I think the biggest problem for foreign learners isn’t irregulars, but the preposition in phrasal verbs—the way say “give up”, “give in”, “give out” or “get up”, “get away”, “get about” etc. all mean different things that can’t just be deduced by what you know about the verb or the preposition alone.
These are indeed very difficult, but in my experience (and also from my observations of other fluent non-native English speakers), by far the hardest problem is the definite article. With a lot of practice and experience, you learn to use it with perhaps 90% or 95% accuracy, but then your improvement stagnates and it’s impossible to ever get it 100% right like a native speaker.
Possible; most non-native spakers I know in “real life” are French, Chinese or German, and articles in French and German are close enough to English. If, as your name suggests, you know more people speaking Slavic languages, you might get a different impression. From Wikipedia (featuring a nice map!):
Linguists believe the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, Proto Indo-European, did not have articles. Most of the languages in this family do not have definite or indefinite articles; there is no article in Latin, Sanskrit, Persian, nor in some modern Indo-European languages, such as the Baltic languages and most Slavic languages.
That fits with my impression that the most tell-tale sign of a Russian writing English is the lack of articles.
(I agree with your “100% is nearly impossible” bit; the equivalent in French would be the use of grammatical gender; my wife’s been living in France since she was 11 (she’s 30 now), and still makes mistakes a French eight-year-old wouldn’t make).
Emile:
These are indeed very difficult, but in my experience (and also from my observations of other fluent non-native English speakers), by far the hardest problem is the definite article. With a lot of practice and experience, you learn to use it with perhaps 90% or 95% accuracy, but then your improvement stagnates and it’s impossible to ever get it 100% right like a native speaker.
Possible; most non-native spakers I know in “real life” are French, Chinese or German, and articles in French and German are close enough to English. If, as your name suggests, you know more people speaking Slavic languages, you might get a different impression. From Wikipedia (featuring a nice map!):
That fits with my impression that the most tell-tale sign of a Russian writing English is the lack of articles.
(I agree with your “100% is nearly impossible” bit; the equivalent in French would be the use of grammatical gender; my wife’s been living in France since she was 11 (she’s 30 now), and still makes mistakes a French eight-year-old wouldn’t make).