40 Times People Were Confused By The English Language

Only you are wrong. While English is much easier to learn, French pronunciation is easier to learn in theory, since it has clearer rules. It's just harder to actually pronounce it for Germans. Hungarian is an even more extreme example: an extremely difficult language to learn, but the rules of pronunciation never ever change, but that doesn't mean that the words are easy to say. English is easy to learn for Germans, but there are no clear rules for how to say a word. You can't tell by reading a word - but it's easy to pronounce once you know how it is supposed to sound.

Hmmmmmh...... I've got the impression German is easier in respect to the pronunciation/spelling relation issue. I used to study German in high school and I know German follows some stable rules, like Italian does. As soon as you get these rules, the rest comes instinctively. But English needs more memorising and more practising to reach that instinct, and it's even changing almost constantly. English is somehwat easy to learn only because it's omnipresent, but as a language itself, it's pretty difficult.

@F.H. - Thanks for the differentiation. As a German, I do not agree with Uwe Theiss at all. I only ever roughly learned the pronunciation rules for French and generally get pretty close just from reading the word - I have extensive knowledge of English but pronunciation is still hit-or-miss.

I'm a native German speaker and I do not agree with Uwe Theiss. In German the way letters and diphthongs are pronounced is almost always the same and only very rarely there is a slight variation in the pronounsiation of vocals. Once you know how to pronounce the letters you can pronounce every German word.

F.H., you say that "English is much easier to learn" and you are right - for beginners. But the more you learn, the more difficult it becomes. To Dynein I will only say that the pronunciation of a particular word can vary so much between native speakers from different parts of the world or even from different parts of a country, that non-native speakers of English will have a hard time to recognise it as one and the same word.

French pronunciation rules are pretty consistent. English essentially has no rules with some words.

Try Danish pronunciation! I've been raised tri-lingual (English, Danish and German) and despite being half Danish (other part's British), I still find Danish pronunciation to be more difficult than German. half the letters in the word aren't pronounced!

Now come on, I speak some German and once you learn all the (simple) rules it's quite a nice ride. Your langauge has a lot of issues but pronunciation ain't one of them!

French is easier than German. French is my native language, and German was my third language (lost a lot of it, though).

German spelling is about 70% phonetic and much easier to learn than English. French spelling is worse than English though.

As a bonus, you can speak English poorly and still be understood. Try learning a tonal language...

You all can be right, learning a new language is something that is hard to evaluate from an objective point of view. May it only seems to me that way cause languages are not my thing. I prefer numbers. I liked Latin but I hated french. The language, not the people :)

German pronunciation is much more difficult if you don’t know what you’re doing, but at least German follows rules for pronunciation.

German pronunciation was invented by Satan...not the English one, I'm Italian and German pronunciation and grammar it's very,very hard for me...