What’s the hardest thing about learning English?

English spelling doesn't make sense to me at all. In my native language, Arabic, there is an explanation on why you'd use a certain spelling of a word in a sentence, words are usually spelled the way they're pronounced unless there is a specific reason. It's all based on rules, and while the rules are difficult to learn at least when you ask why a word is spelled that way there is a reason for it.
While in English... whats the point of silent letters?
Spelling that makes no sense, why is Conscience spelled with "Science" is the pronunciation is completely different? There are so many examples of really weird spelling that I feel are there for no reason, spelling is based not on understanding of the language but based on memorizing it.

Here is the lowdown on why spelling is o difficult in English. The language has always had a characteristic of absorbing words from other languages. During medieval times when British royalty was more French and German than Anglican (meaning British here), English was soaking up words from all the European languages plus Latin. There was no correct spelling of anything back then. Nobody cared.

Around the late 1600s and early 1700s (and I think that was the time frame), that changed. A group of school teachers all around England decided that they would codify the written language with specific rules of grammar and specific spellings. They called themselves the Inkpot Linguists.

These guys decided among themselves that the proper spelling of each word should be based upon its spelling in its original language. French, Old English, and Latin have different ways of spelling the same sounds, you see. In some cases, the Inkpot guys guessed wrong about the origin language of words. Basically, they screwed up everything.

About spelling, this take me back to r/bonappletea and r/ihadastroke...

Such great r/.

Tbh I am an English speaker and haha why is nothing pronounced how it reads? I'm a really bad speller. A really reaaaally bad speller (computers have saved my life) I often have to sound things out phonetically to spell them, which is a pain because my vocab has always been away ahead of my spelling. I just want things to follow rules.
Dave Gormen does a wonderful piece on this with Loughborough, how many different ways you can actually pronounce that because of the damn ough and if you follow the rules you can genuinely pronounce is Lowbrow (it's pronounced Luffbura). Other wonderful examples in Cirencester pronouced Sirencester, Towcester pronounced Toaster, Leicester pronounced Lesster, and Leominster (which I have been pronouncing as it reads all my life) is actually Lemstar. (Place names are a particular issue to me because I work at the post office). I just want things to follow rules I can spell out phonetically please.

• The rules in English language that apply but don't apply all the time. Like... I before E, except after C.... except for these 6000 words that don't follow that rule https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_words_not_following_the_I_before_E_except_after_C_rule1

• Acronyms. Specifically how half of them are pronounced as initials and the other half as words.

• Pluralizing or lack of pluralizing is a big issue I have, and then when I do remember I do it on words that don't need to be pluralized. Like "I love eating the shrimps"

• Word being used many times in a row but is still correct English.

• Words that are spell the same but don't mean the same thing. OR the word has a different word in Canadian/British English but uses the same word in American English. (Cheque is check in American English, but the word check is already used for other MULTIPLE meanings so WHY are you adding yet another?? I don't understand???)

• I pronounce everything wrong. Fk the word "Arkansas" Why does Americans hate using accents to help with how a word is pronounced?? I don't understand. The only word you seem okay with using it on is "pokémon" I mean you HAVE these letters but they are never used??? Why. Why? WHY????

Bonus points because I was taught Canadian English (broken because both my parents know English as a second language) and not American English (with Canadian English being closer to British English but NOT being British English) so I was VERY confused when I first got online and most of the people I talked to were American and telling me I was using English wrong with the issue being BOTH my English was broken AND I was using the wrong English =/

EDIT: Short forming / purposely using the wrong words to be cute or charming.

And not really the act, but the attitude towards it. Like its okay if a native English speaker writes a message like "I no u luv me 4 who I is" If I were to do something like that I get attacked for my bad English.

I am not a native English-speaker and have learned English from a very young age. To be honest, learning English is not too hard since I am able to ace most of the English tests in class. But when it comes to application, such as writing and speaking, I struggle so hard and make mistakes that I am not aware of it until someone points it out for me. It is probably the tense (past, present perfect, etc) giving me the hardest time since I don't know when to use which tense or not in some situations, especially when writing a story.

I've studied English for at least thirteen years and I'm currently majoring in English in university but I still don't understand prepositions. My language doesn't use prepositions so they just confuse me so much, especially if the preposition in English is different compared to what my language uses. For example in Finnish we'd say "in the television" instead of "on the television" and "walk on the sand" instead of "in the sand", so those confuse me a lot.

Pronunciation and spelling can also be tricky, especially with new words I've never seen/heard before. Since we pronounce everything like it's written and vice versa, the silent letters and several different ways to pronounce the same letter can be pretty confusing.

Also, sentence structure. Finnish is really flexible in the sentence structure; you can basically put any word at any place in the sentence and it still makes sense, sadly not the case in English. So sometimes I write in English but have a Finnish sentence structure, like just now as I was talking with my friend I wrote:
"The small lights work well to light the room but for taking pictures not very good." which would work in Finnish but sound awkward in English. Also in Finnish you don't necessarily need the personal pronoun in the sentence because you can see the person from the verb (minä syö n - I eat) so sometimes I forget the personal pronoun from my sentences in English.

Actually, yes. You do. They are just hardly used for whatever reason. (also probably less common in American English compared to Canadian English)

And that's why I said it makes no sense that you have them but never use them.

To me the hardest thing about learning English was that you pronounce the words differently than you write them. Now a lot of native English speakers asked what I am talking about, but listen, slavic languages pronounce letters differently, and we DON'T have silent letters.

For example you have the word "queue" which you pronounce simply "Q", but a Polish person will read ALL the letters in that word, so we'd say "Q-weh-weh". Because we never heard about silent letters in a word before.

English has a lot of nuances like that.
Don't let me start on how many times I confused W with V, because we don't have V in our alphabet either. Where I come from W/V are pronounced the same.
I simply couldn't see the difference between "never / newer", "lover / lower" etc

But right back at you you, because you guys have no idea what's the difference between ś/si/sz is or why we have 3 different Z's in our alphabet (Z, Ź, Ż) lol

Second hardest thing is pronounciation itself. Polish has a lot of words that have a variety of "sh" sounds in them, and some of them don't even exist in English. Polish is a very rough sounding language. Our tongue positioning while speaking is different than in English, so I feel like my tongue will knot while speaking English XD
It's like trying to talk to aliens or eldritch gods XD

Then there's accent. You guys pur emphasis on the syllabes in different places than Polish, same goes to sentences. And when done wrong, in every language, it's hard to recognize a word correctly.

o boy time for some of my favourite english language jokes

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and the following:

“Let’s face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren’t invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren’t sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

The last bit is a bit dishonest, though, as general knowledge explains these words easily: Eggplants because the first varieties to be commonly available in NA were the little egg-shaped ones; the name hamburger is coming from the city of Hamburg, pineapple because they look somewhat like pine cones, and apple used to be understood as a generic word for fruit, etc etc...

pronunciation. I still can't get some words right

As a native English speaker I just want to apologize to anyone trying to learn it for the high number of exceptions and outliers in our vocabulary when it comes to grammar rules (probably one of the hardest things to learn, even for native speakers)

It's what happens when you have a language that's in the Germanic language family being heavily influenced by a romance language