QuestionGuy
For those that learned English as a second language, What was your biggest challenge?
For those that learned English as a second language, What was your biggest challenge?
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Which country to order chips / fries.
I want some fried potato sticks, give me them POMMES!
The punctuation. Since I have no idea where to put commas I just leave them out.
So many bad native speakers! It took me a while to figure out why I didn’t learn “should of“ in school
Ear
Bear
Beard
The silent letters in words
When talking of an action done in the past, when you use “did” the verb that follows needs to be in present tense.
So not “he did went”, but “he did GO”, for example.
I know native speakers do that naturally, and when you get the language it makes sense, since the word “did” already indicates past tense, but that used to confuse me all the time when I was a kid.
Also the spelling can seem completely random at times.
Subject-verb agreement, still confuses me sometimes.
Speaking idk why but i just cant talk as fast as i think or even write
Pronunciation
Letters, that sounds likeother letters
at the beginning the articles (the, a, an), people in my country tend to forget them a lot since we have nothing similar in my language
The “th” sound. I cant get it right. It always sound like “s”
People from my country tend to not understand when to use Present perfect tense and when to use Past simple, cuz it translates the same to our language
words and oral English，im preparing for IELTS，it’s just sooo hard.
Time tenses
Spelling definitely
Pronouncing words that have groups of letters that can be read in a number of different ways, and you just have to know which one applies in each case.
And disguising my accent so people can’t immediately tell where I’m from. My aim was to lose it entirely but it’s become clear to me that that ain’t happening…
“The” Article. I have been told that I often forget it in my writings.
discrimination and ridicule.
Still affected by this shit. Funny thing is, kids with migrant parents are the fucking WORSE!!!
Commas.
If clauses…fuck that shit
Sentences where you got a variation of “th” sounds and normal “t” or “d” or others. I find “th” to be difficult to speak and when you have multiple “th” sounds in one sentence i tend to fall over them or say the typical german “ze” instead
‘These’ vs. ‘Those’
I’m top level now proficiency wise but still have no idea when I have to decide between them.
Why do you get ‘in’ the car, but you get ‘on’ the bus? Using in, on, at always confuses me
Pronunciation. English-speakers don’t realize this, but English has exactly 0 (zero) rules about how things should be pronounced.
My native language is phonetic. That means you just need to learn how to pronounce 30 letters, and you can instantly read my native language. You will have 0 idea what you’re reading, but you can read it out loud with minimal problems. In English, you need to learn how to pronounce around 1000 words before you can start reading something that’s written in English.
It’s completely unintuitive. Humans naturally expect syllables to be pronounced the same regardless of the word, but the English language is packed full of heteronyms. Read, read, tear, tear, lead, lead, object, object.
In my native language, these would all be homonyms (spelled the same, pronounced the same, different meanings).
The whole football/soccer or chips/fries confusion 😭
Nothing