For you, what are your top five most difficult parts of learning English, with number one being the most difficult part?
As a native speaker, it is easy to miss what the difficulties are for learners. In my experience as a journalist, teacher and British immigrant abroad, I think that the hardest aspects are:
1. Spelling
2. Idioms
3. The order of adjectives.
4. Verb to verb collocations
5. Present perfect (simple/continuous).
It would also be interesting to find out how you attempted to overcome these difficulties when learning.
Compared to Danish (my native language), English sometimes has a somewhat confusing amount of options when it comes to which preposition to use. An example of this is “disappointed at/by/in/with/over”. Why on earth do you need so many? In Danish were are perfectly happy with just using one preposition to cover all of these.
for me the phrasal verbs
I was expecting more than one student to mention phrasal verbs, but there is still plenty of time..
It does seem as though the present perfect is a real bugbear (students: bugbear means something that is really annoying).
In many languages this tense exists, but is seldom used. In others it does not exist.
Speaking as a learner of other languages, what I tend to find most tricky are the personal pronouns when they serve as the object of the sentence- but I suspect this is a very personal mental block.
