My English speaking Swiss, French and Spanish friends enjoyed this one last week, so I thought I'd share it.

Reasons why the English language is hard to learn

1) The bandage was wound around the wound.
2) The farm was used to produce produce.
3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4) We must polish the Polish furniture.
5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.
6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time
to present the present.
8) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
10) I did not object to the object.
11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
13) They were too close to the door to close it.
14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.
15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
18) After a number of injections my jaw got number.
19) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
20) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
21) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?

Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant,
nor ham in hamburger; neither, apple nor pine in pineapple. English
muffins weren't invented in England, or French fries in France. Sweetmeats
are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat. We take
English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that
quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is
neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write, but fingers don't fing, grocers don't
groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't
the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese?

One index, 2 indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but
not one amend. If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but
one of them, what do you call it? If teachers taught, why didn't preachers
praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to >an
asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a
play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have
noses that run and feet that smell?

How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a
wise guy are opposites? How can overlook and oversee be opposites,while
quite a lot and quite a few are alike? Have you ever run into someone who
was combobulated, gruntled, ruly or peccable? And where are all those
people who ARE spring chickens or who would ACTUALLY hurt a fly?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house
can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it
out and in which an alarm goes off by going on. English was invented by
people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race
(which, of course, isn't a race at all). That is why, when the stars are
out, they are visible. However, when the lights are out, they are
invisible. Why, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up
this essay, I end it?

I thought I was tough enough to plough through a rough trough but it made me cough, although I was taught adn this what I sought, it caught me out so I sat on the bough and drank a draught that I bought and eat some dough, I ought to know better. Maybe the drought made it diffifult or the task was fraught with danger.

Doesn't help much either.

I always thought that English must be so easy to learn as we don't have so many complicated rules etc. But I didn't realise we had so many words with the same spelling and different pronounciations !!

I got my youngest son to read through these sentences, bless, he didn't do so well.


We must polish the Polish furniture.
The farm was used to produce produce.
The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
The soldier decided to desert in the desert.
This was a good time to present the present.
A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
I did not object to the object.
The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
The bandage was wound around the wound.
There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
They were too close to the door to close it.
The buck does funny things when the does are present.
They sent a sewer down to stitch the tear in the sewer line.
To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
After a number of injections my jaw got number.
Upon seeing the tear in my clothes I shed a tear.
I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
She could not live with a live mouse in the house.
It was just a minute prick and over in a minute.
We would probably read more Shakespeare if we understood what we read.
There was a bow tied in the ropes on the bow of the ship.

***cue my immature giggling***

Anyone else think of a Flight of the Conchords song upon reading this...?

Barbra.

My wife is not a native English speaker but learnt in her original country. She was surprised at how much slang there is used in English as well. She prefers English over her native language

Here's a great example of an english sentence that uses only one word.

Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Bu ffalo_buffalo

Real link here, apparently the wikipedia tag has a bug in a Buffalo there...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo...uffalo_buffalo

If you want to learn good English go to India. Leaving aside accents, the usage of correct grammar among educated people there is amazing.

Read this fluently first time, you have potential in English:

Three witches watch three swatch watches,
Which witch watches which swatch watch?

And this is an example they gave me at my first year's phonetics course at university.

I find it very useful in arguments with people who tell me how English is sooooooo much easier to learn than French.

A Dreadful Language

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, tough and through;
Well done! And how you wish perhaps
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead; it's said like bed, not bead
For goodness sake don't call it "deed".
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt)
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose
Just look them up and goose and choose,
And cork and work and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart.
Come, come I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Man alive
I mastered it when I was five.

Thats American not English.

In English its called an aubergine.

But the majority of the world's English speaking population are in America. If you believe in democracy and majority rule, then you should make room for eggplant.

It's not just the Merkins who call it an Eggplant, there are other countries, who are not particularly American, that call it an Eggplant.

Besides, you could argue that it's not English at all but Spanish or Arabic. I have also heard many English people refer to it as an Eggplant.

American English is still English (never heard that USA and UK are two nations 'divided by a common language'?). And aubergine is a French word anyway.

French is just English with a funny accent.

Yes, but vice versa, we know who invaded whom in 1066

Friends who speak multiple languages tell me that they found English very easy to learn at first, due to the lack of gender, verb endings, etc.

But apparently once you've got the basics down pat, it's harder to become truly fluent, due to the sort of pronunciation anomolies mentioned in this thread.

Mind you, I guess most people don't need to use words like 'bough' and 'deed' in everyday life!

kodokan

LOL x 1000

My view about why english is so unlogical is because it is a mix of several languages over a simplified germanic language.

Germanic saxons that invaded the islands brough their dialect over there.

As they were in an island and then disconnected from the other continental germanic tribes, their language evolved in some way simplifying the grammar and mixing it with the local tribes languages.

Then later on it got mixed with latin and greek and later on with french and now more and more with spanish.

As the english and then the americans have been the nations that lead the world economy and politics the last centuries then english is now used as lingua franca by many other speakers with other even more different mother tongues who distort even more the nowadays english.

Said that, I regret that english is the de facto lingua franca.

Other languages are better stuctured and are more logical in their semantics, grammar and specially their phonetics.

However if the world continues to evolve the way it is, probably the next centuries lingua franca could be chinese ?

I find very hard that the rest of the world would learn chinese as a lingua franca.

The good thing of english of being a lingua franca is that is easier to learn as it has a very simplified grammar. So much people can speak and understand an "exchange english" version, that is maybe not correct but it is enough for people from very different origins to understand each other.

However as the english phonetics can be so capricious, the oral understanding could be tricky.

I do appreciate to listen and read aborigines from the British islands speak or write as this reveals a normally not seen richness of the english language.

Yep the Normans, dirty Scandinavians.

I'm not sure I would agree and would argue that the main reason for any perceived illogicalities is that the English language has never been normed or standardised - which is why the Yanks get away with various abominations. The closest we get to standardization is probably Fowler's "The Kings English".

In contrast witness the Germans who have their Rechtschreibreform and the French - at the time of the French revolution only 14% of the French population spoke what is now considered French - underwent a coherent and consequent (German usage of the word) eradication of various regional dialects.

@HTD

this follows the main phylosophies for regulations on French, German and English cultures.

• The French are centralists and regulate everything on codes that everybody has to follow. Hence there is only one official french language well regulated from Paris to the whole francophone world.
• The Germans have a similar approach but also have a regional approach, so each region while being autonomous and could have their own dialects and regulations have to use the centrally regulated german for official or interregional use.
• The Anglosaxons use "common law" for everything, that is legal, business or also linguistic regulations. So new particularities get incorporated to a body of regulations.