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A comment on Language Study: What is a foreign language worth?. Parent comment

Re:Language Study: What is a foreign language worth? by Vlaix on Saturday March 15, 2014 @05:16AM (#7404116)
Odd you'd say that. Though I'm not a native English speaker, I found Spanish to be among the hardest languages I've come across (more so than Modern Greek or German), and I come from a French background with wide knowledge across all of the Romance board. I'd expect a English speaker to struggle even more than I did.

(The easiest language being English, due to exposure, extreme alienation by French a few centuries back and overall simplicity for the more casual ranges of speech.)

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Re:Language Study: What is a foreign language worth? by bodyfour on Saturday March 15, 2014 @05:54AM (#7404170)
English has some good features:

  * Limited number of glyphs is a killer feature for the keyboard age
  * No noun genders to remember
  * The informal 2nd person ("thou") got chased out of common use centuries ago, along with its verb conjugations
  * Reasonably forgiving sentence structure
Its too bad the spelling and pronunciation are such disasters.
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