Learners, what's the hardest part about Eng*ish?

Phrasal verbs are notoriously difficult to wrap your head around. Explaining to a new learner the difference between "Get it", "Get through it", "Get over it", "Get with it", "Get out" is rightfully very confusing.

Is English a curse word now?

For me it’s the perfect tenses. We don’t have equivalents to these in my language, so yeah

Answering as a native speaker ... The rules, many of which don't make sense and have exceptions. I struggle in this sub to answer learner's questions as to why is such-and-such the way and often times the best I can come up with is that it sounds better that way. That's not rule-based syntax. That's exposure and practice, and decades of it.

OP, I'm curious why you censored the word "English" in the post title.

I think it is a question sentence. For example, when I want to ask about something, should I use 'is' or 'do' as an auxiliary verb? In this case, I have to think of the sentence in normal word order first, and then put 'is' or 'do' in front.

As an ESL teacher, the hardest part of English is making it makes sense lol. What's the purpose of silent letters like in island, and knife. Why do homophones exist, why can't we just use different spelling. Why is there the need for regular/irregular verbs. Why do we need to use treat "I" as plural pronoun instead of singular, etc. Most of the time, I'd spend more time explaining the reasonings instead of the grammatical purpose lol.

Absolutely the pronunciation, especially of the vowel sounds.

For me it is the pace of the language. It is much faster than my mother language

Remembering what the grammatical concepts are called lol. I'm fluent (and have been for a long time) but I can't tell which tense a sentence is in most of the time.

As a Mandarin speaker, I think the most difficult part definitely is how to compose a question, especially in a passive way. For example, when I want to ask my friend, ‘Is the class taught in English?’, I always double-check in my mind whether I should use ‘do’ or ‘is’.

For me, I am a English learner, It’s the linking sounds. All English speakers should pronounce each word clearly and separately for English biginer.

I’ve heard that learning the differences between ‘through,’ ‘tough,’ ‘thorough,’ ‘thought,’ and ‘though’ is a nightmare when it comes to pronunciation.

Why censor English?

Grammar

Spelling is hell. If you've read a new word, you never know how to pronounce it properly until you've heard it at least once. "What are you going to do" becomes "whachugonnado" when it's said fast. In order to use tag questions, you have to keep in mind the entire sentence and say it fast enough. For example: "You wouldn't [insert 10 more words], would you?" (Damn, by the moment I've said all those 10 words, I'll forget what verb I started with in the first place)

In my opinion, preposition and phrasal verbs. In my native language there are only 2 or 3 prepositions to talk about place , objects , person or anything. In English, I guess there are more than 10 which a little bit challenging to get used to. Phrasal verbs are confusing too.

Why the fuck did you text it like it was a cuss word

After you’ve learned everything there is to learn and some more, friggin’ articles will mess you up, if your language doesn’t have this linguistic category.

Prepositions

I have to imagine it’s all the gendered nouns. Most people don’t think English has any because they’re so subtle

I'm pretty advanced and this isn't an issue for me anymore, but I feel like irregular verbs suck ass. Also I suck at understanding Past Perfect, Past Perfect Continious and Future Perfect + Future Perfect Continious. I barely use them, and when I do use them I think I'm doing everything correctly, but the pure existance of these tenses pisses me off. I definitely have to stop for a second and think what tense I want to use exactly. In my language, we don't have the concept of the Perfect tense, we have three tenses and that's it.

As a native, the only thing I ever struggle with some of the irregular verbs, e.g absorption -> absorb

Speaking haha

The exceptions and pronunciation, since many words don't sound the way they're spelled

A second pain point that I see a lot of learner run into are strong verbs. There's really nothing you can do except memorize the patterns. Swim-Swam-Swum, Write-Wrote-Written, Drink-Drank-Drunk, Speak-Spoke-Spoken, Eat-Ate-Eaten etc. etc.

Nouns conjugated as verbs? When is that correct, when is it bad style, when is it just wrong? 🙂 Singing is a gift 🙂 You have a gift for singing 🙂 You are a gifted singer 🙂 You are gifted with singing ability 😐 Nature has gifted you with singing ability 😟 Your mom gifted you her singing ability 😖 Please, God, gift me the ability to sing