A common saying I hear about around ,my Arabic friends is that, English is the easiest language. While, Arabic on it’s own is a beast in terms of difficulty, the amount of rules and dialects you have to memorize, English, I think, suffer from this too.

I’ll outline why I think English is not the easiest language, it certainly is easier than Arabic in some aspects, but it’s undoubtedly harder in others.

heavily dependent on special cases.⌗

Picture this, you are a beginner in English. You learn about a new grammar rule, for example multiple instances of a noun.

Some nouns have the simple formula, adding s at the end.

  • egg -> eggs
  • apple -> apples
  • orange -> oranges

This makes complete sense, and is an easy rule to follow. But for every rule, there is an exception. In English, there are lots of em.

It’s almost like it’s strictly made out of exceptions, then the rules got added…

  • goose -> geese
  • water -> water
  • person -> people
  • lava -> lava
  • alcohol -> alcohol
  • weed -> weed/weeds(depends on meaning)

letters that share the same function⌗

Observe the following:

✅Pharmacy ✖️ Farmacy ✅Corona ✖️ Khorona ✅Kratos ✖️ Cratos ✅Car ✖️ Kar ✅Giggle ✖️ Gigel ✅Enough ✖️ Enof ✅Gotcha ✖️Got-sha ✅Light ✖️ Lyt

silent letters⌗

I mean, some to most languages contain this. It still doesn’t make sense, if there is an extra letter that isn’t pronounced, just remove it.

English has this a lot, I am sure you could think of a few examples to this. Plus, it’s really not fun collecting lists of inconsistencies in a language.

In any case, these should have a rule considering that it is so common that it occurs in daily speech, contrast this to a language like Arabic and it strictly specifies where silent letters via diacritics.

contextual words⌗

I’ll use a recent word to illustrate this, consider the word ’lit’. When used with a light source, such as a lamp, means that it is on, i.e it’s emitting light.

But as it has changed recently, it became to describe something as cool, or awesome. This is problematic when you try to use it with the original meaning, to mean a light source being on.

“This lamp is lit” - is this supposed to mean that it’s awesome, or a light source being on?

verbs and nouns⌗

Words that are both verbs and nouns are problematic, for example consider the word ‘police’.

Police (noun) means the people that police ( verb ) the people.

Which allows for cool but ultimately useless sentences such as: “Police Police Police Police Police Police Police Police”

normal language⌗

At the end of the day, English with all it’s flaws(trust me, there are a lot) is still a normal language(I mean the difficulty, not social perception)

I don’t place as it easy, due to a lot of countries existing that has completely different languages and it would be hard to adapt to the system of English.

An easy language I think, is a language that you could speak within 2 to 4 weeks. It of course depends on your knowledge of languages similar to the one you’re learning, but generally there are languages that are easier to learn like Sign Language(basic), Body Language, etc.

Though it is a lot easier than other languages like Arabic, due to it’s accessibility. It’s accessibility is so strong in-fact, that people could learn English without knowing any grammar. (me)

Truly technology turned an ultimately flawed language into the world’s standard language. That, and English countries constantly colonizing other poorer countries(looking at you: us & uk)

Which makes me wonder about the Chinese language, will it ever become the world’s standard language? I mean, 3B people already speak it, you might aswell learn it.