English is an easy language but ...

English is quite easy to learn, at least the basics, but it also has a lot of disadvantages:

1. It's pronunciation is nothing but completely chaotic, in the end you have to learn the pronunciation of every new unknown word.
2. It sounds quite ugly, you can use it for instruction manuals and as an international auxiliary language, but it's rather useless in literature and arts, where much more beautiful languages like French or German are dominant.
3. Because of it's linguistic primitiveness it's more complicated to express complex circumstances.

What do you think?

I speak English as a first language, and I heard it can be quite hard to learn for non-English speakers. I don't see it as a nice sounding language...but British English sounds more attractive than American English in my opinion.

1. Mostly wrong
2. Wrong
3. Wrong

That's what I think

1.Correct
2.Correct
3.Wrong

1 correct
2 wrong
First: English sounds ugly, it is YOUR opinion.
I've have always heard that American or Australian English sound ugly
Second: the langauges you think are more beautiful is YOUR opinion again. It can be true, but it is a matter of individual taste. I can add to your list other languages are beautiful to me (like Italian or Greek or Japanese) and remove others. For example I've NEVER heard that German sounds "beautiful" in my life. Romance languages are usually indicated like that.
Third: the language of art, architecture and literature is ITALIAN, in every language you can find words deriveded from it in these fields
Look at music words, just to make an example: where is German and French terminolgy?
3 wrong

English is only easy for Germanic-speaking people. One exception would be French, a Romance language. Why? Well...frankly French phrases / expressions are more align to English, in many ways that for Spanish-speakers the word or sentence would sound ridiculous.

For example:

It's a piece of cake -English
?????????? -French ?
Un trozo de pastel -Spanish
Un consejo -Spanish *the correct-way

English is only easy for Germanic-speaking people. One exception would be French, a Romance language. Why? Well...frankly French phrases / expressions are more align to English, in many ways that for Spanish-speakers the word or sentence would sound ridiculous.

For example:

It's a piece of cake -English
C'est une piece/part de gateau/tarte/quiche -French ?
Un trozo de pastel -Spanish
Un consejo -Spanish *the correct-way

French and english are very close...hum... what do you think?

1. True
2, True (though German is also hideious)
3, Not true. It's mch easier to write technical peices in english than other languages.

>>It's a piece of cake -English
?????????? -French ?
<<

C'est du gâteau.

I don't think English is that easy. Maybe it's easy to understand certain concepts, but mastering the language is as difficult as with any other language.

1.- Yeah, it's difficult. But there are some tricks to guess or imagine what's the pronunciation of certain words.

2.- I don't think so.

3.- No. The fact that you can't express certain things in English shows that you haven't mastered the language yet.

Pete from Peru

>>Because of it's linguistic primitiveness it's more complicated to express complex circumstances<<

What do you mean by this? If you are referring to the grammatical structure of English, then yes it is reasonably simple, but does this inhibit complex expression? Do the genders, cases and endings in, for example, German enable one to convey more complex concepts? I fail to see that they do. On the other hand English does have a rich vocabulary. Isn't this a far more important factor?

1. I agree, it could be way inconsistent about pronunciation. Words sound almost must be learned individually.

2. The ugly thing is relative. Only a person who never has heard it before could judge. Being a native Spanish speaker I've heard some of it since ever so I'm biased by it. The arts thing is way relative, if we talk about music its production is the most copious followed by Spanish I think.

3. I don't think it's primitive, I prefer simplified. It's much easier for a language to spread worldwide if it's simple unlike any version of Chinese or German for example.

If English is so easy, why the following less than straightforward examples?

The following are correct:

'Will it take long?'
'It won't take long'

But this isn't: 'It will take long' It has to be 'It will take a long time'

'He stays in all the time' sounds right, but 'He stayed in all the time over the weekend, while not absolutely wrong, sounds awkward. 'He stayed in the whole time over the weekend' sounds right here.

OK, only a couple of examples of things I have noticed non-native speakers saying, but I'm sure there are more.

Hi !,

1. It's pronunciation is nothing but completely chaotic, in the end you have to learn the pronunciation of every new unknown word.
I agree with Pete's opinion here.

2. It sounds quite ugly, you can use it for instruction manuals and as an international auxiliary language, but it's rather useless in literature and arts, where much more beautiful languages like French or German are dominant.
How this language sounds is completely relative to each person. I have to say that I am not quite fond of its sounds, but I wouldn't give the adjective "ugly" to this language either. As for its usefulness, I completely disagree with you in so far, that you can't put its beautifulness or lack of it as a parameter to judge its usefulness in literature. Anyway, English has a lot of beautiful literary works, as many other languages, I would say.

3. Because of it's linguistic primitiveness it's more complicated to express complex circumstances.
Here I disagree with you. I think that, together with the Scandinavian languages and Dutch (each to its own extent, of course), English has undergone a process of simplification, leaving languages like German or Icelandic, to which ancient English is closer, behind it in a less advanced stage of simplification. It would be like comparing Latin in any of its forms, with the modern Romance languages, and say, that they are more primitive than Latin.

ur probably just dumb, I speak English and Spanish as my first languages and I never found any hard part in speaking English. Ur IQ is probably just too low for the language so fuck off and drop your non-sense thread post coz nobody gives a damn.