But it IS meaningful for DDB to relate that there is a consensus amongst experts (and non-experts) that English is among the hardest languages. So, as people who have studied the issue conclude, accounting for all relevant factors like where the non-native speaker comes from, the consensus is that English is hard, not easy. Shawn -----Original Message----- From: Charmian [mailto:worldserpent at gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2004 12:12 PM To: dragaera at dragaera.info Subject: Re: A Linguistic Note 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