On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, Scott Schultz wrote: > > > 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. > > I'd pretty much assumed that Phil was being sarcastic. I thought it was > pretty well known that English (particularly the American brand) is one of > the more difficult to pick up as a second language. Actually, I'm unaware of such a consensus. I'd say Latin, French, German, Dutch, probably Hebrew and Greek and Russian are more difficult than English; Italian (and more so Spanish) a bit easier. But for communicating with someone at the 500-word vocab level I think English is easiest by a good deal. Also a lot of modern words are more comfortable in English. Anyway, the consensus among Europeans I know is that English was easiest to learn of the languages they know. Spelling is certainly painful in English - but have you ever tried to use a comma correctly in German? Talk to an Italian from a small town? Speak French well enough not to get Englished in Paris? Keep gender/person references straight while drunk in whatever non-English language?