulty is useful. 

If we were to redesign the human species, I would recommend that the throat not be used for solids, liquids and air. This fanciful wish points to the weak, choking point in our design. We wish in the thread to fancy that we can single-handedly convert English overnight. However such a study is legitimate, for it forces us native speakers to ask what is the weakest point of English, that requires native-English teachers to point their special attention to, in teaching English Second Language students.

I read the following sentence without blinking. “Plough through enough dough to make you cough.” But a ESL student will ask, what is the rule for saying 'ough'? Contrariwise, Hungarian, Spanish and Esperanto are promoted as being languages where words are always spelled phonetically.

But now, try to say correctly in Xhosa their tongue-twister: “The diviner follows the road as a dung beetle”. Lack of an upbringing in Xhosa will cause you to fluff the different clicks that are native to any Xhosa child. Any elements that don't exist in the mother tongue, but which exist in English, present the greatest opportunity for deliberate teaching. This is because these elements present no Velcro for the students to hook their new learning onto. The other way around, I struggle to remember the gender of a table in French. As an engineer I always want to know why? “That's just the way it is” never satisfies me. So I have to make up pictures of a tablecloth looking like a dress to help me to remember.

In South Africa too, verb tense, subject-verb agreement and the articles are the most annoying errors with our ESL students. Yet these are useful, and in many ways, essential constructs of English.

The strength of English is that the most useful words have survived, irrespective of who we have stolen them from. ('Borrow' is a euphemism. Let's be blunt!) The result is a “hotchpotch patchwork quilt”. Now try to get an ESL student to repeat that tongue-twister fast!

I might not change much from the Englis language, neither spoken nor written. It is easy to learn, as a foreign language and the best to communicate, worldwide. 

Think for exampler, of the attempt to bring Esperanto as a newly/artificially built «universal» language... a total failure...

.http://esperantodocumentary.com/en/about-the-film

A difference in writing and pronunciation !!!!!!!!!

But it would be different alphabet :-))

The use of tonicity (the placement of nuclear accent) is particularly difficult for non-native speakers and mastering it is difficult. Contrastive tonicity, for example. Ser Wells 'Intonation' (2008) for more info.

I would change the spelling. It would have been great if English was a phonetic language and we could spell English words as they are pronounced.

On review of my answer, I would redesign English to make the negative more clear. This is because e.g., the French pronounce our "can" and our "can't" identically, creating much legal confusion. Perhaps the redesigned English could steal and uniformly implement the double negative from some other dialects and say: "I not can that not do"!

English spelling!

Is there a real need for so many past tenses?

And: Why do Brits and Americans etc. use the tenses differently?