English is one of the easiest human languages
Oh really?!?
[rolls up sleeves]
I live and work in France and a topic of discussion from time to time is about how awful English can be. I find it easy as I grew up speaking it (and by consequence I really can't get my head around all this gender crap, it's a book, it's a thing, it's not masculine or feminine, it's flattened bits of squashed tree flesh with ink splatter in various patterns that magically impart information).
English grammar is a mess riddled with exceptions to the rule.
English is a stress-timed language (that's how Shakespearean stuff works) which can be not only very confusing for somebody from a syllable-timed language, but there are plenty of arcane rules about where to put the stress. Contract is not the same word as Contract, for example.
To ram this home, say this sentence seven times, and each time put the emphasis on the next word along: I never said she stole my money. You've just said seven different things.
Pronunciation is a mess. It's not just that there are words that look identical that are completely different (like "wind" (that which blows) and "wind" (what you'd do to fishing line)), even certain letter sequences are batshit crazy, like "ough" (rough, thought, through, though, etc etc). On the flip side, "wine" and "whine" sound identical but are two completely different, unrelated, words.
And good luck explaining to a foreigner words like "choir". Really, English is a language crying out for a whole pile of accents so people can look at a word and know how to say it.
Speaking of nonsense words: Queue. That is all.
But this wouldn't help as, thanks to the widespread use of English and people's regional variations, there are hundreds of similar but notably different ways to say the same things. Hell, in England there can be a dozen entirely different accents in a hundred mile radius.
Oh, and this means that the same words can be pronounced in entirely unexpected and interesting ways because of these differences. My mother, born and raised in Maryland, found out the hard way that "Woking" and "Basingstoke" are not said like she expected (for non-Brits: woe-king and bay-zing-stow-k).
We shall politely gloss over the extra Us in English words like "colour", and the use of "s" for a "z" sound, like "realise", and the missing words in American English, such that "write me" is a complete sentence. But we shall take a moment to consider the startling array of sounds that an English speaker needs to master in other to speak good English. Nobody at work, and there's like a hundred and fifty people, are capable of saying my name correctly. It's just a bunch of sounds that literally don't exist in French. Related to this, a cow-orker was annoyed and decided to swear in English...but the best she could do was "oh sheet". Or should that be "oh sheat"?
Word order is always a fun one. While there are many variations in the world's languages about which way to put the subject, the object, and the verb; English has rules and is quite happy to break them because screw you.
English also has a long long long history of pillaging words and grammatical prefixes from wherever and whenever. This gives us complete bullshit like flammable and inflammable mean the same thing, but visible and invisible are complete opposites.
Lots of homophones to make things harder to understand. You might see the word "date". You'll need context to know whether it's a day, a romantic outing, some sort of fruit, or a vague concept of time (like carbon dated), or just referring to something old fashioned.
Sometimes one needs to use "that that" in a sentence and even though it is correct it just looks peculiar.
Adjectives... Oh my. In order to speak "correct" English, there's a big list of what adjective goes where in relation to the rest. It's why we might talk about the small round plastic mirror, but not the round plastic small mirror.
Mouse pluralises to mice, but "house" pluralises to "houses". It's regional (and possibly old fashioned) that roof pluralises to rooves instead of roofs.
If you feel proper chuffed that you make it this far, it doesn't matter whether you're pleased or annoyed. Chuffed is a contronym, so it'll happily mean whichever you want.
Oh, and one final thing about English. Always remember, it's i before e except after c... right? right?
.
I'm not familiar enough with languages to know what would be an easy language to learn, but it's not English. The only benefit that English has is that so many people speak so many variations (some more broken than others) that English speaking people generally understand even somewhat messed up English.
As opposed to French where I (living and working in Brittany) had the bizarre experience of watching my cow-orkers completely fail to understand a girl from Toulouse. Yes, her French sounded different enough that I noticed it was different, but it wasn't that different. So there's me, qui parle comme une vache espagnol, translating between the two. A bloody Brit interpreting a Frenchie for another Frenchie. What. The. Actual.....
I'll leave you with this: "tittynope" is a word. You're welcome.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
