Why is learning English difficult for Iranian students?
Learning English is not only difficult for Iranian student but also for other people whose first language is not English. Some students have been learning English for more than 1 year. Every day they do something to improve their English, like reading a short dialog, or watching the news or a movie without subtitles, but they haven't got good English yet. I mean, with a little effort and a dictionary they can read short stories.
For this difficulty there are a lot of reasons some of which I am going to mention . First of all English is a crazy language to learn because it is so horribly irregular in its spelling, pronunciation and other parts, for example there is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth, beeth? The second is pronunciation, there are three problems with pronunciation that students in Iran often have: problems pronouncing groups of consonants, problems pronouncing certain vowels, and problems with the rhythm of English. In addition, there are smaller problems such as pronouncing TH sounds and the letter V with F
The third obstacle for learning English is that there is no environment that makes us familiar with the original language. In our country, it is quite difficult to find people who speak well in English. How can I learn a language that nobody around me speaks that language?
The difference between grammar and culture can be other factors for making this process difficult .What we have more difficulty with, is writing and speaking in English. Why exactly is that? It's because reading and listening are so called 'passive skills, while writing and speaking are active skills. This principle holds true in your native language too. When you watch TV or listen to a radio program in your native language, you probably understand 100% of what is being said. In other words, the majority of us spend much more time on listening and reading than on writing and speaking
In conclusion, I would say there are a lot of people who look for ways of improving their English, especially their pronunciation, intonation and accent.