You're right that English grammar is fairly simple in terms of things like morphology and grammatical gender.

Where I think English would be surprising, if discovered as a new language, is the phonology: we have lots of extremely unusual and hard-to-pronounce consonant and vowel sounds. You can take whole classes just to learn how to pronounce the English /r/ in a way that sounds right. Which makes it especially unfortunate as a world language.

> You can take whole classes just to learn how to pronounce the English /r/ in a way that sounds right. Which makes it especially unfortunate as a world language.

While true that is "solved" by having very distinct accents. Somebody from Oxford, Melbourne, Delhi and Houston ( all pronounce the /r/ and other sounds quite different, but will still understand each other (given a little will on both sides)

Tolerance of different pronunciations is helpful for people learning to speak English, but not so much for following what they're saying. Plus of course we have a significant number of words where an attempted phonetic pronunciation might not be a bit unusual so much as completely unintelligible. At least we're not that fussy about stress and apart from implied questions don't really convey much important meaning with tone.

I don't know about you, but I have a very hard time understanding a lot of Indian accents specifically because of the unfamiliar stress patterns. (That, and their avoidance of aspirated consonants, which drives me crazy.)

tbh I find the unfamiliar stress patterns of reasonably fluent Indian English speakers a lot less problematic than some of the quirks my fellow Brits' stronger regional accents! The tendency to enunciate syllables we often mash together actually tends to be clearer

Yeah I do decent with Indian accents as well. And I have more trouble with Chinese accents and many British accents. But I mostly can’t stand the southern English and their inability to pronounce the letter R. It sounds like someone with a speech impediment. As an American I greatly prefer speaking to a Scot or Irishman.

And the closer you get to London the more the English have a French culture. By that I mean an inferiority/superiority complex. They’re always better than everyone else.

English verb and noun morphology are simple. English phonology and syntax are extremely complex. This is why people say “English has simple grammar”: they’re thinking only about morphology, which is the hard part of Latin, Greek, Russian, etc.

As a native Russian speaker, I would say that getting the morphology wrong won't prevent you from being understood. You will sound pretty weird, but people will still understand you.

Similarly, English syntax errors - which are extremely common among non-native speakers - usually don’t prevent you from being understood, either.

E.g. “I wondered what did he do” will be understood perfectly by virtually 100% of English speakers, but will immediately mark you as a non-native speaker (the correct form is “I wondered what he did”).

And, given the sheer number of accents, getting the pronunciation wrong is not that big of a deal either, especially if you do it consistently. Native speakers adapt very quickly.

The real problem is understanding English spoken by those native speakers in all their accents...

Of course English has gender but mostly in pronouns which are easy to master (until you talk about ships where it gets weird.)

Plurals and articles seem to trip up many non-native English speakers. The rules for these things are quite intricate and riddled with exceptions, and if you write a page of prose and make a single mistake with a plural or an article, a native English reader will instantly know you are not a native speaker, even if your meaning is understood.

Example: "if you write page of prose and make single mistake with plural or article, native English reader will instantly know you are not native speaker."

> Of course English has gender but mostly in pronouns which are easy to master (until you talk about ships where it gets weird.)

"Ships are 'she', except in the American navy, where littoral surface combatants are 'he'", or "...except in the British navy, where submarines are 'he'", something like that, isn't it? Guess I'll only talk about "the vessel", which should pretty reliably be "it".

> Plurals and articles seem to trip up many non-native English speakers. The rules for these things are quite intricate and riddled with exceptions, and if you write a page of prose and make a single mistake with a plural or an article, a native English reader will instantly know you are not a native speaker, even if your meaning is understood.

Fortunately not so bad for speakers of German and the Nordic languages, which work rather similarly. (Germans usually give themselves away by using the compound in stead of simple past tense.)

> Example: "if you write page of prose and make single mistake with plural or article, native English reader will instantly know you are not native speaker."

The canonical example seems to be the Slavic languages, above all Russian.

To me, any use of “she” to refer to ships (or countries, or whatever other inanimate things people sometimes call “she”) sounds dated, weird, and somewhat poetic/figurative. I suspect this usage is almost totally dying out among the younger generations.

> dated, weird, and somewhat poetic/figurative.

Yeah, that's me.

> almost totally dying out

That too.

> among the younger generations.

That's not me.

Russian lacks articles entirely, like most Slavic languages.

English word order is janked, though.

It's really annoying that we're modifier-modified when it comes to adjectives but modified-modifier when it comes to relative clauses. We say "the red car", but "the car, which is red,".

Also we sometimes use modified-modifier for adjectives for poetic effect, in constructs such as "painter extraordinaire", "minister plenipotentiary", or "court martial".

And then we have questions, where English goes from normally being SVO to being OSV. We say "That is John." but ask "Who is that?", and if we say "That is who?", it's usually an expression of abject shock. Or sometimes we dip into our Germanic heritage and bring out V2 word order (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order#Vestiges_in_Mode...).