"English is better than all them weird foreign languages!/Why are other languages so hard!?"

Chagen

Nyktos: Those guys are much more aggressive towards other languages, though.

I still want to learn a ton of languages, anyway. I just bought a course on Polish.

Stormtroper

To those who knew a romance language before learning English: what was the transition from gendered to non-gendered language like?

For me, unnoticeable.

MillerCross

^^ Really? I figured it'd just be one less thing to keep track of.

True, I guess, but when you're used to it and when it has such a great utility (You easily avoid gender confusion when you immediately know your teacher is female without having to ask after that) it feels more like losing an arm than losing a zit, to use a really bad metaphor.

BlackHumor

English is less complex than most other languages, because several invasions of the British Isles by various people who didn't originally speak English (along with contact with the Celtic languages) wore away most of the more complex bits of Old English.

It's still got some pretty nasty sets of irregular verbs, and the spelling is a little unintuitive, but overall it shouldn't be too bad for speakers of other European languages.

(Of course, all this just makes it harder for an English speaker to learn languages that still have all that complexity.)

Chagen

"(Of course, all this just makes it harder for an English speaker to learn languages that still have all that complexity.)"

Yup, and that's what pisses me off about English.