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Comment by dan353hehe | Hacker News Reader

Don’t worry about us. English is truly a horrible language to learn, and I feel bad for anyone who has to learn it.

Also I have always liked this humorous plan for spelling reform: https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm

The node for it on Everything2 makes it a little bit easier to follow with links to the English word. https://everything2.com/title/A+Plan+for+the+Improvement+of+...

So, its something like:

    For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be [replased](replaced) either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet.

It becomes quite useful in the later sentences as more and more reformations are applied.

English spelling is pretty bad, but spoken English isn't terrible, is it? It's the most popular second language.

You never realize how many weird rules, weird exceptions, ambiguities, and complete redundancies there are in this language until you try to teach English, which will also probably teach you a bunch of terms and concepts you've never heard of. Know what a gerund is? Then there's things we don't even think about that challenge even advanced foreign learners, like when you use which articles: the/a.

English popularity was solely and exclusively driven by its use as a lingua franca. As times change, so too will the language we speak.

Every real, non-constructed language has weird rules, weird exceptions, ambiguities, and complete redundancies. English is on the more difficult end but it's not nearly the most difficult. I'm not sure how it got to be perceived as this exceptionally tough language just because pronunciation can be tough. Other languages have pronunciation ambiguities too...

English is rather complex phonologically. Lots of vowels for starters, and if we're talking about American English these include the rather rare R-colored vowels - but even without them things are pretty crowded, e.g. /æ/ vs /ɑ/ vs /ʌ/ ("cat" vs "cart" vs "cut") is just one big WTF to anyone whose language has a single "a-like" phoneme, which is most of them. Consonants have some weirdness as well - e.g. a retroflex approximant for a primary rhotic is fairly rare, and pervasive non-sibilant coronals ("th") are also somewhat unusual.

There are certainly languages with even more spoken complexity - e.g. 4+ consonant clusters like "vzdr" typical of Slavic - but even so spoken English is not that easy to learn to understand, and very hard to learn to speak without a noticeable accent.

English is far from the most complex or difficult.

English being particularily difficult is just a meme. only the orthography is confusing.

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