add this word to the increasingly stupid lazy americans' vocabulary!

Back to the topic, two things that really get my goat are:

1) people who say "like" like every five words;

2) people who use the verb "go" to mean "say", as in So I go "Hey, gimme them nachos!" and he goes "Get your own effin nachos!".

Perhaps you are an expert on that, because I definitely get the impression that English is not your first language...

In any case, you are new here, so you probably don't know my family, the country I live in, or the people I hang around with. I dare say I know more about "people who had to learn English as a second language" than most Americans. And no, that is not what they say. My wife, who learned both English and French as foreign languages, definitely finds English much simpler than French. The same is true of my daughter-in-law, and most people I know who learned various languages. I used to think that English was one of the more difficult languages to learn (just repeating what I had been told...) and it was "people who had to learn English as a second language" who set me straight. That, and learning a few other languages myself.

Furthermore, you are moving the goalposts once again. Before, you were claiming that "English has few hard rules" and "mostly [your word, not mine] exceptions." Since you have found it impossible to back up your assertion, you have to try to pretend you were only saying that English has "many" exceptions. But the problem with internet discussion boards is that your earlier words are right there for everyone to see.

Since that isn't what I wrote, perhaps it is not that English is not your first language, but only that you can't read very well...

Oh snap!

Well, what can I say? That just goes to show how wrong impressions can be, don't it?

Oh, gimme a break already. And your point would be?

Look, you appear to be labouring under a definite misapprehension. I never claimed that learning English was any harder than learning God-knows-what. I merely said (see post 26) that every language presents its own individual difficulties to the learner. I even allowed that English is probably a relatively easy language to learn a Simple Version of.

You had to jump all over this with "Simply not true" and then launch into a laborious enumeration of the easy points of English.

Neither you nor I has had the experience of learning it as a second language. Especially not as adults, which makes a huge difference.
So your wife found it easier than French. Is that a statistically significant sample? I'm afraid not. Every individual has an individual experience.

My main point is that learning to speak it well -- I've been assured by many multilingual people (including my wife) -- is pretty hard. This has to do with its anarchic nature and so much of it being derived from Shakespeare or from the King James Bible (an astonishing percentage comes from those two sources), which don't resemble modern English closely at all.

Again, what is this "you are new here" stuff in aid of? You got a problem with that?

1) I never claimed that learning to speak English well is easy. I just said that it is "one of the easiest major languages." Learning to speak it well (just like learning to speak any language well) is very difficult, as demonstrated by the fact that a very great number of native English speakers do not speak it well (hence this thread). You are the one pretending I said it was "damn easy" (when I never said any such thing).

2) What I "jumped all over" is your claim, not that learning to speak English "well" is difficult, but that "English has few hard rules" but "mostly exceptions". I listed a number of "hard rules" (no exceptions) and showed that there are plenty of others for which the exceptions are not a majority. In fact, I defy you to back up your claim that English is "mostly exceptions" with one single grammatical rule for which there are more exceptions than cases that conform to the rule.

3) If you read my post, you will note why I referred to you being new here. No, I do not have a problem with that. Why do you think I would? But the old-timers know that I speak multiple languages and have lived most of my life in multi-lingual settings. So I don't criticize you for not knowing that, because you haven't been around.

That makes at least three things in your post that demonstrate clearly that you don't read very well, in terms of understanding what a person wrote.

i thought it was tow, as in tow the company line in a tug of war.
learned too things.

I've really missed you, Async.

Unfortunately, I won't be around long. I'll be gone to Africa again for a good part of January.

Maybe I'll be back again soon after that, and maybe it'll be months again before I'm around. 2016 was one of the busiest years I've ever had, and I just didn't have time for Wordforge.

This post would have been way less awesome if you hadn't numbered each paragraph.

To add my two cents: English is an incredibly easy language to begin to learn. It is one of the hardest languages in the world to master. Practically no native speakers ever do, and that is not at all true for many other languages. The easiest way to see this is that the necessary active vocabulary for a conversation can be as low as 500 words, but the existing vocabulary you could learn is greater than in most other languages on the planet.

The historical dimension of this, of course, is that English is the conquering language par excellence. It has an easy shallow end that the conquered people learn and can soon use effectively, and a really deep pool at the other end where all the stuff taken from other languages or developed divergently in the many different provinces lives and breeds, in the deep, under the tides, with orthography neighbouring Cthulhu and slightly more tangled than he.

Yes, I could sit up all night night trying to think of a "rule" (sorry, a grammatical rule) for which there are more exceptions than cases of compliance. But I think in that event it wouldn't fit the Rule category. By definition. So there are none.

I stand by my claim (not mine, actually, but that of others) that there are few hard rules. I fail to see why you take such exception to this eminently relative notion.

The "mostly exceptions" is an old joke, again originating from exasperated people who've undergone the experience and which -- I'm getting tired of repeating this -- excludes you and me.

In fact, I tire of this entire snarking exchange. You win in the one-upmanship stakes, sync. That make you feel better?

In which case, you agree with me that it is "simply not true".

If you had said that to start with, you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble.

Excellent post, K. You've said what I was trying to say (and perhaps with more greater personal authority). It has an easy shallow end and a really deep deep end. First-rate analogy.

Right. My mistake for pre-supposing a sense of humour. That's one mistake I'll never learn my way out of.

Actually, your mistake was in thinking (erroneously) that there was anything about it that indicated it was a joke. When I wrote a post that started and ended with a reference to that statement not being true, you should have simply replied "It's a joke." Instead, you argued about a series of entirely different points.

I don't think anyone who has paid any attention to my posting history doubts that I have a sense of humour. But one can hardly be expected to see the humour of something that is in no way identified as such.

You're kidding.

You didn't miss much, the last month aside.

The ongoing discussion between @Nono (Welcome!), @Asyncritus , and @K. is, in the true spirit of Wordforge, what makes it worth logging on and wading through the schoolyard spats.

Thank you (and do continue)!

Trump Slams "Unpresidented" China Act

Well, the term "Unpresidented" may come to be used to refer to what the US has chosen to do to itself.