How is English Different than Your Native Language

[tulosai]

For foreign speakers what are the biggest differences to you between English and your native language? Are the sounds different? Is the alphabet different? Are some points of grammar different?

[Czarownica]

It sounds very different from Polish. It has some letters we don't use (x and v), but it misses a lot of our letters, too (ó, ż, ź, ł, ę, ą). The grammar is definitely easier (of course, for native Polish speakers Polish grammar is not difficult anyway), most notably the fact that it's so close to having no cases; we have 7 cases in Polish.

Also, Polish is a gendered language, unlike English. The nouns all have their gender and also if I wanted to say "I've done something" in English, then it doesn't disclose my gender. In Polish, however, it'd be "Zrobiłam coś" and it does demonstrate that I'm a woman; a man would say "Zrobiłem coś".

There are probably many more things that I forgot to include

[Eudora13]

My native/mother tongue is Bengali which is nothing like English at all. They have their origins from very different roots as far as I know. But both these come to me naturally since i was put into an Anglo school from when I could just about talk, and my native language was picked up from my parents/family. Sadly, I cant read and write too well in it (Bengali), which is not the case with English. Yeah, I really find that rather sad...

[Beverly]

Indonesia uses the same written as English ,the most confusing part for me was the A E I . Indonesia A E I ,are a lot like the Hawaiian I'd say. Indonesia pronounce 'i' the same way English pronounces its 'e' .Another thing is the grammar. Indo doesn't quite have Grammar so that was a new thing for me when I first learnt English. As for my mother tongue ,the Chinese dialect really doesn't have any..written language? I dunno,since We grew up in Indo,we write in Indo. My parents write in Mandarin.

[BWL]

My native language is essentially a southern dialect of Chinese. It is usually not written, standard Mandarin being used instead, although you could write it down in Chinese characters if you wanted to as Chinese characters do not represent pronunciation.

Being a Chinese dialect, it has no articles, no gender even in pronouns, no singular and plural distinction, no cases, no verb inflections of any kind and therefore no irregular verbs since all words have only one form anyway!

It does have between 6-7 tones per syllable and this makes it extremely hard for foreigners to learn. My dialect also has a unique property that exists to a very limited extent in Mandarin: tone sandhi. What this means is that the tone of a word is not fixed and changes when it is part of a phrase: imagine if "fire" was pronounced with a different tone when it is spoken aloud alone and a different tone when it is part of a phrase like "fire hydrant".  This means that anyone who learns it has to not only memorise citation tones for every word, but also the sandhi or transformed tone when it is used in a phrase! Not many Chinese from other parts of China can learn to speak it properly too!

[SpiralArchitect]

My native language is Hindi and is completely different from English, to the point that their scripts are different. While English has indeed incorporated a few Hindi words in recent times, a person with an English background will find more difficulty in learning Hindi than something like German or French.

From the point of view of conversation, Hindi words can be pretty tricky to pronounce properly for non-native speakers. The British actually renamed a lot of Indian towns during colonial times because they couldn't pronounce the names properly.

[pcgamer]

My native language is Hindi and it's nowhere near English. Not even one bit. It sounds different.

[Topcho]

I join the club  My language is quite different. Starting with the fact that we use anothe alphabet, and some sounds are missing, others are present. I still can't pronounce perfectly "th" so I will have to live with this ,lol. We have genders for each noun, and quite often every other word - adjectives and the conjugation of verbs - changes accordingly. The articles also depend of the gender and are attatched to the end of the word - and if can be different for words in masculine depending if it's the subject un the sentence. But on the other hand, we don't have a real infinitive. All of these can lead to many missing "to" and "a"-s.

[RomanAnthonysMama]

English is my native language, but my grandmother and mother speak Spanish. They say Spanish is easier because English has so many different meanings for the same words. We also have so many grammatical rules and regulations.

[kitkat0124]

English and my native language are using the same alphabet. There are words that can be pronounced similarly with same meaning but different in spelling. There are also some words in english that don't have a translation in our langauge so we use the english version. I guess, I can't really say it's different but not I can't hardly say similar too.

[karmel]

I believe there is a difference between the basic sentence patterns of English and my native language, Filipino (Tagalog). In English, we usually start with the subject followed by the verb: I will go to the mall. We can also use the same pattern in Filipino but it doesn't sound natural: Ako (I) ay pupunta (will go) sa mall. What's common in our daily conversations is the verb-subject pattern: Pupunta ako sa mall, when translated literally, becomes Will go I to the mall.

Also, there is a difference in the pluralization of nouns. In English, we add -s/-es or change the spelling of the word. In Filipino, we add mga before the noun.

I'm not exactly a language expert but these are my observations. I don't mind being corrected . I think there are still a lot of other differences.

[lizbeth19hph]

English is far more different from my mother tongue when it comes to words but some characters in the alphabet are the same, the only difference is the sound or the pronunciation. Grammar rules is also different.

[Rosa]

The English language is just slightly different from my native language, Jamaican Creole. Jamaican Creole is a combination of different languages, including English so most words sound alike or remain the same. One example is water in English is wata in Jamaican Creole.

[leahcim132]

Pretty different. My native language is in French and in English, there is no feminine or masculine words. So when writing in English, it's strange because I am so used to associating the words to the verb, etc...

[Kandikkal]

The first and foremost difference will be the pronunciation. In my mother tongue, which is Malayalam, you speak like what you have written. But in English, most of the time the pronunciation is way different than the words written. It was very difficult for me to understand the different pronunciation of different words. The dictionary helped me a lot in this situation.

[secretgoldfish]

My native language is Portuguesa and one of the biggest differnces are the verbs. In english with most verbs you use the same word for almsot every person, with the exception of she/he/it. In my language we have different contractions of the verb for every person.