[DigitalHobo]

> Arabic is far more simple language with fewer exceptions than english or french

Would you say this is true of spoken english as well? By that I mean, a large amount of the difficulty involving english involves our train-wreck of spelling rules, spoken english on the other hand tends to be reasonably easy to become functional in (apart from idioms). Would you say that Arabic is simpler than purely spoken english as well?

[mohamedattahri]

I would say that English is somewhat hard, mostly because of the exceptions in the past participate, words that are NOT - edit - spelled phonetically, making it hard to learn new words, and there are many tenses - not as many as in French, most of which are misused when casually speaking.

[t-3]

English spelling is a feature, not a bug. You can tell the origin of nearly any word by it's spelling, and knowing that gives you clues to pronunciation and grammar. If you're ignorant of latin and more modern European languages it might be difficult though.

[dorfsmay]

But spelling keeps changing. What's the origin behind "check", as in checkbook?