I know 3 languages, German and French are both easier then English. And English is my mother tongue.
Memorizing genders in German is very easy with a mnemomic method. Learning it has frankly been a walk in the park, everything is orderly and put together in discernible components.
I don't know about German but French? easier than English? Come on!
How can you be a native speaker and not understand Your vs You're or its vs it's?
> Or the fact that half our words are German and the other half are French.
Quite a few of the basic ones come from old Nordic I think. : )
How did you really learn all the German (and French I guess) genders?
I guess you either grew up in a multilingual home and as such doesn't represent the majority of us or you are incredibly gifted or just trolling.
Learning genders is easy. It's just a memory game. And most people now and days don't really care if you mess it up.
English is mostly old Germanic.
Out of the 50 most used English words, all but one are from Anglo-Saxon. Out of the top 200, all but 13 are from Anglo-Saxon. On the other hand, out of the entirety of the English vocabulary, only a small portion of them are Anglo-Saxon. English has a Germanic core but has borrowed happily from other Indo-European languages.
I hope I'm representing these numbers right. Been listening to the History of English podcast [1] which, if you like this stuff, is absolutely fascinating. The first episode is worth listening to just to hear Old and Middle English spoken.
That's on you.
English needs to /steal/ and should have stolen in all such cases. Sure, take how the thing is said and even the meaning, but strictly adhere to a single simple set of rules without exceptions for encoding that verbal language to written form and for decoding it back to speech.
Each language has its warts. But kids learn them all in nearly the same time. There are better criteria: I like Future II and composites in German, in English almost every noun can be turned into a verb, French is full of nice sounding idioms. Some languages lack future or conjunctive at all, in others the verb conjugates with the speaker's confidence. The richness of colors is another topic. The list is endless, all the thousands of natural languages have a different expressiveness. The trends towards English kills a lot of the total human cultural expressiveness. I wish my brain had a greater window of learning them without effort, so I could easily choose an appropriate language fitting any given context.
- English can't have one way to write f sounds instead of f(ish)/ph(oto)/(rou)gh. (I'm quite aware of the history, I'm pointing out that the resulting rules are uneccessarily stupid.)
- German and a few others need to give different genders to knives, forks and spoons as well as anything else. Why does anything except living creatures need to carry a gender? Why does ein/eine/einer/ein need to change depending on different rules except as a dead giveaway that you are not a native speaker? ;-) (Yes, as a speaker of one of those languages I'm quite aware that it just doesn't sound right without.)
Quite frankly I don't think language difficulty is the key here, otherwise we'd be having this conversation in spanish. I'm a native french speaker and I think the only reason english is easier to learn than german for us is that english is basically everywhere around us.
English is not my native language but I love its spelling and I think it's ideal. I'm not referring to saxon words, though, but the majority that comes from Latin, Greek and French.
I'm also glad English has no Academy prescribing its usage; lack of genders is super nice; easy article rules another plus; if we could get rid of the preposition madness it would be perfect (i.e. in/on/at are not uniformly applied as inside/on-top-of/at-point-of).
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.
- James Nicoll
New words & phrases get adopted by common usage. Old unused words & phrases get discarded like used condoms.
If you think a better language is one that holds on to its words unchangingly, and harshly judges and beats up new words, then you have free choice between the languages that came from Latin, especially the last flower of Latium.
I have abandoned that netherworld of arrogance to bask in the uncertainty of a language that admits to not knowing what words we might need in the future, and that isn't afraid to follow them down alleys to capture them. That seems to me more in line with intellectual honesty, always learning, revising mistakes.
As for the Latium flowers, the groupthink is that they should be preserved, whereas for English it is that it should continue to evolve. I've picked my favorite. :)
(Source: native speaker of one of those.)