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The English Language: Your opinion

English...what?

I can pick out a Canadian accent right away...the way out and about are pronounced is different from most American accents. It's really kinda cute the way it sounds...maybe almost a bit Scottish.

:p ahaha that is so cute! but you mean scottish.. perhaps youre talking about more of newfies(newfoundland) and novascotians (nova scotia) especially those two provinces have a dominant irish/scottish culture. Oh and mustnt forget about Gaspe Quebec.. the french there is somewhat different too lol

IMO I just think english is the easiest when you really compare it to other languages, no symboles or characters, its simple enough and very organised. Not to mention English and French are the two most used languages in the world oh and Spanish too! but anyway, my point, its much easier to learn english then lets say japanese or even mandarin..😌

Concerning accents I think it is funny because our own selves. I mean how the heck does one know if one has an accent unless someone from a different culture says .
 
At first I thought it would be easy but later found out that English has many redundancies, so many variables and short words and also each word can have whole different meaning than its supposed meaning. I thought I was going mad at the beginning but now I'm catching on. I find English harder than Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.
 
Learning anything requires information to be attained through personal experiment or donation of facts from master to student; therefore any language that has innately fewer of such resources, or requires comparatively more of them to be effective is harder to learn, but will probably be as easy as any other when it has been optimised for personal use.

Fortunately, the few languages that come under this banner are are ancient egyptian, cuneiform, the motley collection of pre-communist Albanian languages, and Scouse. The issue of pictographic centered alphabets usually gets easier when approached from the right direction ( such as radicals), and so I won't brand it here.

As for the topic at hand, I'm grateful for english in that it is better than it's predecessor (french) for a lowest common lingual denominator, as it is generally phonetic and has fewer exceptions and therefore is (statistically) easier to understand someone who doesnt know it as well as one's self. I do however wish it could be revised, optimised and standardised properly, which would have me stoned to death if I ran it past most english teachers in britain; patriotism be damned.

I also object to most strictures of capitalisation on general principles, but thats a different issue.
 
I do however wish it could be revised, optimised and standardised properly, which would have me stoned to death if I ran it past most english teachers in britain; patriotism be damned.

I also object to most strictures of capitalisation on general principles, but thats a different issue.

I would go "optimized", "standardized" and "capitalization" with "z", not "s". And in other cases "offense" and "defense" with "s", not "c". It's better standardized in my opinion.
 
I would go "optimized", "standardized" and "capitalization" with "z", not "s". And in other cases "offense" and "defense" with "s", not "c". It's better standardized in my opinion.
I agree with you totally (and further would like to see the letter C removed from the alphabet). However I am in Britain and CVs get discarded for gaffs like that therefore I don't want to get in the wrong habit :|
 
Like any other language, you need a lot of effort and commitment to learn English, but comparatively it has less restrictions and rules in grammar than Russian, Finnish or Hungarian for example (according to my readings).

The accent could be a problem for some, but not everybody. Potentially, every human is able to produce any sound in any language; it may just take more time and effort than usual to revive that potential, than one had deployed in their early age to learn their mother tongue.
 
@kusojiji

There are languages that are simply harder than others. Your sweeping blanket statements about all languages being equally difficult make no sense.
 
What does it mean to say that one language is "harder" to learn than another? From the point of whom?

I would say that from a native English speaker's point of view, Japanese is much more difficult than Spanish. Interestingly enough, I had an ex-girlfriend who was fluent in Spanish who said that Spanish was easier to learn than English because the pronunciation was much more similar.
 
All languages have their ups and downs, and peculiarities that give certain character and personality to the communication. Because of the way we absorb information during our youth, we adopt our mother tongue as the 'native' language in which we process our thoughts. For this reason, native speakers of a language tend to see their language as easy, and the more different the language, the more 'difficult' it seems. Breaking free from our comfortable linguistic thought patterns is key to learning new languages.
 
All languages are roughly equal in terms of complexity, though some may be complex in different areas.

The difficulty in learning any language is - of course - a relative measure.
 
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