I feel the authors pain of learning a foreign language. I’ve struggled with Japanese just as long as the author has with English and I am no where near being able to write a blog post like that.

I still think the author misses the target on a few points:

English phonetics are no worse than any other language- when the author writes phonetics he means spelling, which I suppose is more difficult than average (being Danish myself, I don’t see it as more difficult than “normal”)

English is a first language across a huge swath of the earth. No wonder British, Indian, American and Australian English ended up so different. But due to politics and the internet, we barely recognize these as dialects.

The author says it’s easy for Italians to understand Sicilian, but I’m sure anyone who learned Italian as a second language from textbooks won’t feel the same.

If you’ve learned Japanese or Chinese from a textbook you’ll have a hard time understanding what people are talking about in Shanghai or Guangdong or Osaka or Kyushu.

Languages are difficult. Difficult to learn, difficult to measure and difficult to categorize.

The biggest myth on the internet is that English is somehow easier or more suited for as a common language. But I disagree that it is worse than others.