And besides the English measuring system, what about the English language itself—the language of international diplomacy, which has no rules and must all be learned by memorization?
I’m told that English is very easy to learn well enough to be functional, compared to other languages. You’re pretty much good to go if you just
You won’t be perfectly grammatical, but you will generally be understandable if you, for example, pluralize every noun by adding -s. There’s little need to fuss with irregular conjugation rules, and no grammatical gender. English might (?) be harder to speak flawlessly than many other languages are, but it isn’t necessary to master these nuances to make yourself understood in a wide variety of contexts. The distance from zero to functional is smaller than it is for other languages.
At least, I have been told this by several people who learned English as a second language.
(I’m a native Italian speaker with very fluent English and a smattering of Spanish and Irish; I studied French and Latin in high school but I’ve since forgotten most of them.)
Well, grammar-wise English is way easier than most other European languages (though way harder than creoles, Indonesian, or engineered languages), but the phonology is not that simple even by central/northern European standards (let alone by southern European or Asian standards), and the spelling-to-pronunciation “rules” are about as bad as they could be. (As a result, it’s much easier to learn to write English than to speak it, and there are lots of people who would be hard to identify as non-native speakers in formal writing but would be quite hard to understand when speaking.)
I’m told that English is very easy to learn well enough to be functional, compared to other languages. You’re pretty much good to go if you just
memorize a few thousand core vocabulary words,
put things in SVO order,
add -s to pluralize and -ed for past tense,
use ascending pitch for questions.
You won’t be perfectly grammatical, but you will generally be understandable if you, for example, pluralize every noun by adding -s. There’s little need to fuss with irregular conjugation rules, and no grammatical gender. English might (?) be harder to speak flawlessly than many other languages are, but it isn’t necessary to master these nuances to make yourself understood in a wide variety of contexts. The distance from zero to functional is smaller than it is for other languages.
At least, I have been told this by several people who learned English as a second language.
(I’m a native Italian speaker with very fluent English and a smattering of Spanish and Irish; I studied French and Latin in high school but I’ve since forgotten most of them.)
Well, grammar-wise English is way easier than most other European languages (though way harder than creoles, Indonesian, or engineered languages), but the phonology is not that simple even by central/northern European standards (let alone by southern European or Asian standards), and the spelling-to-pronunciation “rules” are about as bad as they could be. (As a result, it’s much easier to learn to write English than to speak it, and there are lots of people who would be hard to identify as non-native speakers in formal writing but would be quite hard to understand when speaking.)