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[miauw62]

I actualy like it.
Learned it all by myself.
Wich is to say, it cant be hard.

But latin is still the most awesome language.
Hurray for endings!

[scriver]

I really, really like the English language. It's easy to learn, easy to use, very agile and has an easy time absorbing foreign words and expressions.

[Loud Whispers]

But latin is still the most awesome language.

[RedKing]

At least English doesnt have "mutations" where a word changes phonetically depending on context. Welsh is a pain because of this, particularly for loan words/neologisms... in certain sentences:

C becomes G (Cymru to Gymru)

B becomes M (Bag to Mag)

P becomes Mh (Passport to Mhasport)

Very annoying for leraners to know what changes and when. Cant say anything similar exists in English.

http://www.linguata.com/welsh/welsh-language-mutation.html
http://www.linguata.com/welsh/welsh-language-mutation-1.html

Yeah, the Celtic (Gaelic and Welsh) languages are notorious for initial consonant mutations. As far as languages I know, Japanese is chock full of them, Chinese has some but not a lot. There are some dialects of English where you get voiced/unvoiced initial shifts, but I can't think of a good example off the top of my head. You do get a lot of consonant shifts inside and at the end of words. e.g. belief - > believe (the f->v shift is the most common one)

English does absorb loanwords really well, and has a habit of verbing the noun, (for instance, the word "verbing".) and turning adjectives into both nouns and verbs.

[Pnx]

The English language, like an experienced working girl, has learnt to be flexible.

[Skyrunner]

Here is a way to illustrate:

                 Active                                                 Passive
                 Singular Plural                                       Singular plural

Present      1st o        mus                                    or           mur
                2nd s        tis                                     ris            mini
                3rd t         nt                                     tur            ntur

This of that 6 more times

not counting infinitives and gerunds

Erm... the number of conjugations there are is like such:

• 3 persons; plural or singular. (that makes six)
• Three verb groups, -ar, -er, -ir
• Indicative tenses are Present, Present Perfect, Imperfect, Preterite, Perfect Past (Pluperfect), Future, Future Perfect, Conditional, Conditional Perfect, Preterite Perfect. = 10
• Subjunctive tenses are Present, Present Perfect, Imperfect, Pluperfect, Future, Future Perfect. = 6
• Then there is Affirmative Imperative, Negative Imperative, Past Participle, Present Participle, Gerund. = 5

"Stupid math" tells me there are about 360 endings per verb. But from what I've seen a lot of tenses have similar endings, and since most verbs are perfectly regular and only need the memorization of a single rule, there isn't a metric ton of endings to remember. For example, the -ar endings for Present Subjunctive are identical to the -er endings for Present, and vice versa. Gerund consists of adding -ando or -iendo (depending on -ar, or -ir/-er ness.)
Imperatives have a few simple rules (such as affirmative tu verbs being the 3rd person of the present indicative).

Anyways, I'm trying to learn the above and it's not going easy :3 The above was typed by referencing a verb chart.

[scriver]

and has a habit of verbing the noun, (for instance, the word "verbing".) and turning adjectives into both nouns and verbs.

I was about to mention this as one of my favourite features of English. The whole malebility of the language is really great. Similarly how easy it is to make oneself understood even if you aren't very good at it.

[RedKing]

Doubly so because so few people actually are good at it. So few in fact, that being extremely accurate and grammatically correct in English sounds weird to most people. We used to have this one exchange student at my undergrad school that would ask for assistance in the most perfect, measured, unaccented English possible. Which made him sound like a freakin' android.

[Skyrunner]

Yeah, I love verbing nouns, and the versatility of -ness and -y.

Verb-y wordy people are the paragon of paragonic verbing! (I think that makes no sense, but at least the vague meaning gets across.)

[MonkeyHead]

I suspect that the malleability of English has arose due to it being used worldwide (Ha! "Lingua Franca") as a result of the days of the British empire - it has been so widley spead, changed and recombined it has adopted or developed into a framework allowing for easy communication between people less than perfect in its use. Heck, here in Wales we often run sentences back to front when using English ("Freezing it is, today." - almost Yodaesque, but thats how sentences run in Welsh - like most languages, the opposite way in terms of structure to English) and it makes sense more or less, when in other languages I suspect it probably wouldnt. Before the days of the empire, I suspect the laguage was far more formal and rigid.

[Shook]

Well, when put next to an exceptionally flat language like Danish, English is very colorful indeed. In my head, it's definitely also the "cooler" of the two languages (since it is, in fact, completely impossible to sound cool when speaking Danish, yet it's astoundingly well suited for deadpan comedy). I'm obviously only completely fluent in Danish, however, and it imparts a comical accent on my spoken English. Still, comical Danish accent or not, English is a very useful language to know in Europe (most people can speak it to some degree), and it doesn't sound completely silly (well, cockney is still funny to listen to), so i think it's pretty neat.

[MonkeyHead]

The sheer diversity of accents/dialects within the small area of the UK is also worth mentioning - Stick a Taff like me in a room with a Geordie, a Glaswegian, a Brummie, an Essex wide boy and a Westcountry bumpkin and you would swear there were 6 different languages on show.

That, and a massive fight.

[Skyrunner]

The musical Billy Elliot had a reference to that in one of its scenes They were speaking to each other and neither understood.

[Knirisk]

Tell me, though, all you English-As-A-Foreign-Language people...  Do you see the problem with the phrase "I could of done something"?  A lot of native English speakers don't.  Drives me mad.

I'm native but have a problem with that phrase. I have been corrected for similar in the past. People just say what sounds like "of" but really it's "'av'" or even "have". It's been going on so long lots of people write it as "of". The sentence still might have it's flaws but then I was never very good at English.

Yeah, I'm almost positive that "could of" is actually people meaning to say "could've". Around my area (New England), people pronounce "of", not as "uhff", but "uhv". It's more pronounced with a V than an F. "Could of" is just a misrepresentation of "could've" from speech to writing.

[Pnx]

Reminds me of my favourite clip out of Hot Fuzz.