No, instead it's in the vocabulary. ;)

Many of the most basic words of English exist in more formal and less formal versions. Compare horseman and equestrian, or eat and dine, or smell and fragrance, or hug and embrace.

Many of these apparent redundancies derive from the period when Britain was ruled by native French speakers, who tended to use a lot of French- or Latin-derived words.

I certainly wouldn't claim that spoken English doesn't encode plenty of formality:

  *Sir, would you care for an aperitif?*

  *No, I ain't hungry.*

Also, when you start addressing someone using formal forms it is very hard to switch to informal 'you'. Using these forms affect human thinking and after you have already addressed someone formally (because it was in a professional situation for instance) you are not likely to become friends. In some cultures there is a special complex social protocol for switching from formal 'you' to informal one. This ceremony is sometimes called using a German word 'Bruderschaft' and for some peculiar reason it often involves kissing and drinking alcohol. This, rather unfortunate, photo captures such situation: http://imgur.com/pmf57.jpg

As I find it significantly easier to develop social relationships in English, I often wonder whether this lack of formal 'you' contributes to the economical prosperity of the English-speaking countries (and esp. the even less formal US).

But then, the formal 'you' contributes to professional relationships. Think of it as a safeguard against overstepping an invisible line of proper conduct.

It is really more difficult to say "Sie Arschloch" than "Du Arschloch" because the formal 'you' clashes with vulgar language one would use around drinking buddies.

try{ assert ! relationship.isCustomerOrBoss() say."You asshole!" } catch(VulgarLanguageException e){ say."That's not acceptable." }

The point is that in English the additional semantics do not require additional syntax. To make a programming analogy, this is like the difference between C++ having overloadable operators and Java using methods to achieve the same. C++'s grammar is more complicated than Java's, because C++ uses additional syntax to achieve the same semantic ends.

The dual French / Germanic roots to English vocabulary does however hint at one of its distinctively complicated features: English pronunciation and spelling is bewildering because of that lineage.

I could say that in English and in Chinese, and with effort in German.

The participant here who submitted the article is dubious about any one language being harder than any other language. I was exposed to that doubt as part of the standard dogma of linguistics while studying linguistics, and I have observed difficult features in many of the languages I have studied.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415

That said, I have also read in the linguistics literature a hypothesis that there is a language-universal process of forming creoles and koineization,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koin%C3%A9_language#Process_of_...

and my educated guess would be that English (having spread around the world, and spoken in the country with the most native speakers, the United States, mostly by people whose traceable ancestors were NOT native speakers of English) might be a more koineized language than, say, Twi. So perhaps on a truly worldwide, pancultural basis, English is somewhat easier to learn to communicate with other speakers of English than most languages are to communicate with other speakers of those languages.

And if you can argue that for Chinese, you could argue it for the romance languages, for English after the Norman invasion, etc.

There’s also I do run, I did run, I will run, I shall run, I can run, I could run, I should run, I must run, I might run, I would run, I may run. And all their negations (“I shouldn’t run” is OK but “I mayn’t run” is not). And the special rules for conjugating them: the past tense of “I run” is “I ran”, but the past tense of “I can run” is “I could run”, not “I canned run” or “I can ran”.

These are not complex to native English speakers because we learned most of them without being formally taught, but an adult learning English as a foreign language is not so lucky.

(I see from Googling that German also has modal verbs; I don’t know if the whole set is easier or harder to learn than the English set, from the point of view of someone who knows neither.)

The funny bit with your example? Despite the similar usage, German complicates things further by splitting the primary and auxiliary verbs, with the primary being transported to the end of the clause:

Ich sollte nach Hause laufen.

Literally:

I should to home run.

This is no coincidence, since English grammar is basically a simplified version of German grammar. There's a clear continuum from German to English via Frisian and Dutch where the grammar is continually simplified relative to its Germanic root. You can see the same sort of progression in the Romance languages. Modern Italian is pretty much uncontroversially simpler than Latin.