Seriously, some of the dumbest people in the world speak it. It takes no skill to speak. Whereas other languages such as Русский, Español, Tiếng Việt, 日本語, 汉语, 한국어 and several others require skill. I'm sick of hearing this comment about how English is one of the most difficult languages in the world. It's the easiest. Anglophones are also some of the most ignorant and obnoxious people in the world.
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Anonymous2006-12-18 15:21
>I'm sick of hearing this comment about how English is one of the most difficult languages in the world.
I wouldn't use the word "comment" in this context. gb2/elementary school/
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Anonymous2006-12-18 15:36
This post doesn't mean to say that there aren't harder languages than English, but I disagree that it is the very easiest of all. It depends how you look at it. You talk about speaking. English has many many times more different sounds than a language like Japanese, but it'd be the other way around when talking about writing it. Does "anglophones" mean people who were born with English as their primary language? In that case we are not only talking about England, Canada, America, Australia etc., many people in Asia are also anglophones but do not posess those two traits you just described there. To be dumb and to be born with a certain language is different. Many African languages are really hard, as they have the infamous click sounds. Could you honestly say those are really intelligent and well informed? No offense meant, I just beg to differ.
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Anonymous2006-12-18 15:43
>>1
If English is so easy, then why are Japanese people so crappy at it?
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Anonymous2006-12-18 16:51
because japanese people are inferior!
cant do the shit right
el idioma del mono loco descubridor de las torres gemeleas
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Anonymous2006-12-19 15:35
I can only speak English and Japanese, but here's my thoughts on this.
ANY language is easy to speak if you're in an environment where you use it on a daily basis. Using natural sentences, on the other hand, takes far longer. This is especially true of a language like English that has lots of odd grammar and small connecting words. English pronunciation is also very difficult when compared to other languages like Japanese, thus accents will persist much longer with people who've learn English as a second language unless their native language is one with many of the same vowel and consonant sounds.
Writing English is also only slightly easier than Japanese, as while Japanese people have kanji to remember English speakers must remember how to spell. Unless you are a linguist who understands word origins and morphology, kanji are only slightly more arbitrary than the spellings of many English words.
Reading-wise Japanese is harder than English because you can sound out an unknown word but you cannot do the same of an unknown kanji. Although, it should be noted that unless you know the meaning of the word, being able to sound it out is still of no use.
The reason so many people can speak English in the world is that it is spoken in many places in the world. This has nothing to do with how "easy" it is. Japanese people cannot speak English because, although they all "study" it in grade school, the English education system is flawed and basically consists of memorizing a series of vocabulary words and preset sentences to regurgitate for a test, after which they will be soon forgotten. "English" class is taught almost entirely in Japanese, and there is little, or more often absolutely no actual "speaking" done by the students. A Japanese person who's spent half a year in the US will be able to speak more English than a Japanese person who's studied since they were in elementary school.
el idioma del demente primitivo descubridor del fuego
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Anonymous2006-12-19 19:00
"Japanese people cannot speak English because, although they all "study" it in grade school, the English education system is flawed and basically consists of memorizing a series of vocabulary words and preset sentences to regurgitate for a test, after which they will be soon forgotten. "English" class is taught almost entirely in Japanese, and there is little, or more often absolutely no actual "speaking" done by the students. A Japanese person who's spent half a year in the US will be able to speak more English than a Japanese person who's studied since they were in elementary school." >>21
Hmm. This explains why "Engrish" is so abundant in Japan....also, the method of learning Japanese (the written version, anyhow) is also based on memorization, because of the garbled writing system (memorization-oriented Chinese writing, along with more phonetics-compatible kana - which might ALSO be memorized due to the older emphasis on kanji), and this older memorization focus may have heavily influenced the learning of English.
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Anonymous2006-12-20 4:29
>>24
Yes, learning to write in Japanese is basically a process of memorizing characters and then using them a lot so the writing process for each character sticks in your head. Because of computers, there are many people who forget how to write most kanji once they get to the point where most of their reports and whatnot can be written on the computer. It's kind of like English speakers forgetting how to spell because they rely on spellcheck.
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Anonymous2006-12-24 7:48
las 3 palabras mas graciosas de la tierra:
1- IMEEJIS
2- troleo
3- vikingo
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Anonymous2006-12-25 7:49
"You need three months to learn English, three years to learn French and 30 years to learn German."
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Anonymous2006-12-25 10:59
what about japanese?
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Anonymous2006-12-25 14:27
>>28
80 years +
if not you will always sound like a 5 years old little girl to japaneses
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Anonymous2006-12-26 16:35
So many otaku Americans go on quests to Japanese and they all suck at speaking it.
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Anonymous2006-12-26 18:05
You could also try to learn dutch, it has 525 prepositions and 4400 combinations with verbs to use them. It will take you some time before you have mastered them all...
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Anonymous2006-12-26 21:34
Danish. One of the hardest.
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Anonymous2006-12-27 1:39
>>31
Not to mention that it is DAMN hard to pronounce... shit man... shit...
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Anonymous2006-12-27 16:12
Hungarian is actually the hardest. The British did a study.
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Anonymous2006-12-28 0:42
I would like to think that welsh is quite difficult.
I don't see anyone talking about Swahili's eleven gender classes or the click languages at all. How about the Chinese tonal system? Or the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds in Thai that many Germanic and Romantic language speakers can't tell the difference between?
Ffs, languages are only "easier" to learn based on what the speaker's first language is.
Also, which English are we talking about?
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Anonymous2006-12-29 4:09
Ffs, languages are only "easier" to learn based on what the speaker's first language is.
YOU ARE RIGHT
WOW
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Anonymous2006-12-29 15:51
QUENYA IS THE BEST LANGUAGE GUYS
STOP FIGHTING ALREADY
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Anonymous2006-12-29 16:15
English was invented by chipmonks
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Anonymous2006-12-29 17:19
English is an easy language to speak? What a laughable thought. I wish I could properly clarify what I'm thinking. The use of auxillary verbs, and no clear reasoning as to when to use each form. Examples:
He reads occasionally. He is reading the book. Does he read occasionally? Is he reading the book?
If you speak English as your first language, or you learned it as a young child, that may seem quite natural to you. However, if English isn't your first language, it's quite confusing.
Why does English have so many ways to pronounce simple words? Rough, through, though. The ough part sounds different in each case. How about their, there and they're? Your and you're? Those are mistakes many people make.
English has many irregular verbs as well. The past perfect tense is done so many ways it's confusing.
There are many other things. The point is, English isn't a simple language. However, it's not the hardest langauge to learn. Any language is "easy" to learn provided you're exposed to it when you're younger than 6 or so.
Personally, I think the romantic languages are relatively simple, however, this is because of personal bias. If I was raised with Japanese, I suppose I'd consider Chinese or Korean to be simple compared to the romantic languages or Arabic.
Wow, an ignorant white person who thinks Korean, Chinese, and Japanese are similar.
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Anonymous2006-12-30 6:17
>> about their, there and they're? Your and you're? Those are mistakes many people make.
If you're properly taught the differences among these words then they aren't hard to understand at all. People constantly mistake them for one another because they don't pay enough attention when they're taught the differences.
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Anonymous2006-12-30 8:03
what you say someone set us up the bomb main screen turn on all your base are belong to us - Zero Wing for Nintendo. I think that proves Moonspeakers have trouble with it.
Ok, perhaps I was wrong. But are they not in the same language group, like how English, French, Spanish, German and such are quite similar?
And relatively speaking, they may not be similar when compared to each other. However, when you compare them to languages on a broader base, one might notice more similarities between them, however small.
Yes, I know that if one is properly taught the differences, one will know how to use them the correct way. However, apparently many people aren't taught the correct way or they didn't pay enough attention. It's because those words are so phonetically similar that the confusion arises in the first place.
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Anonymous2006-12-31 9:59
>>49 Actually, English is more similar to German and Dutch, because it's a Germanic language. French and Spanish are latin languages, which is one of the reasons why French people generally suck at English. English is similar to French in terms of vocabulary (because of the French invasion of the British island in 1066), but when you look at the grammar, it's quite different.
As for the subject, English is by no means the hardest language in the world. It can be hard if you didn't grow up hearing it, because when you're young, it's very easy to pick up nearly any language. It only gets more difficult after that. For example, my mother tongue is Dutch, but by watching Cartoon Network a lot, I learned English quite easily.
English can be hard in the sense that its grammatical rules have a lot of exceptions. Other languages, however, such as Dutch, pretty much have no grammatical rules. Almost every other verb is conjugated in a different way, which can really confuse people who want to learn this language when they're over 10 years old. We find it rather easy, because we grew up hearing it everywhere. There are a lot of other things, but I think the idea's clear by now.
Maybe I'm just weird for finding English and French (and other romantic languages) to be relatively similar grammatically. Most often they're all svo order, but I guess there are exceptions (object pronouns in the romantic languages). They all have the same subject pronouns. Compare that to Arabic, which has not just subject pronouns for single person, two people, and three or more people, but also different subject pronouns depending on case (well, I'm not sure, I don't know exactly how it works).
When it comes to conjugation, though, the romantic languages and English are very different.
So Dutch has (nearly) no grammatical rules? Sounds a bit scary to me.
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Anonymous2007-01-01 0:43
WHY DON'T YOU TRY SPEAKING ELFISH AND TELL ME HOW YOU LIKE IT, YOU DUMB FUCK!
No, you misunderstood. With Dutch verbs you can't just use the form you like, but there is no global system for verbs. Let's just say we have a rule-set, but there are tons of exceptions. It's also unclear when to use accents for example, so our language is just quite illogical.
>English is an easy language to speak? What a laughable >thought. I wish I could properly clarify what I'm thinking. >The use of auxillary verbs, and no clear reasoning as to when >to use each form. Examples:
He reads occasionally. <-- He reads from time to time. This is always the case. (No, he doesn't read all the time, but you can answer the question "Does he read occassionally" with the same answer, no matter when you ask it).
He is reading the book. <-- He is doing it at this moment only. You don't know anything whether he does this all the time, or at occassions; you only know that he performs this action at this moment.
Does he read occasionally? Is he reading the book? <--- Same story.
I think it's pretty fucking clear when to use them alright.
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Anonymous2007-01-01 14:28
>French and Spanish are latin languages, which is one of the reasons why French people generally suck at English.
you got anything to back that up?
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Anonymous2007-01-02 6:12
Well, he is correct- in Europe at least, statistically people who come from countries which speak the 'Romance' languages have poorer English than those who come from the germanic family. How much of this is due to education etc is debatable, but I will say one thing: I was learning Swedish for a while, and it is shockingly similar to English.
English isn't hard. I'm Dutch, I picked it up very fast, and many I know did too.
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Anonymous2007-01-03 14:48
I'm trilingual, acquiring English in elementry school, Hebrew and Russian being mother tongues.
I would say that learning-wise, English is in the middle between the other two. One of the ways to objectively think of the difficulty of a specific language is asking oneself: how many exceptions to rules are there?
English has its fair amount; Hebrew - almost none (since it wasn't spoken for nearly two millenia and only recently artificially revived); Russian - a fuckton. In fact, that's one of the reasons it's considered to be the 3rd hardest language to learn (after Chinese and Japanese).
In conclusion, saying such things about English is simply not accurate. How many languages do you know? 2? 4? To accurately answer such a thing one would need to be a major polyglot, with at least 8 languages of different kinds (one asian, one Indo- european, one middle- eastern etc). I direct you to the University nearest to you, linguistics dept.
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Anonymous2007-01-05 14:34
DERE ER FITTER!
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Anonymous2007-01-06 16:37
I think one of the factors that makes English seem difficult is it's flexability. You can ignore grammar and spelling (see ebonics), make up new words on the fly, combine existing words, and although English is a low-context language you can use it as if it were high-context, and another native-English speaker will usually be able to understand you. However, a non-native speaker of English may have a great deal of difficulty understanding what you just said.
On the flip side, if you never learn proper English and really only learn the bastardized version that most people speak anyway, learning the proper way can be very difficult.
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Anonymous2007-01-08 1:10
>>59
I'm trilingual, acquiring English in elementry school, Hebrew and Russian being mother tongues.
Dutch is about the closest language to English... Frisian is closer (all being west germanic languages and Saxon(English) was very very similar to Frankish(Dutch)) So it's not a very good argument that dutch speakers can learn English pretty quick...
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Anonymous2007-01-09 9:32
The closest language to English I've seen is Scots. Look it up sometime.
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Anonymous2007-01-09 20:51
English is by no means easy.
Some words are spoken the same but spelled differently. Some words are spelled the same but mean different things. Verb conjugation is a miserable little pile of vowel changes. And speaking of vowels, they often overlap into each other regarding how you pronounce them. Let's not forget that we have the widest vocabulary out of any other language. But that's what happens when make a hodgepodge of Latin, Germanic, French, and Greek languages.
Be thankful we don't have genders for our nouns.
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Anonymous2007-01-09 22:51
A minute to learn, a lifetime to master.
It's pretty easy to speak/write BAD English, hell almost everyone is doing it! Ever spoken to a telemarketer from India? They might have the grammar and words figured out, but their pronunciation...
Then there are those for whom the situation is the opposite.
Not too many get it both right though.
I'll stick to speaking/writing broken English for now :)
English. The sheer vocabulary and flexibility lets you express things in subtle ways that other languages can't.
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Anonymous2007-01-10 21:19
English is very hard unless you've grown up in the western world. Then it really isn't.
Agree w/ 71.
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Anonymous2007-01-11 3:24
The problem with English is that spoken English has "evolved" much quicker than written English. There's many rules and exceptions that aren't written out. Many words have a unique pronunciation, whereas in many Asian languages it's opposite. In Japanese, once you learn the 46 or so syllables, you know how to speak it. No exceptions there. The 2000+ daily kanji is a completely different story though.
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Anonymous2007-01-11 8:32
Just because there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet doesn't mean that it's easier to learn than other languages which have hundreds of characters. There are so many different exceptions and whatnot which other languages don't have. "I before E, except after C, or in neighbor, reign, or weigh..."
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Anonymous2007-01-11 9:50
English when it comes to how it's written is memorizing every single word. There's no "sound it out" in English.
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Anonymous2007-01-11 16:10
Dutchies can't pronounce it. It sounds like they just came out of the center for the mentally challenged.
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Anonymous2007-01-11 16:58
what say you me come fomr hong kong cant understend
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Anonymous2007-01-12 1:31
Is English the only language that has spelling bees?
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Anonymous2007-01-12 10:06
Finnish is the hardest language. Period.
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Anonymous2007-01-12 22:58
Very hard - English, Russian, Arabic
Hard - French, Germany, Finnish
Middle - Italian, Spanish
Easy - Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese
Very easy - Japanese, Korean, Indonesian
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Anonymous2007-01-13 1:54
Oh yeah, Americans are the ONLY idiots in the world *rolls eyes*
Seriousely. It's literally impossible for anyone who can speak "Human" to speak dog. However, there's this article that talks about humans that has been brought up by animals. These people can speak the animals language and speak. However, they cannot learn any human languages. It's very strange.
says who? woof woof rawr ruff woof growl bark! "If you do not chase your tail, you may end up where your master is heading."
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Anonymous2007-01-23 15:45
Animals have limited forms of communications, but most aren't that complex. Of note is whales, dolphins and elephants. Bees are widely known to communicate by dancing. Dogs, as far as I know, have limited communication means, but they use body language more than vocalized things. If I remember correctly, groundhogs or prairie dogs or meerkats have a form of communication that is fairly advanced.
Mandarin Chinese only has four tones (five if you want to get technical). It's not that hard.
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Anonymous2007-01-25 13:52
Ithkuil is the hardest language.
Go fuck yourselves now.
Seriously, though, the difficulty between languages can't be measured by a single factor. You need to take so many things into account; case system, verbal system, phonology, morphology, arbitrariness, et cetera, et cetera.
English is my third language, and by personal opinion, I find it far easier than Russian, my first, and German, my fourth.
Russian has a far more complex verb system than English, as well as a large amount of consonantal phonemes (due to palatalisation and such) and far more difficult grammar.
I know Norwegian, as well, and find it stupidly simple. Simple "subject-object" case system, relatively small vocabulary, etc. Pronunciation is on the irregular side, but it's still no big deal.
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Anonymous2007-01-25 14:40
>>95
No human can speak Ithkuil, even the man who made it. I don't the language counts.
In my native tongue, Polish, pronunciation is simple. For the most part, the way you recite the alphabet is the way you always pronounce the letter in a word.
No. You just don't notice because you know the language natively.
I know Russian, and I've had a go at Polish. Despite this claimed one-to-one correspondence between pronunciation and orthography (which really isn't true, anyway), its unnatural combinations of consonants and small use of vowels make it stupidly hard to pronounce.
You don't even really pronounce letters in words as you do in the alphabet. For example, how would you pronounce "sz", "rz", "cz", etc?
Russian, on the other hand, has a much simpler phonology. Once you know on which syllable the stress is, you can deduct the word's pronunciation.
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Anonymous2007-01-26 15:35
>>99 For example, how would you pronounce "sz", "rz", "cz", etc?
*shurg* But it wouldn't take me more than ten minutes to learn.
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Anonymous2007-01-26 21:25
I think sz is like sh and cz is like ch. No damn clue about rz, though.
hahahahahahaha! oh wow. grouping people in with the languages that are spoken is even more ignorant than racism. why dont you hide under your rock again since you cant come up with a good reason for hating. it was good seeing you again though, how do you like the sunshine? has it changed at all since the last time you emerged?
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Fun Machine2007-01-31 1:49
English is the hardest to learn, not due to pronunciation, but different rules of grammar and past/present/future tense. For anyone who doesn't speak english, it's pretty damned hard to get the hang of right away. If you're born and raised to speak english, then sure, it's no problem. You know the different rules of the english language...but anyone else will have some difficulty catching on to it
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Anonymous2007-01-31 2:36
Spanish is the hardest to learn, not due to pronunciation, but different rules of grammar and past/present/future tense. For anyone who doesn't speak Spanish, it's pretty damned hard to get the hang of right away. If you're born and raised to speak Spanish, then sure, it's no problem. You know the different rules of the Spanish language...but anyone else will have some difficulty catching on to it
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Anonymous2007-01-31 8:26
Engrish is the hardest to learn, not due to rules of grammar and past/present/future tense, but different pronunciation. For anyone who doesn't speak Engrish, it's pretty damned hard to get the hang of right away. If you're born and raised to speak Engrish, then sure, it's no problem. You know the different pronunciation of the Engrish language...but anyone else will have some difficulty catching on to it
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Anonymous2007-02-03 2:44
>>101 >>100
ch - same as h in happy
cz - same as ch in church
dz - same as d followed by z
rz - same as s in treasure
sz - same as sh in share
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Anonymous2007-02-03 23:37
Lojban ftw.
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Anonymous2007-02-04 1:25
>>105
your an idiot... go back to failing school dipshit
french, spanish are much harder to learn than english(that's why english is an international trading language easy & quick to learn) cause every noun has a "sexe"
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Anonymous2007-02-04 4:31
how the hell can you fail at american school? they're not even teaching anything. find an average graduate and he won't know the difference between affect and effect.
But how many of these people are actually (properly) literate? How many can differentiate between "your" and "you're" or "its" and "it's"?
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Anonymous2007-10-30 15:13
I would say that speaking english isnt' that hard, but reading and writing are. And this is mostly because the words dont sound anything like they been spelled. My first language is finnish and second english. When I compare these two languages, english is simpler to speak, but when it comes to writing a word that you have only heard it horrible, no wonder you have spelling competitions. When in finnish you just write every "sound" you hear and you most likely got the word right.
Same goes for reading, I can pronounce any finnish word that I have never heard by just reading it, but in english I could only guess.
SO english has its problems, but as it has been said earlier on its because you can hear it everywhere you start to learn it. I got the hang of it trhough internet and fanficts. So I do apologize and and all typosand misspells, I suck at grammar.
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Anonymous2007-10-30 15:17
>How many can differentiate between "your" and "you're" or "its" and "it's"?
Not many Americans, at any rate.
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Anonymous2007-10-30 16:08
>>118
Not many. But surprisingly enough, a large chunk of them are native speakers, mostly American.
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Anonymous2007-10-30 16:39
if English is so easy, why don't all the illegal mexicans know it?
>>122
illegal = we don't want them in México please kill them in the border o give them a "job"
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Anonymous2007-10-31 9:16
I think English is so monotonous language because it doesn't have distinctive male-female form.
English has less variant grammatical endings either, which makes it less attractive.
In contrast, Japanese has 3 kinds of characters that makes easy to find materials from bookshelves or to look up words from pages.
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Anonymous2007-10-31 21:41
>>126
English does/can be more male-female depending on how foreign you want to sound. The boat, she is sinking! We have to salvage her!
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Anonymous2007-10-31 21:47
>>1
The fact that English has about 5 million exceptions is the reason for people saying it's hard. I don't think any other language can come anywhere near the amount of exceptions to rules.
Then again, I'm from Norway, so I can learn any language easily.
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Anonymous2007-10-31 23:25
>>>1
How can Anglophones be uniformly ugly when there's no common genetic ancestry for many Anglophones? It's extraordinarily dumbfucky to characterize the entire English-speaking world as "ugly" and "obnoxious."
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Anonymous2007-11-01 5:22
>>129
He was probably referring to the two most prominent English speaking people: the American and the English. And they are possibly the ugliest people in the world. (I won't include niggers in the comparison, because they're technically not PEOPLE).
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Anonymous2007-11-01 7:42
>>130
Again, this comment is filled with dipshit stupidity. There's no uniform American "look," other than maybe the fact that 25% of their population is overweight. Sure, that's ugly, but when you talk about facial structure, you can't logically make a sweeping generalization, because ALL WHITE PEOPLE IN AMERICA ARE IMMIGRANTS. America is a NATION OF IMMIGRANTS, and as such, has MUCH GENETIC DIVERSITY, HOMOFAG
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Anonymous2007-11-01 7:57
>>131
Still, if you randomly choose an American person, chances are that it will be fugly.
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Anonymous2007-11-01 15:09
>>132
Chances are if you choose one random person in the entire world, they'll probably be fugly. Don't be a dumbfuck
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Anonymous2007-11-01 15:33
Not true, Spanish is alot easyer than English. Its just other countries teach it at an early age. dumbass.
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Anonymous2007-11-01 16:23
>>134
No fucking way. English has no gender terminations, no mood conjugations, etc... English is one of the stupidest languages ever.