[materielle]

That’s just not true though. Sure English doesn’t have tones, but there are other tricky parts of the language. Additionally, Russian is another “difficult” language, but all the satellite nations had no problem picking it up.

The real reason people learn English isn’t because it’s easy. It’s because they need to. As someone who is married to an immigrant, it’s not easy for them. They’ve just worked really hard over decades.

Americans will do fine learning Chinese if it ever becomes an economic necessity.

[fc417fc802]

It's not easy to become highly proficient in english but it's quite easy to speak just barely well enough to communicate effectively in a professional context. Importantly, the written form follows naturally from the spoken. You won't get all the edge cases right (that's incredibly difficult even for native speakers) but getting in the ballpark can be done purely phonetically with a fairly small set of rules. Combine with modern spellcheck and I expect it's pretty difficult to beat for ease of practical use.

I think at least a few of the latin based languages are in the same ballpark but for inane historical reasons it's english that won out.

Compare with chinese where even if you sweep tones under the rug you've got a bunch of idioms (difficult) followed by one of the most difficult writing systems in existence. Don't get me wrong, I think the writing system is quite elegant and has a truly impressive history, but neither of those things has anything to do with ease of mastery.

A tangential thought is that if you intentionally set out to come up with a rule following yet maximally difficult language I think a reasonable approach would be to fuse the equivalent of latin grammar with chinese tones and then fuse a chinese style writing system with arabic style contextually sensitive ligatures.

[rossjudson]

Pinyin converts reading into a vocabulary exercise. China might decide to Pinyin all the things.

[pantalaimon]

> Russian is another “difficult” language, but all the satellite nations had no problem picking it up.

Russian is not more difficult than English and a lot of the satellite states were speaking other Slavic languages. If you already speak Spanish, it's less difficult to pick up Italian too.

[alex43578]

There’s also the fact that a huge portion of foreign immigrants to the US don’t and won’t learn English, but can still operate just fine (or even have the system cater to them - press 1 for Spanish).

Look at the uproar over requiring commercial drivers to be able to read road signs in English.

[pantalaimon]

The US also did annex large parts of what used to be Mexico in the 19th century, so you don't even technically have so be an immigrant to speak Spanish

[alex43578]

Unless you're 126 years old, that excuse doesn't really hold up. Plenty of immigrants came from Italy, Poland, and Russia more recently than your mentioned time, but you don't hear Press 3 for Italian too often.

[lisdexan]

Well... they weren't immigrants, they were annexed. Why should they speak English?

[alex43578]

They didn't have to. But they also shouldn't expect the annexing government or populace to accommodate them.

Their country lost the war, lost the territory, and those that stayed and chose to take American citizenship should've learned English, the (de facto) language of the country they chose to join.

[pantalaimon]

People still speak German in South Tyrol even though it's part of Italy since 1919.

[RupertSalt]

Along Interstate 5 in 1980s-90s Southern California, there were large signs, black-on-white, which showed a pictogram of a family running.

The English text above read "WATCH FOR PEOPLE CROSSING ROAD"

The Spanish text below read "PROHIBIDO"