Okay, I guess I can't really talk since I'm a native English speaker, but really! I bet you that a language like Finnish or Hungarian is 1000x harder than English will ever be. English doesn't depend on cases like Finnish does, there aren't insanely diverse conjugations like there are in Hungarian. English is actually pretty simple, according to many of my European penpals whose native language is NOT English. So really, why does everyone say it's "one of the hardest languages to learn". Everyone says "oh the pronunciation is hard". Have they ever tried Chinese?? Or, "oh pluralization is too hard". Study Danish/Swedish's and see how much more difficult and annoying it is than English! My question: Why do people think it's soo difficult?

It is a mystery to me, too.

English is NOT hard to learn. Once you get people with (more or less) phonetically spelled languages to treat English like Chinese in that way (not much connection between the written and the spoken word), they are usually flying. Once they take that in, they are often better at spelling than a lot of native speakers, because they can use their own language's exacter phonemes to remember the spelling of English words.

I am bilingual myself, and my experience is in teaching both German and English as foreign languages. With intensive learning/ training most people can have a reasonably fluent conversation in English in about 3 months, German takes about twice as long.

My own theory is that since so many native speakers feel they are not perfect in English, partly because some seem never to have been taught the rules, they think it must be difficult for anybody else as well.

Another reason is the way English is taught a lot of the time in schools abroad, people are taught RP (often badly), and expect every English speaker to talk like that, which makes contact with real people often quite overwhelming. I had a very bad time at school in Germany, arguing with the English teacher when he sounded so very different from my mother's ("educated") Hiberno-English.

In France and Germany they have American films only dubbed, so there is no exposure to other accents.

i really don't get how so many people use "pronunciation" or "grammar rules" as an excuse? do they think that other languages don't have the same or even worse problem?!?!

english is extremely simple compared to pretty much every other language.

try korean or mandarin.... or finnish with its 15 cases or !Xóõ with its 72 consonants, 32 vowels and 4 tones, for that matter....then speak again.

i'm a non-native speaker and it's the 3rd language i'm fluent in, next to others i'm currently learning. back in the days when i was in school i also had french and latin.... and english is by far the easiest. end of story!

I think because there are so many irregularities, and pronunciation isn't as simple as some other languages. It's not phonetic. Of course other languages are difficult in their own way. Maybe there are just a larger number of people learning english as their second language, therefore more people to complain?

It's actually only just the random pronunciation, thats all :).
Many find it hard simply because A) they are English speakers and they want to feel good about their language's complexity, and B) because other peoples haven't bothered trying Finnish yet (There is even a fable that the Devil couldn't learn it, so why don't Christians pray in Finnish lol? :P).
Chinese, Finnish, Hungarian, Swedish and *not* Danish are all very regular languages, despite what they seem to be. They all have regular conjugations etc and structure. Danish has these but it is pronounced like English is, REALLY VAGUELY (and like English, it has many different pronunciations depending on where you come from, e.g. I pronounce the 'o' in 'Cold' and 'Code' with rounded lips, sounding really posh, but an American or *normal* Aussie might pronounce it with the 'o' in the back of the throat.

So the truth is that English has a really random verb system and pronunciation (and sometimes word order) which on face value make English harder. But because we have such a rich vocabulary, it is harder to confuse some words, which is a good thing, and makes English very useful, as we don't have to try and guess the context to figure out what someone is on about.

Pluralization is too hard? Hah, thats kind of true, but only non germanic peoples should say this, because its kind of a Germanic language thing to have such a strange plural system (E.g. Man, men, sheep, sheep, dog, dogs etc). But it is in theory nearly just as easy to learn the word in two forms than it is to try and add a plural suffix on the fly in a language such as Russian, especially when it comes to cases! (E.g. Sobaka (dog), Sobaki (dogs), Sobak (of the dogs), Sobakam (with the dog), Sobakami (with the dogs) etc)

Anyway, its really not hard, in fact no language is truly harder than the other, unless you combined English randomness with Russian case and conjugation systems with Chinese ideograms and tonal pronounciation! HA HA HA!!!!

The only really easy languages are constructed languages such as Esperanto and Slovio, google them, Slovio is actually much more useful, especially if ur studying Russian, Croatian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Czech, any of that Jazz (Czech is a Western Slavic language so its a bit different to the others but anyway)

I can't speak for everyone in the world, but I am currently doing an exchange trip in Japan, so I can speak for the Japanese students in what I think causes them to find English so hard.

Firstly the difficulty in English is in how many syllables it is made from, It think there are more than 8000 possible in English. This makes listening to English, and remembering what sounds to say while speaking quite difficult.

Secondly I think that a great part of the difficulty stems from the environment in which English is taught. It is very clean textbook stuff, and the tests and marking are treated like Maths. As far as speaking and conversation goes, it is nearly not studied at all. So the Japanese students end up with huge written vocabularies and complex understandings of English grammar, but can't hold a simple conversation in the real world. It is the sanitised nature of the English that they learned.

So basically I think that could to some degree carry on to other learners of English, the sounds and pronunciation, and the way in which they learn it.

Of course if the English course that they are taking is boring dry textbook stuff they aren't going to try anyway and will then have more troubles with the sounds and in turn hate it more and then study less etc etc etc.

And of course if you study something at school you are more inclined to complain about it being hard.

So I think that's all the reasons I can think of.

(Excuse any faulty grammar, I am having trouble in my head with being surrounded by Japanese and bad English, it makes it a little more difficult to think in natural English)

i think because we've tweaked it so freaking much :D
we turn the real word into slang, therefore the person trying to learn proper english & modern english at the same time is stuck having to learn a bunch of variations for one word!
exapmples:
got to: gotta
want to: wanna
you: ya
the: da
boy: boi
and then we come up with words that technically aren't even part of the english language!
examples:
shawty
ayo
niggaaaaaaaaa
sup
homie
ese
homes
vato
:D

The problem is phonetic pronunciation:

home is pronounced like comb and not like
come, etc. There are no set rules of pronunciation due to the many, many languages English is derived from, Latin, Greek, French, etc.. English is a hodge-podge with different rules and endless exceptions to the rules.

A lot of people?

So who might they be then?

English is a simple language. But add grammar rules,slang terms,one word that has a lot of different meanings,or a bunch of words that have the same meaning. This is what makes English such a hard language to learn. I am an American by birthright because my dad is in the air force but I was born in Germany and spoke German as my first language. So believe me when I say that English is not the easiest language in the world to learn.

Because English is essential in all the fields

I don't know, I got a C in English class my last quarter, I don't understand grammar at all, it is my weakest point, but I always get As on essays, so I guess my grammar is good, but I don't quite understand what I am doing. plurals arent hard, just add an "s", unless the word is like fish.

But maybe people think it's hard because we can't even speak our own language, and plus, we have lots of random words, and then about a million exceptions. we also have 3 letters in the alphabet that we don't need, c, x and q. they are just the sounds of other letters. So they can be confusing too. Its also hard to learn, because we have so much slang and stuff, so that might get confusing.

But, seriously, if native English speakers can barely speak the language... you can't expect foreigners to find it so easy.