I used to teach GED classes at a small campus for our local community college. Since our campus was so small, our Advanced ESL students would often move up to my class (even though many of them had advanced degrees from other countries). The Advanced ESL class was taught by a good friend of mine -an amazing teacher. And she taught her students well! I can't tell you how many times these students completely flummoxed me with their knowledge!

I kinda disagree. You could change the order of some of the adjectives and it would still sound fine.

I worked for an international org years ago and a native Spanish speaker pointed out the lunacy of pronouncing “plough” differently than “enough.”

What is nice about Spanish is that it is pronounced the way it is spelled, giving it a distinct advantage over English. Other languages also have irregular pronunciation rules, such as Portuguese, which makes it difficult to learn, as one cannot tell how to pronounce many Portuguese words just from the spelling. Pronouncing words the way they are spelled is a real advantage for any language, and most modern languages have updated their spellings to reflect this. Unfortunately, English has not, partly because it became standardized much earlier than other languages, around the time of Shakespeare. The advantage is that we can understand Shakespearean English, and many languages cannot easily be understood in their 16th Century versions.

As for word order, a lot of languages allow for words to be placed in different orders, especially languages that are highly inflected - English is not.

The only reason I am glad that I am a native English speaker is that English is now the dominate second language worldwide. This makes international travel easier for those who speak English. For a while, about 50 or 60 years ago, French was vigorously competing with English, and there are still more people who speak French as a second language than as a first language.

I am a dyslexic native English speaker. Or is that a native dyslexic English speaker? Or do I speak dyslexic native English?

It's all French to me!

Every C in Pacific Ocean is pronounced differently. Same with every E in Mercedes, and U in Put up your dukes.

i before e except after c has to be the most useless rule in the English language. It became more useful when a British friend taught me "i before e, except after c, except when it 'eye' as in either or neither, or when it's 'ay' as in neighbor or weigh." And I always add, "or when it's weird." I guess Americans dumped the useful bit of this rule because we mispronounce either and neither.

I think English is the best language to know if you’re only going to know one language. I am so impressed at how many people in other countries also speak English. I feel embarrassed that I can’t speak another language well. Spanish would be handy then I could understand what the workers around my house are saying!

One of the reasons that I wanted to learn so many foreign languages was that I had a phobia that people were talking about me behind my back in other languages. I developed this phobia living in San Francisco, where I constantly heard a huge variety of languages being spoken on the bus or streetcar. I have, in fact, overheard German tourists in Mexico talking about me, and it was not nice, but I did not say anything to them. I've also overheard Mexicans talking about me in Mexico, but that was more in fun.

I often wish that French was my native language, as I have never mastered pronouncing it correctly. My first French teacher said that it was important to use certain muscles in your mouth, lips, and tongue to pronounce French correctly, and she would have us all purse our lips as if about to kiss before beginning to speak. I also learned that if you do not develop these muscles as a child, it is very difficult to do so later in life, and I guess I never did. I've been criticized for having a horrible American accent when I speak French, but only by a young woman who was in my Spanish class at City College in San Francisco. She lived a block and a half away from me, and we used to take the streetcar back from class together. I wanted to practice French with her, but she only wanted to practice Spanish with me, and so she may have just used this as an excuse to speak Spanish instead of French. Anyway, when I went to Mexico City a couple of months later, everyone asked me if I preferred to speak French when I spoke Spanish with them, and so I must have picked up a French accent from her. Eventually I picked up a Mexico City accent later, and when I spoke Spanish to people I worked with in Los Angeles, they told me that I sounded like a Mexico City snob.

I had no trouble pronouncing Russian in my Russian class - for some reason it was easy for me, although the grammar was extremely difficult. I've never had trouble with Italian either, and most people in Italy were not sure where I was from when I first spoke with them, until they saw my passport or reservation details. French is the only language I've had a real problem with pronouncing, of the ones I've tried to learn. Portuguese is next.

I too am glad to have english as my native language, but wish I was fluent in others...at least spanish as so many people speak it around here.

I had a Japanese fellow work for me as an intern and I never realized what a struggle it was for him to alphabetize anything. Not only did he have to learn all the letters and how to put them in words and pronounce them, but that there was an order to them...

I really don’t think that English is as difficult comparatively as many think. Yes we have some crazy things, but so do most languages. Verb conjugations are much easier for example, and we don’t have to figure out if things are masculine, feminine or maybe neuter. Lars, I speak Portuguese, and it is on the difficult side, but if you speak Italian fluently, i think you will find that there are a lot of similarities.

I think what makes English so difficult is that it is not one language but so many...latin roots, german roots, and so many words adopted from everywhere: sanskrit, greek, tamil, hungarian, bantu and many more.

I am a first born American with Italian parents. Unfortunately, they wanted their 5 children to be American and never spoke Italian to us. It's doubly unfortunate since all 5 of us have struggled with foreign language in school. My brain is just not wired for learning language. In fact, my brother moved to Spain, lived there for years and told me he still speaks like he is uneducated.

I just returned from 2 weeks in Italy and wished with all my heart that I could speak the language!

dedtired, I understood enough what Spanish speaking workers were saying..wasn't anything flattering about us))

(They didn't know I was watching "Rubi" at that time..and "Rubi" (and other telenovelas. but I can watch only main- hero- is -a villain ones) , is like a textbook..they repeat so much of same thing so many times one really starts to pick it up )))

I'd love to learn Spanish.

(after I've forgotten all my French..))

Overall, I had such a nice plan, language wise. Included minimum three more languages..that was before my desire to learn Spanish..I figured after French I'd take up on Polish, Yiddish, and Swedish (why Swedish? don't know)

Italian would be cool too

And Arabic btw

But no, it all goes other way so it seems. Down the drain. My memory and all.

Lars, I'll try to find that famous excerpt from some classics-we were given it in 8th grade (last official grade when you learn language. Then it's literature only. You're still graded for grammar of course, in your essays) to put there punctuation signs correctly..

I did it!

But I was much much better then

And yes, it's an excerpt from hell.

Czarlinalex, similar thing for me. I know very little Polish and other than the few a year when I visit the Polish deli I don't even hear it. My parents were born here, though, but there was a big push for assimilation, so they were adamant that since we were American, we spoke English. Polish is not an easy language to learn.

Some of my HS friends' parents fled the Nazis, so they were born in Poland, and they spoke Polish at home.

In my previous job, we had some international students, and I bought a book called "English as a second F'ing Language" which they found pretty helpful.

I'm not (a native English speaker, that is), which means that I frequently know better English than many native speakers (tongue in cheek). Examples: Lie/lay down --- no, you don't lay down; you lie down on the bed, but you lay down the book somewhere. And my pet peeve, although I've thrown in the towel by now, is the hypercorrection of I, instead of me or my, as in "She visited George and I" or "She came to George and I's house". The latter still makes my toes curl.

Regarding the order of adjectives: This is very interesting, even though some rearrangement might be possible, but got me thinking. I tried it with some of the other languages I know, and it is actually pretty much the same. Part of the explanation is that the relation between adj-noun can be closer or not, e.g. a cotton shirt or whittling knife would be a compound noun in German or "shirt of cotton" or "knife for whittling" in a Romance language. I suppose there's a closer connection or intrinsic more permanent connection between the fabric or purpose of an object than simply its color. So, yes, it makes sense that an opinion (which is more fickle) is further away from the factual property about an object, "a lovely, crisp white cotton shirt". Note also that you wouldn't put a comma between cotton and shirt and probably also not between white and cotton.

So, yes, there may be language universals at play here.

Nosoccermom, I'm with you on the hypercorrection of me to I. Drives me crazy.

And I didn't understand lay/lie until I learned German (legen/liegen are direct analogs). But I still don't get the conjugations right in English consistently because they are so stupidly confusing (layed/laid, really? Must we?)

It is spelling and pronunciation in English that I think is the bugaboo for language learners, as well as having at least one word with a Germanic root and one with a Latin root for almost everything. On the plus side, our verb conjugation are comparatively easy, we don't have a formal "you", we don't have as many cases as some other languages, and we don't have gendered nouns. Yay, English!

I'm not a native English speaker. I do speak Swedish and studied German in the past (can barely speak it now, although I was good then, but can read it). Have studied a little spanish. In my experience they all have their oddities and I found the best way to get those is to "live" the language. Ie read in that language, listen to that language (radio, TV) and speak it with native speakers.