I assume this is fan made. It’s sooo good.

https://youtu.be/ALUSAvGAji4?si=VM4PK8HdUwsZXSZE

I think that guy would have preferred to go about his day without a dickhead sticking a camera in his face

This is a cool little run of posts isn't it?

After spending five years teaching it, I can confirm English is bonkers.

I don't know where it ranks on the easiness scale, but it really trips up my students from time to time. For example, stuff like when to use 'her', 'she', or 'herself' can be quite confusing to a non-native speaker. There's various other things, and yeah, what people find difficult does change depending on what their first language is.

As I said before, five years of teaching it has revealed just how mad a language it is. How mad it is compared to other languages, I don't know (I'm looking at you, German - die, der, or das? How about you just have one word for 'the', eh?) Stuff that I'd never thought of before but had to learn so I could teach it:

- adjective order. (You can say "big red bus", but you can't say "red big bus".)
- when you can say 'the' (thee) and 'the' (thuh). (The former for emphasis, sure, but 'thee elephant' works in generic speech, but 'thee pheasant' doesn't.)
- when you can say 'shall'. (You can say "Shall I... ?" but not "Shall you... ?")
- prepositions of place are quite difficult for a Chinese speaker; a literal translation would give 'above/on the bed', but we'd say 'in bed'. 'The bird is in the tree' takes some time for them to wrap their head around.)
- spellings in general; English isn't as phonetically consistent as it is in our heads. (Like the video said: compare 'bough of the tree', 'I had a cough', and 'He's eating a doughnut'.)

Bonus challenge. What does this say? (Hint: It's an animal.)

ghoti

It's a Frankenstein language, that's why it's difficult.
It's made up of the languages of all the people who invaded us before we started invading everyone else.

The positive is that outside of the sad act grammar Nazis it's a language where creativity is encouraged. This doesn't help with the learning of it but makes for great literature and other written word art.

The Frankenstein nature of it might make parts easier for certain other language speakers. The French and Germans will find plenty of similarities for example.

Oh, and after it was a Frankenstein language, it was (and still is) a magpie language. Veranda, pyjamas, and zeitgeist have all been yoinked from other tongues.

Like for example the bird is on the tree or I am above the bed: we get what they mean. It just betrays their lack of mastery, doesn’t stop meaningful communication. Easy to learn hard to master

I still struggle to understand some Glaswegians and I've been here over 20yrs.

Related: I was researching stuff about computation, languages and their implications on thinking the other day and there are some invented languages that are designed to be syntactically unambigious -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
https://toaq.net/refgram/introduction/

The gender thing killed French for me.
My teacher smelt really strongly of Oxo cubes as well. I'm not getting shouted at for misgendering tables by a beef stock goblin.

I think any native speaker of any language will recognise a non-native more or less immediately. English is no easier nor more difficult in this case. One thing I would say about the difficulty of English is that you hear how difficult it is to learn more than other languages because literally billions more people are learning it than any other language. I mean the percentage of native English speakers who can hold a reasonable conversation in another language must be tiny because everyone else is learning English. I also think this means that native English speakers don't really have much grasp of what makes a language difficult to learn.

Or the tried and trusted Brits on the Med method. If people don't understand just say the same thing again, but shouting.