Philip Hart wrote: >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. > > You might get by as a tourist that way, but you certainly aren't going anywhere else, if that is all you know of English. And even then, if you haven't got the hang of English syntax, you might be saying the opposite of what you mean. The real difficulty with English is the inordinate number of exceptions to its basic grammar rules, so many exceptions that one could be forgiven for assuming that there is no real English grammar & giving up in despair. German grammar is a piece of cake by comparison, and Latin isn't any worse than English, certainly. >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? > > > Yes to the first; it's not hard, about like English rules for punctuation ca. Austen's time; no to the second; yes to the third--the secret is to act like you know what you are doing & with a certain amount of Parisian superiority (Parisians treat other Frenchmen from the provinces only slightly better than they treat tourists generally; yes to the fourth. You might learn to *communicate* in English more quickly than in many other languages, but actually *learning* English is a lot tougher than most languages. Snarkhunter