By Luis Alejandro Blandón Ordóñez y Anthony Méndez Ruiz – English Club Students

During millions of years, human beings have communicated in different ways. Thanks to this, different languages were created, and they have developed in specific places and by the mobilization of people. These have spread throughout the Earth's territory. There have been more than 7000 different languages around the world, many of which have disappeared over time, others have managed to remain and merge to create new languages or dialects. According to Hammond (2018), the most widely spoken languages in the world by the number of native speakers in conjunction with non-native speakers is as follows: English, in the first place, has a total of 1121 million speakers; Mandarin, in second place, has 1107 million speakers; Hindi/Urdu, in third place, has a total of 697.4 million speakers, Spanish has a total of 512.9 million speakers. As we can see, the most widely spoken language in the world is English.

To enter into the context, all languages consist of a theoretical part that explains the form, the operation, and the order of the linguistic structure of a language. This is known as grammar, as well as the qualities of the characters that are used to be able to represent, in a graphical-visual, way what we want to be understood. On the other hand, there are other characteristics of which a language is composed. According to Nordquist (2019), "Phonetics is the branch of linguistics that deals with the sounds of speech and their production, combination, description and representation by means of written symbols.” (para. 1).

Many people believe that English is a difficult language to learn because of its grammar, its phonetics, the meaning of each word, as well as the creation of a new meaning by joining one word with another. Of course, if people begin to learn a new language, this will generally be observed from a positive perspective, but with time, this can become more difficult because the concepts begin to acquire much more detail. At this stage, the students must put much more of their effort to practice, and pay much attention to small details; enough time must be invested so that significant progress is made every day.

Although many languages are difficult to learn, there is also the possibility that they are much easier to learn than others, because of their similarities in alphanumeric characters, their similarity in the pronunciation or writing of a word in a new language compared to the mother tongue, and so on. Translations (2019) stresses that "English is part of the Indo-European family of languages and many of its words are derived from ancient Greek and Latin, which are also common in other languages spoken in Europe.” (para. 1) This means that the transformations and words that have been added over time to these languages have been common. For example, languages like French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and others are very similar. We can find other similarities: English and Spanish share some words like "color" and "color"; they also share the alphabet, and many times the grammatical structures. English language is a tool that is very easy to learn because its ease to write through alphanumeric characters. The most complicated, but not difficult to learn, are its grammatical structures although this language has fewer conjunctions in their verbs than other languages, such as Spanish.

The advantage and ease of learning English today are the technologies and knowledge of native speakers of this language. Although, at first, a language like English may seem a little difficult to learn and understand, we should always try to learn it because, in the current century, it is often necessary. It can either be of great use for job opportunities, to communicate with people from different backgrounds, as English is taken as the universal language, etc.

If learning this wonderful language becomes difficult, it is advisable to mix it with things that you like to do in your daily life, such as watching movies in English, listening to music, and singing it by reading the lyrics, learning new words or phrases every day, reading books that are written in English, using applications and games to be able to use a little more English.

 

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Bibliographic references:
  • Hammond, A. (2018, 21 November). Los idiomas más hablados del mundo. Recovered from https://blog.esl-idiomas.com/blog/aprender-idiomas/los-idiomas-mas-hablados-en-el-mundo/
  • Nordquist, R. (2019, 3 July). What Is Phonetics? Recovered from https://www.thoughtco.com/phonetics-definition-1691622
  • Translations, D. (2019, 6 August). Why Learning English is Difficult. Recovered from https://www.daytranslations.com/blog/learning-english-hard/