Hmm... not sure if it's just me, but maybe we've taken the jokes a bit too far? This thread seems to have evolved into pretty much nothing but jokes and other... weirdness-es(?).
But is that not the core fallacy in attempting to judge a language along lines of good, better, best? There was a time when even professional linguists used terms such as primitive to talk about languages like Native Hawaiian due to its restricted battery of phonemes, or the languages of South East Asia because of the unusual way in which biological gender of people is rarely made reference (even though these languages do have ways to make these distinctions). There have been schools of thought that assumed that because Indo-European languages show a tendency to migrate from synthetic grammatical systems to analytical ones, that analytical is, in essence, superior as the linguistic evolutionary goal of this family of languages. In retrospect, all of this is hogwash. All natural languages do the same job, albeit in different ways. They impart information from individual to individual and serve as the vehicle for culture to impart information from the past to the future. All extant languages do this. Good, better, best, bad, worse, worst, are all meaningless terms in the consideration of any language. And this is coming from someone whom you know to be a stout proponent for spelling reform in English.
You must be American Not only is the English language specifically considered by [at least one person, apparently ] to be infantile, but moreover the entire concept of only bothering to learn one language is seen as the height of laziness (though one wonders how all the lazy people reached such a height in the first place. Maybe they're lazy because they spent so much energy climbing and would rather rest for a while longer?) Neither: velvet is soft and silky, green is bulbous and rotund. You're thinking of orchid
Er...are you saying that people learn a second language and then abandon their first language? Entirely? Forever? I'm thinking, no? So my point that native speakers of English didn't exactly choose English remains unchanged.
@shrollowheld32 Did you miss the different spellings of things from English English, and American English? Though some of us from either side can spot the difference in spelling, but the meanings are the same. But the slang is an entirely different breed of animal entirely. It is a language of its own and stole form Latin, and other languages along its way through history to the present. And it has changed a bit since it was first conceived. At one point in time the k in words like knee, knife, knight were all pronounced with the hard "kuh" sound, before becoming silent in more modern times.
I'm not getting the assumption that English comes across as a language for those that hate themselves at all. I'm not native to the language, but I find it beautiful. It's vocabulary is a lot richer than my own language, which also has it's quirks just like any language. The assumption that it is somehow a generally held belief among non-natives that English is a language of self-tormentors is plain wrong, and I can't help but feel that you just wanted to post a wordy rant as an introduction post. Not sure if serious...
I can't make a lot of sense of the OP's question, but as an aside I once took a course as an ESL teacher and they pointed out that one of the main differences of English compared to other languages is that the rules are fairly flexible. I can't remember for the life of me what the technical term is, but they also pointed out that when singing, a vocalist can stretch and shorten the syllables in English, as well as changing the notes and accents they are sung in, to suit the melody of the music and to make the vocals part of the song, and they are still completely understandable as words. Apparently you can't do this in most other languages (which are structurally syllabic, in that the length of the syllables in relation to one another is integral to the meaning of the words) without making the sentences unintelligible or just really weird to listen to. The tutor at least, thought this was one of the reasons English has grown to be a lingua franca and why pop songs sung in other languages don't tend to travel, or in many cases be much good in the first place, as the singers are trying to fit the words into the song rather than using them as part of it.
@shrollowheld32: Here in Ottawa, to get a job worth having (even if all you wanna do is wait tables), you need to speak both English and French. And they got tests we have to pass. It takes the average French-language native about three months to pass the test. The average English-speaker to pass the French test? Three to five years! Either the testing is way out of whack, English natives (even those with IQs over 130) are dumb as rocks or French is much harder to learn than English. As for sounding like teenage gibberish, well... Pfftt.
Yes! And if you buy a T-shirt from them, the troll in Aisle #7 will stamp you for reentry. (The stamp is actually the GPS coordinates for what you're looking for.)
Whilst having a weekend in Brussels, we were having lunch in a bar...quiet time, and the manager chose the bar to interview his new barman...the new barman spoke neither French nor Dutch, the manager didn't speak whatever it was the barman spoke, so they had the interview in English...and his lack of a "native" tongue (to the country where he'd be working) wasn't why he didn't get the job! I used to work with a Chinaman from Hong Kong, our site was visited by a Chinaman from one of our plants on the mainland, so they could only converse in English...
I was thinking the same thing. I wasn't even consciously aware of irregular verbs in English until I learned Spanish. Spanish verbs are hell. Look, the thing with English is that it makes very little sense. Every rule you learn will have exceptions, and so many exceptions that you may wonder why there are even rules at all. But once you embrace the idea that it doesn't make a lot of sense, it becomes much easier to love. As others have said, the vocabulary is rich and wide and the rules and when to break them make the language highly maleable. It can become a very useful and forgiving tool in your hands once you stop resisting everything that challenges your current notions of language. I'm a polyglot as well. I speak English, Spanish, and Portuguese fluently. Each language has its own set of rules - I'd be wasting my time trying to complain about these rules, or the things in each language that make no sense. Each one is their own thing. You can't change it, you can't fight it, it just is what it is and if you want to speak to the people who use that language then at some point you have to embrace it. I don't understand the purpose of posting a tirade against a major language of the world. What is this intended to do? It wont make English any easier to learn, and discussing it at length wont change the aspects of English that bother you.
How about the arcane formula for when to put accent marks in Spanish? Get it slightly wrong and you summon Cthulhu.
I didn't know what a gerund was until I learned Spanish, but I knew how to use them. Strange how much you learn about your own language when learning another.
Funny thing is that there was a time when accent marks went on pretty much any polysyllabic word in Spanish. You just put it wherever the spoken stress went. Then sometime in the mid 1700's the Spanish were clearly bored silly and decided to take their very logical orthographic system and spice it up! The new system for where accent marks go pretty much requires a semester at Hogwarts to learn.
Any wonder that the Spanish Empire was the first Empire to fall after The Age of Exploration? All the damned accidental Cthulhu summonings.