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WHY IS ENGLISH HARD TO LEARN FOR STUDENT?
Sarah Salasa Salsabilla
5029211062@mhs.its.ac.id
Intitut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS), Surabaya, Indonesia
Introduction
The popularity of English as the most widely used language around the world has spread across
various non-English speaking countries, in particular Asian countries and “becomes the key language in
Asia” (Fang, 2009, p. 1). English has developed to be the major foreign language in such countries as
Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and China and has gained in its own status
across Asia (Rintaningrum, 2016). It is also often discussed that learning and speaking using English is very
difficult for students or students, especially if they are not native speakers. What makes it difficult for
students to learn it? The sound, grammar, pronunciation, pronunciation, and structure of English as well as
when they listen to English speakers. Therefore, a solution is needed so that students and students can easily
understand English.
The sounds
One of the problems with English is that there are many sounds that are difficult. Voice intonation and
intonation can also cause problems and make English difficult to learn. This is because the meaning of a
sentence can change completely depending on the use of intonation in certain words. Keep in mind that
English contains 19 vowel sounds, 5 short vowels, 6 long vowels, 3 diphthongs, 2 'oo' sounds, 3 r-controlled
vowel sounds and 25 consonant sounds. The five short vowel sounds in English are a, e, i, o, and u. Short ‘a’
for example the words and, after, and as. Remember that these sounds are not necessarily indicative of
spelling. Note that the above words all contain the vowel whose sound they make but this is not always the
case. A word might sound as if it contains a certain vowel that is not there. Examples of words whose short
vowel sounds do not correspond with their spelling are busy and does. The six long vowel sounds in English
are a, e, i, o, u, and oo. long u (pronounced "yoo") for example the words of music and cute. Examples of
words whose long vowel sounds do not correspond with their spelling are they, try, fruit, and few. An r-
controlled vowel is a vowel whose sound is influenced by the r that comes before it. The three r-controlled
vowel sounds are ar, er, and or. The ‘er’ for example the words of her, bird, and fur. It is important that
students pay close attention to the er sound in words because it can be created by an r-controlled e, i, or u.
These vowels are all transformed into the same sound when an r is attached to the end of them. More
examples of this include better, first, and turn. The 18 consonant (b, d, k, f, g, h, j, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y, z)
sounds such as the ‘c’ sound is covered by k sounds in words like crust, crunch, and create. The blends that
are formed when two or three letters combine to create a distinct consonant-sound, often at the beginning of a
word. In a blend, the sounds from each original letter are still heard, they are just blended quickly and
smoothly together such as ‘dr’ for example the words of dry and drag. Diphthongs and other special sounds.
These are usually found in the middle of a word such as ‘ey’ in rain. The 7 digraph sounds (ch, th, sh, wh, ng,
nk). Point out to students that there are two sounds of ‘th’ such as this and thing, which is difficult because
most other languages don’t have that this sound to use as a reference.
English grammar
Learning English will be effective if we also understand the grammar. Grammar is the essential
thing in learning English. However, there are still many students have difficulties in understanding
grammar (Ameliani, 2019). Quirk (2000) said that grammar as complex system in which all parts of
grammar are mutually defining and there is no simple linear path, we can take in explaining one part in
terms of another. Grammar is another reason that English is so hard to learn. In addition to the numerous
grammar rules in English is the fact that it seems like there are exceptions to almost every rule there is.
Although many say that grammar is not necessary to focus on, it actually makes it more difficult for
students, especially when taking exams such as when entering university or doing TOEFL. The challenge
is also when they are still learning grammar but are ridiculed without being justified by others which
makes it more difficult for students to learn grammar, for example when they want permission to go to
the bathroom using "can I go to the bathroom?" which should be “may I go to the bathroom?” but the
teacher immediately quipped that his words were wrong. Too many grammar rules also make it difficult
for students.
English grammar has some strict rules. Don’t split infinitives. Don’t end a sentence with a
preposition. Be careful to use “who” as a subject pronoun and “whom” as an object pronoun (I had to
look that one up). A bunch of words sound the same but are spelled differently, or a bunch of words are
spelled the same but have different meanings, or a bunch of different words can have the similar
meanings but different connotations. Grammar might have been more productive in high school if the
focus had been on the basics, like when to say, “she and I” instead of “her and me.” That’s important.
Student that can speak English, sometimes get confused when arranging words and sentences
relate to the grammar. Students usually face the other difficulties such as when making sentence or
paragraph relate to the tenses. They get the difficulty in choosing the suitable verbs. Sometimes they do
not use the appropriate tenses, so it makes the sentence is meaningless.
Spelling
Trying to learn the spelling rules is another reason that it is so difficult to learn English. Again,
there are many spelling rules that must be followed, but there are also exceptions to most of those rules. A
good example is “I before E”, but people usually forget about the second part of that rule that says,
“except after C”. This is another reason why English is hard to learn.
Reading involves recognizing words, while spelling involves reproducing words. When you want
to do research on plants. Plant owners can choose what plants you want to research such as lavender,
youtan poluo, and schweinitz sunflower while all you have to do is point at the plant. But if the plant
owners had asked you to name each of the flowers yourself, instead of asking you to merely recognize the
plant, it would have been a more challenging task. Likewise, producing the spelling of a word is more
difficult than recognizing a word.
There are different ways of spelling the same sound. Because English is so full of borrowed
language, words that may sound alike when you say them aloud aren’t always spelt similarly. The words
‘tall’ and ‘shawl’ rhyme, for example, but the ‘aw’ sound is spelt differently in each. Some words have
totally different meanings but are spelt and pronounced the same. These words are called homonyms. The
word ‘ball’, for example, can refer to both a toy and to a formal dance.
Students spend much less time spelling than they do reading. Less practice time equals more
difficulty. Since sounds can be spelled in many ways, students need ample practice, along with
dependable spelling rules and patterns. In any given week, much more time is spent on teaching reading
than teaching spelling. Even worse, spelling has been dropped from the curriculum at many schools
across the nation, leaving kids to their own devices. That lack of practice combined with the added
complexity inherent in spelling adds up to many struggling spellers.
Pronunciation
It’s true that we have a lot of sounds, words, and phrases in English that are difficult to pronounce,
especially if your native language is very different. Students probably practiced a lot of English words
and phrases on their own, but when they’re putting them together, they ever gotten tongue-tied, or just
tired, when they’re trying to speak. That gets even more difficult when student feel embarrassed or
frustrated by their pronunciation, or when they feel others misunderstand them. There are factors affecting
the learning of pronunciation, they are as follows an accent, stress, intonation, rhythm, motivation and
exposure, attitude, instruction, age, personality, and mother tongue influence (Gilakjani et al., 2011).
Students need to be taught pronunciation, as all other aspects of language, in a communicative
method. Though communicative methods for teaching vocabulary, grammar and pragmatics have been
around for decades, there has been little development of a communicative method for pronunciation
teaching.
What students need are as follows:
1. Conversation
Teachers can help with strategies for how to initiate and maintain conversation with native
speakers outside the classroom, but ultimately this is something that learners must do themselves.
They can be greatly helped or hindered in this by the attitudes of the native speakers with whom they
interact. Native speakers who encourage conversation, and are not themselves awkward in cross
cultural communication, are one of the biggest boons a learner can have.
2. Drilling
Students also need considerable drilling and repetition, but this must directly exercise the
speech that they will use in real life. Old fashioned drilling of sounds and minimal pairs or more
modern practice with chants and tongue twisters is useful only in so far as it is directly related in
the student’s minds with the speech that they will use outside the classroom.
3. Expert guidance
Essentially what students need to do to pronounce a new language in a way that is easily
intelligible to its native speakers is to stop thinking about speech in terms of the categories of their
first language and start thinking about it in terms that are appropriate to the new language. If they
can do this, even though the exact realization of some of the sounds is likely to be a bit ‘foreign’,
their meaning will be evident. Where a student has difficulty in pronouncing specific sounds or
sound sequences of English, they need appropriate description of how to think about the sounds in
terms they can understand and ‘latch on to’. They need to be terms based on the way the learner
thinks about the sounds, not the way English speakers do.
4. Critical listening
Students need ample opportunity to listen to their own speech and that of fellow students in
comparison with that of native speakers, and to learn to distinguish the aspects of student
pronunciation that make comprehension difficult. Listening to your own speech as you are speaking
is very difficult. For these reasons it is essential for students and teachers to work with recorded
voices so that the speech they are discussing is external to both of them and can be referred to
objectively without distortion. Computer technology makes this type of recording and play back
extremely easy.
Structure
writing can be so hard for many of us. We might communicate perfectly when we talk, but when
we write, we stare at the screen for fifteen minutes trying to figure out what to say. Many students
especially struggle with sentence structure. Students need to know sentence structure basics like there are
four types of sentences such as simple sentences, compound sentences, complex sentences, and
compound-complex sentences. There is so many things that student needs to learn about the structure.
Listening to English Speakers
Listening, in most general terms, is simply described as the act of hearing (Rintaningrum, 2018).
Another reason why English is hard to learn is that you can’t always listen to native English speakers to
learn it. In most cases, simply listening to a native speaker of the language can be a big help however, in
English, this can make it more difficult. The reason for this is that too many people shorten the phrases
that they frequently use. This turns “going to” into “gonna” and “have to” into “hafta” (Doctors, 2021).
There are even native English speakers who don’t use these correctly because the only versions of the
words and phrases they have heard from their friends and family are the shortened one.
Conclusion
As students or students, we know that English is our second language. Learning a language that is
not our native language is indeed very difficult to understand quickly, such as how to pronounce,
structure, or grammar correctly. The solution is to find ways to understand English such as listening to
stories, watching movies, or songs in English and translating them in our native language as an additional
vocabulary. Pronunciation can be one of the most difficult parts for a language learner to master and one
of the least favorite topics for teachers to address in the classroom. Teachers can help students by
highlighting elements such as sounds, syllables, stress and intonation. Once the students understand the
functions of these elements, they will know what to focus on and can build upon this basic awareness.
Teachers can actively encourage the students’ actual production, build pronunciation awareness and
practice through classes gradually building skills in listening and speaking in both formal and informal
situations. Many researchers are done to investigate and observe what really happened in this case like
grammar is a big problem when students learn English as EFL learners. English usually signed by
grammar. It can be concluded that grammar, structure, spelling, pronunciation is an important one tools in
learning English.
References
Ameliani, A. N. (2019). Students ’ Difficulties in Grammar of Seventh Grade Junior High School 1 Magelang.
Conference of English Language and Literature (CELL).
Doctors, T. L. (2021). Why Is English Hard To Learn? https://thelanguagedoctors.org/is-english-hard-to-learn/
Gilakjani, A., Ahmadi, S., & Ahmadi, M. (2011). Why is Pronunciation So Difficult to Learn? English
Language Teaching, 4(3), 74–83. https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v4n3p74
Rintaningrum, R. (2018). The Asian EFL Journal Volume 20 , Issue 4. Asian EFL Journal, 20(4), 6–15.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Khadijah-Maming/publication/329625974_The_Asian_EFL_Journal
/links/5c12766c299bf139c756b1d3/The-Asian-EFL-Journal.pdf
Rintaningrum, R. (2016). I Find It Easy To Learn English When ………: Lecturers’ Perspective. In A.
Mukminin (Ed.), Proceeding The 2016 Jambi International Seminar On Education (JISE) (pp. 1–12).
Jambi University Press.
https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/60966406/JISE_OK_FULL_JAMBI_ARTICLE_B_RATNA_RIN
TANINGRUM-with-cover-page-v2.pdf?Expires=1631692548&Signature=VciMCY-
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