Some Difficulties that Mongolian Students Might Have Learning English

I can anticipate a few areas of difficulty that a Mongolian ESL student might have. To begin with, a Mongolian student learning English might find the rules of grammar challenging due to the drastic differences between Mongolian grammar and English grammar. Many theorists claim that Mongolian grammar is much easier to learn than English grammar. For starters, in Mongolian, “there are only three tenses (past, present, and future) as opposed to the past, present, future and conditional tenses of English” (www.koreanhistoryproject.org). This difference between the two languages could be a challenge for a Mongolian ESL student because it means that they would have to learn the conditional tense, which is complex and requires higher order thinking skills. Mongolian grammar is also absent of prepositions and articles, “making sentence structure much simpler than English” (www.koreanhistoryproject.org). Mongolian students are sure to struggle with the two foreign concepts of prepositions and articles because there are a lot of “rules” to learn, and almost as many exceptions to the rule that cause confusion. In my experience as an educator, these are the two areas that many ESL students find the most difficult to master.
Mongolian ESL students may also become confused by the subject-verb-object word order of English because Mongolian syntax reverses the order with subject-object-verb being correct. Mongolian students learning English may also have trouble with writing and spelling because they are required to learn a completely new alphabet, a new way of writing. Pronunciation may also be a challenge to Mongolians learning English because “pronunciation differs so radically from the Indo-European languages partly because some Mongolian words are very long” (www.koreanhistoryproject.org). The usage of double vowels is present in both Mongolian and English, but Mongolian ESL students may have difficulty pronouncing words with double vowels that require one “to pronounce the vowels as separate syllables” (www.koreanhistoryproject.org) as in words like cooperation, skiing, continuum, and radii. Mongolian students might be inclined to pronounce words like these with fewer syllables because when a Mongolian word has a double vowel, it means that the vowel is simply stressed, not separated into two syllables.
One final difficulty that may arise for a Mongolian student learning English relates to the differences in intonation between the two languages. Mongolians generally speak in an even tone without inflection. When speaking English, however, there are many instances that a person’s voice should rise or fall in pitch. It may be difficult for Mongolian ELLs to get accustomed to raising their pitch at the end of a question, as a result.