| > Sorry jordigh, but in what area? You are focussing just on gender. There are many other parts that make up a language. I gave an example which you ignored. English has pretty complicated consonant clusters, such as in "angsts". It has two liquids, r and l, which many other languages do not distinguish. Depending on the dialect, it has 12 to 14 vowels, not counting diphthongs (okay, fine French has 16 vowels). That's just phonology. Let's discuss some syntax. Here is something I hear French speakers mess up all the time in English: number agreement. Why does the verb "run" have to have an "s" in some cases but not in others? While French also has conjugations, large parts of them are only written, not pronounced. Thus, French speakers have trouble with number agreement in "the cats run" and the "the cat runs". English has a pretty complicated phrasal verb system. For example, knock up, knock out, and knock over all mean completely different things and are unrelated to the meaning of ordinary "knock". English has a completely foreign usage of the verb "do", which is used for affirmation in a way that no other language does, for example "I do mean this". I can keep on going. If I am allowed to compare English with Russian (for example, English has a complicated system of articles, which Russian very simply lacks), with Japanese (Japanese only has 5 vowels), or with Chinese (English has complicated inflexions for nouns and conjugations for verbs, which Chinese lacks), I can find lots of other relative complexities with other languages. And all of this without talking about the weird spelling systems (there are more than 2) that English has cobbled together from all of the languages it has borrowed spellings from over the centuries. |