English was language designed terribly

[RicardoZ]

Every language has irregular verbs and grammar rules that don't always apply.

English is actually one of the easier languages to learn, though. Studies have shown that babies in English speaking countries begin talking at an earlier age because the language isn't so complicated.

[Lylandra]

to me, learning english was pretty straighforward, too. But it might be pretty easy for a german since many words basically are the same.

Latin was hard as hell (how many declinations and conjugations?!?!? and why no 3rd person pronouns?!) and besides the catholic priests no one learns to speak it properly anymore. But learning how to translate latin enabled me to understand written french and spanish to some degree, so yes, romanic languages are quite similar

For "mastery is tough in any language.
True. But be warned that most "native speakers" are NOT masters in their own language. Many use slang and some of the more "high-society" words from olden times (which get still taught in foreign schools) won't be used anymore. (Does anyone still know the word "Base" for female cousin? Or "Oheim" for uncle? A normal modern day German might confuse the first word with a chemical base and the second with "oh home" or something like that)
Even some tenses are used in written language only while many people will use basic/easy termas and tenses in dialogue

[Drithien]

English is one of the simplest languages in use in our days. How can someone have trouble with english, especially on a basic level, is beyond me, unless they have some kind of mental handicap.

The awful mistakes a lot of people make, like the infamous "your" instead of "you're", is in most cases just people being too lazy to learn properly, correct their mistakes, or worse just trying to seem cool. Native speakers "abusing" their own language, and an emerging culture that thrives on the use of abbreviations even when there is no rush, doesn't help things either.

German, japanese, greek, now these are languages that have quite some difficulty in learning how to properly communicate through their use. Learning proper english is just a matter of not being lazy.

[Eliot123]

Uh, no.

As languages go (and English is not my primary language, nor do I live anywhere near a country where it is), English is pretty easy.

[Tackhisis]

(and why no 3rd person pronouns?!)

All 3rd person personal pronouns in Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages are coming from demonstratives.

[Vulcanasm]

the English language was designed terribly. there is so many rules to the languages but then there are exceptions to those rules, exceptions to those exceptions.
SUGAR wtf why is it spelled like that.


sorry killed the title

The more widely spoken a language is, the more it evolves into a mish-mash of structures and grammatical constructs from different linguistic trees. The English language wasn't "designed", my friend. It was culled, cobbled, and in many cases stolen.

[Deleted]

Oh I think French is much worse, it's easy enough to speak and listen to... but as soon as you start to write... 16 different rules in where you use the 200 different rules. Then there's the issue with the way you say words (phonetic) and the way you write them don't look slightly similar. Figue is pronounced "fig", that's where I've had issues "e" in french is never pronounced for some reason.

Because it's more fun when you only pronounce certain letters and not the others ^^.
Also it makes the language flow better.

[Deleted]

English is a crazy language indeed. Can be fantastic for expressing yourself with though.

[Deleted]

I thought English was fairly easy.

I'm french and I learned Spanish at school, I've never had to "learn" english, always watched lots of tv shows/movies with french subtitles, then moved to english sub, then none at all.
Always felt natural, I don't really have to think about it, though I still do some dumb errors sometimes.

I feel sorry for all those people trying to learn french, with all those é à â ö and shit. And conjugaison, exceptions, er/ir/... verbs.
And I don't know why but I've never heard anyone speaking french with a decent pronunciation, it's always soooooo off. Speaking like some sort of 17th century King.

I thought Spanish was really similar to French too, so no that hard.

[Whidbey]

If you think English is put together strangely, try Irish Gaelic. I studied it for one week and when the letter O means 5-6 different things based on the inflection used, I gave up.