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Comment by moepstar | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused why English is always said to be hard to learn - those concepts mentioned exist in other languages as well..

Even to the opposite, i'm not sure if there's a language where there are _no_ words with 2+ different/opposite meanings?

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English is a lumpy mishmash of West German, Scandinavian, and Old Norman, leavened with generous helpings of Latin, Greek, and borrowed words from dozens of other languages. That makes for a big basket of grammatical, spelling and pronunciation exceptions held together by vestigial declensions and duct tape.

All in all, a delightful language to read and write if you know it, but a tar pit if you're trying to learn it.

I've heard that English speakers are far more tolerant of sentences that don't follow the rules and can still understand what is said (eg "the mat cat sat upon"). A French friend said that it can be difficult to understand if the speaker merely gets the gender wrong.

When I played with constructing my own language, one of my concerns was how much poetry and wordplay that a logical semantic consistency prevented. For instance, "I pick... you!" is impossible in a language where the direct object comes earlier in the sentence.

A tar pit if you're trying to master it, but not necessarily so hard to get started with.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_irregular_verbs Is possibly a better indication. Many other languages also has irregular verbs, but I think the number of extra rules and variations that English employs there are a bit more dramatic.

Are you joking? Try with http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbi_irregolari_italiani

There are 223 entries in the English list, and 161 in the Italian one.

>i'm not sure if there's a language where there are _no_ words with 2+ different/opposite meanings?

They exist, but AFAIK they are all constructed languages. lojban is one example of a language where every word has exactly one meaning (as well as having audio-visual isomorphism, completely regular grammar, etc.)

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