On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 13:51:21 -0600, David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b at dd-b.net> wrote: > Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> writes: > > > Anyway, everybody in the world ought to speak English. It's an easy, > > flexible language with a great children's literature. > > It's widely reported to be among the hardest of the alphabetic > languages (let's not get into the difficulty of becoming literate in > chinese!), actually. And I don't believe "spelling" is a standard > school subject much of anywhere else. > Hmm, I don't know. I don't think it's very meaningful to speak of English as being the "hardest," because hardness really depends on where the learner is coming from. It's going to be a lot harder for a native speaker of Chinese to learn English than a native speaker of Swedish or German. Charmian