English-speaking children typically needed about three years to master the basics of reading and writing, whereas their counterparts in most European countries needed a year or less. [...] That’s bad news for English-speaking societies, which represent about 6 percent of the world’s population
That's also bad news for learners of English as a second language, who represent another perhaps 60% of the world.
I've been learning English since I was six, then went to a British university, completed my degree and now I live and work in the UK. My proficiency level would be easily rated at C1/C2 level - I am completely fluent in both reading and writing.
And yet, I still find words in English that I simply don't know how to pronounce. I can give them a try, but unless I've heard someone else say them, I have no idea. That's a huge problem with English and I know that a lot of people who learn English as a their second language struggle with it.
I'm a native English speaker (Australian) and I find myself looking at a dictionary on average 5 times a day. Probably because of this, and an amateur passion for linguistics, I have a broader depth of knowledge on word definitions and pronunciations than most people I communicate with.
It's certainly not uncommon for native English speakers to have no idea how to pronounce a whole bunch of English words because they don't use them, so you're not alone there.
I always tell people: read with a dictionary and understand the pronunciation key! Or use an app or web dictionary that has a 'play' button.
Having said all of that, I don't know if it's a huge problem - most people get by fine with the words they know, and domain-specific words tend to be ones you learn in the field.
> I still find words in English that I simply don't know how to pronounce. I can give them a try, but unless I've heard someone else say them, I have no idea.
...and even that isn't much of a problem if other people supply the correct pronunciation in a fun happy helpful way, instead of the sneering or sarcastic manner often used.
I'm a native English speaker who started watching movies and TV shows with the English subtitles turned on about 5 years ago, and in that time have found dozens of word pairs I thought were different, having only heard/spoken one word and read/written the other, but they were actually the same word. Just an idea.
I'm an English native and find there are few people I meet with as extensive a vocabulary as I have (but I don't move in academic circles or anything). However I find that there are words I know and use but pronounce differently to the norm, that's because they're words I've learnt through reading and never actually heard spoken by others.
Can't think of any just now - insouciance is a word I've never heard anyone else speak, but I think I pronounce that one correctly. Hopefully I've conveyed well enough what I mean without example. Actually Linux is an example - used it for years before I met another user and then heard Linus tell me how I'd pronounced it wrong, slightly different as it's a [foreign] name, I digress.
I have heard (from a Linguistics student) that it takes an adult native speaker of French / German / Spanish / Italian (European languages etc etc) about 4000 hours to reach basic competency in English, and the same going the other way.
Going from/to the European languages to/from Japanese or Chinese (etc etc) take about 8000 hours to reach basic competency.
That's because Indo-European languages are very similar to each other. You wouldn't be able to learn Finnish as quickly as you could learn Norwegian. The grammar is just too different for an English speaker.
Chinese grammar is pretty similar to English ex. tenses (which are much easier for an English speaker going to Chinese than a Chinese speaker going to English).
Tones are no big deal unless you think about them. Ever thought about your breathing? Tones are a bit like that. Just don't think about them, let the sentence flow.
Characters are the killer. Not hard, but slow and tedious. 2 per day... 5 per day... 10 per day... cram and 100 per day... but they're lost without constant reinforcement.
Then the thorn you were trying to ignore comes back, and idiomatic sentences (chengyu, based on 4 characters, 'long time no see' being of the form, or 'people mountain people sea' a super simple one) based on cultural or historical references come back, kick you to the curb again. Much as English idioms do.
And then speaking formally... different ball game. Pomp and circumstance rule.
But informal spoken Chinese is surprisingly easy to attain. Just get the accent down.
To expand on the similarity between Chinese and English: both Chinese and English are "analytic languages", which rely on word order more than inflection. English is not as analytic as Chinese, but more analytic than other European languages (je vais, tu vas, il va, nous allons, vous allez, ils vont).
That's also bad news for learners of English as a second language, who represent another perhaps 60% of the world.