I teach foriegn students who come to us in Oxford because they want to go to Bristish universities. Most of my students are Russian sopeakers so I am aware of theor difficulties learning our language: no articles, only 3 tenses, word order, the use of это for questions and answers, etc. What problems do you have with our language?
I think the main problem is pronunciation. For me ,as Russian, the most difficult is to pronuonce "th"-"z" and "th"-"s". Speaking I always forget about the differance of these sounds.
What about grammer, the matter is that our languages have different logics. Russians and , for example, Spaniards get into the habit of inversion and reading like writing, but English is a language of order. There are cases in Russian, but a lot of prepositions, which English uses instead of them, make some problems,too.
But, let's be serious problems, learning English is much easier than other languages, because English is everywhere.
The most difficult thing for me is synonyms and their use. For example, we have one word in Russian, but in English you have three or more for the same thing.
One big problem for Arabic students is the First, Second, and Third Conditional.
Because in Arabic, the verb after "if" always in the past form.
The second problem I think would be the tenses (especially when it comes to choose between using past or present perfect). Also in Arabic there are only three tenses.
The third problem in my opinion is using "the" or dropping it (for example, it would be wrong to say the God but in Arabic it would be wrong not to use definite articles with that word).
The think is that most of Russians used to learning English at school, there is very bad language education.
What we usually do on English lessons? - well, read some easy text with the help of dictionary (there are a lot of unknowing worlds for most of the pupil). That is really irritating. So this is the end of the story. What we have: awful pronunciation, gramma, spelling, listening, everything, end hateness.
Hello Mr Millard
I have 3 problems for learning English:
1- Synonyms: I agree with Iris. There are a few words with similar meaning but not exactly the same. I dont know how to apply them in the sentence. For example: "watch", "see" and "look" are one of many examples of this kind of word group.
2- Complex structure: I'm accustomed with these structure and the rules which govern them.
3- Prepositions: There are many prepositions and I'm sometimes confused about applying them.
