[rich_sasha]

I sympathise with the view (non-native English speaker from Europe).

While it's true English has a ton of inconsistencies, complications etc. they tend to happen at a slightly higher level I think. There is a reasonably big subset of English that is quite easy.

French and German, not to mention Polish, are much harder to learn IMO, since the difficulties are up-front. Some examples:

- French conjugation of verbs is a whole world of its own

- German has noun cases, and you have to remember what verb comes with which cases

- Tenses in English are quite nicely organised into a Cartesian product of {past, present, future} x {simple, perfect, continuous}. It's fiddly to learn which one to use, but it's a plug-and-play use after that. By contrast, French has similar tenses, but spread around (not homomorphic to the nice Cartesian product, if you like). Plus, agreeing tenses ("sequence of tenses" apparently), OMG

- Nouns are non-gendered in English, and gendered in most European languages. Yes, a ship is a she, and referring to people or animals you use he/she etc. but in Polish and French, every word has a hidden, often undeducible gender you just have to know. Can't remember if German has rules for noun gender.

- English is very economical with words; nouns, derived verbs and adjectives are often the same word (e.g. "speed" the noun and "to speed", i.e. drive too fast). No such luck other side of the Channel. Similarly, "mouse"+"trap" -> "mousetrap". In French -> "piege a souris" ("trap for mouse").

- Comparing to Polish is a bit futile, but let's just mention nasty things English doesn't have: double numbers, in addition to singular and plural (one hen, two hens, ten hens will be "[one] kura", "[two] kury", "[ten] kur"), verb aspect (whether an action is completed or not), 7 noun cases, 22 conjugation groups, stem mutation on conjugation and inflection), nouns conjugate differently by gender, and of course genders have to be agreed between nouns and adjectives... just to name a few :)

[eesmith]

> Tenses in English are quite nicely organised into a Cartesian product of {past, present, future} x {simple, perfect, continuous}.

http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/rules/future.htm comments that the future tense "is a very difficult aspect of English grammar", with several different forms:

- auxiliary verb will for predictions/statements of fact ("The sun will rise at 6.30 tomorrow")

- auxiliary verb going to for intentions ("We're going to buy a new car next month.")

- present continuous for arrangements; arrangement = a plan for the future that you have already thought about and discussed with someone else. ("I'm meeting my mother at the airport tomorrow")

- present simple for scheduled events ("The train departs in 10 minutes.")

That's in addition to the future continuous ("Don't call me after 10 o'clock. I'll be sleeping." and future perfect ("I hope my mother will have finished cooking dinner by the time I get home.")

Your Cartesian doesn't include negatives, where English uses the auxiliary verb do. (Compare "I do not know Spanish." with "I know not Spanish".)

[stickfigure]

Do those future forms really matter? You could just use will or going to in all cases and nobody would know you aren't a native speaker:

* The sun will rise at 6.30 tomorrow

* We will buy a new car next month

* I will meet my mother at the airport tomorrow

* The train will depart in 10 minutes

All perfectly fine.

[eesmith]

What really matters is that there isn't a single simple "Cartesian" future tense with only {simple, perfect, continuous} forms.

Here's an example where "will" cannot be substituted with "going to".

"If you sit down then the movie will start." <-- makes sense

"If you sit down then the movie is going to start." <-- ???

In the earlier list, that's "will" because it's a prediction or statement of fact.

[stickfigure]

True, but also seems like a pretty minor mistake? I feel that I've heard worse offenses from native English speakers. Maybe I feel exceptionally tolerant having lived a year in eastern Kentucky.

Also, "The movie will start when you sit down" is probably better form all 'round.

[eesmith]

I'm not clear about the goal of your comments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_tense#English and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going-to_future are clear that there are differences between the uses of the different ways to express the future tense in English.

Quoting the latter link, "in some contexts the different constructions are interchangeable, while in others they carry somewhat different implications."

Do you disagree with that assessment? If so, why?

"Don't get close to the bomb, it will explode." implies the bomb will explode if someone gets close to it.

"Don't get close to the bomb, it's going to explode." implies it's going to explode (no matter what) and that people shouldn't be nearby.

[bradrn]

> Tenses in English are quite nicely organised into a Cartesian product of {past, present, future} x {simple, perfect, continuous}

Alas, they are not. You can have a perfect continuous, for instance: ‘I had been waiting’. Furthermore, the future doesn’t fit into the same paradigm as the other two tenses, both syntactically and semantically. I prefer to think of it as follows, at least in the realis case: {non-prospective, prospective} × {non-perfect, perfect} × {simple, continuous} × {past, present}. (The irrealis is more difficult, and overlaps somewhat with the realis.)

> Polish … double numbers

This is usually called the ‘dual’.

> … verb aspect (whether an action is completed or not)

English has this too (simple vs continuous is fundamentally an aspectual distinction), though not quite as pervasively as Polish or other Slavic languages.

[rich_sasha]

> Alas, they are not. You can have a perfect continuous, for instance: ‘I had been waiting’. Furthermore, the future doesn’t fit into the same paradigm as the other two tenses, both syntactically and semantically. I prefer to think of it as follows, at least in the realis case: {non-prospective, prospective} × {non-perfect, perfect} × {simple, continuous} × {past, present}. (The irrealis is more difficult, and overlaps somewhat with the realis.)

It's all true, and I'm not pretending English is a trivial language. My point is, you can speak fairly good English with no knowledge of any of these complications. You simply cannot escape from fundamental complexities in all the European languages I know, that need to be navigated for even simple communication. It helps that the tenses are at least somewhat organised. This "Cartesian" model is much clearer to me than e.g. the French "bag of tenses".

Of course you can argue what's "basic communication". Something like "I go train Manchester tomorrow" is fairly unambigous, but very poor use of language. My impression and point is that it's much easier to speak simple, correct English than it is to speak simple, correct {French,German,Polish}.

[bradrn]

> you can speak fairly good English with no knowledge of any of these complications

Well, this is very dependent on exactly what you mean by ‘fairly good English’. I’d say that getting to this level is hardly trivial — I’ve seen many non-native speakers whose writing is nearly unreadable. Though then again, there are a fair number of native English speakers who also have terrible writing. As a monolingual speaker I can’t personally compare this aspect of English to other languages.

[soneil]

The way I've always understood this is that you can speak surprisingly bad English and still be understood. To a large extent you can just throw most of the right words in a sentence together and be largely understood - even if it sounds fantastically wrong.

I'm thinking of things like .. in Slovak, spoon vs teaspoon is lyžiča vs lyžička. If you don't understand how they mutate the word endings - and as far as I can tell, memorise them all on a case-by-case basis, this is easily lost. small spoon, little spoon, tea spoon, there's not many ways in English for it not to be understood.

So my understanding is not so much that it's easy to learn, but the MVP of being able to communicate is a surprisingly small subset of the full language.

[yorwba]

> in Slovak, spoon vs teaspoon is lyžiča vs lyžička

Isn't that just the diminutive? The English equivalent would be a "spoony." You might get looked at foony if you use that word to ask for a teaspoon, but if an English speaker understands what you mean, it's because they know their language well enough to guess the meaning based on a handful of words and the context.

Similarly, I'd expect a Slovak speaker to understand "lyžiča malé", "malinká lyžiča" and "čaju lyžiča", even though they probably sound horribly wrong. (BTW, my dictionary says it's spelled "lyžica".)

[rich_sasha]

If Slovak is anything like Polish in this regard, yes it is "just" a diminutive, but also a key word-creation mechanism.

In Polish, a screw is "śrubka", and "śruba" is a big screw - also a ship's propeller. "Kowadło" is anvil, and "kowadełko" (small anvil) is the anvil bone in your ear. "Łyżka" is a tablespoon and "łyżeczka" is a teaspoon, not merely "smaller spoon". "Suka" is bitch (either pejorative or very technical term for female dog), "suczka" (little bitch) is what dog owners and breeders actually call female dogs. And so on. Diminutives of words can end up having quite different meanings to the original words.

[euroderf]

Other commenters have noted that French verbs are messy. But there are a couple of shortcuts for new learners. Future can be expressed by aller (present tense) + inf. (e.g. "I am going to [verb]"), and past can be expressed by venir (present tense) de + inf. (e.g. "I just [verb]ed").

[mikhayahu]

> double numbers, in addition to singular and plural (one hen, two hens, ten hens will be "[one] kura", "[two] kury", "[ten] kur")

Actually Polish does not have dual number, just singular and plural. What you are refering to is just different noun case - use plural genitive when numeral ends in 5,6,7,8,9 or multiple of 10.

[zoomablemind]

>...different noun case - use plural genitive when numeral ends in 5,6,7,8,9 or multiple of 10.

Exactly. gettext PO-file translation comes to mind, the plural form rules (e.g. https://php-gettext.github.io/Languages/ )

[rich_sasha]

Yes but in practice it’s the same for a learner (or only a small discount)

[handrous]

> - French conjugation of verbs is a whole world of its own

> - Nouns are non-gendered in English, and gendered in most European languages. Yes, a ship is a she, and referring to people or animals you use he/she etc. but in Polish and French, every word has a hidden, often undeducible gender you just have to know. Can't remember if German has rules for noun gender.

French conjugation isn't as bad as its reputation suggests. Gender's what dissuaded me from trying to keep up with it, after getting pretty damn good in four fairly-rigorous semesters of French study in college. I never got a feel for guessing gender, because there are lots of rules and way too many exceptions to them. For that and other reasons it ends up being hard to drill French nouns out of context—and actually, drilling adjectives out of context isn't all that useful either, for similar reasons. You kinda have to study the whole thing at once to really internalize all the transformations words undergo due to gender, so using them correctly becomes quick & natural. So much for simple Anki decks and reclaiming otherwise-lost time to work on vocab.

Spanish is so much easier. I barely paid attention for a couple semesters of very half-assed Spanish instruction in high school, but I bet I could correctly guess noun gender in Spanish at a much higher rate than I could French nouns, which language I studied both more recently and probably got ~100x as good at as I ever was with Spanish.