

Boy it’s a hard language. The English has a few quirks but it is an EASY language compared to most, including French
Man, as a native English speaker, I totally disagree with this. We are, as I emphasized in another comment, a fucking mess phonetically, and a lot of this is ironically because English plundered so much from French (among other languages). So much of English you just have to “know” on a nearly case-by-case basis, and I imagine the internal systems I use to subconsciously keep track of these inconsistencies are a terrifying web of spaghetti. The conjugation is fucked six ways from Sunday, there are idioms out the ass (see the ones I’m unintentionally using here), there’s sooooo much slang, and there’s practically a bottomless pit of words – so much so (in combination with how common it is as a second language) that Wikipedia maintains a simplified English version using a list of only the 1000 most common words.
I can’t say I’ve learned French, but even accounting for how much I already accidentally know of it (knowing more obscure English words aids a lot in translation to the point I can often read sentences with knowing just a handful of basic French connective words), I’d bet it’s a ton easier. The main thing I’d hate, like I do with Spanish, is gendered nouns (god, they’re so fucking superfluous), but I’d still say it beats the weird peculiarities of English.
Most non-native speakers, to my understanding, would consider English quite hard to learn, even when factoring in all the English media they’re surrounded by growing up.


















Sorry, I meant that for comedic effect; I understand that the English language isn’t an agent and that there was no singular instance where English went over, grabbed over 1/4 of its words from French, and came back. I know that “plundering” isn’t how language truly works. I do know about Old Norman’s influence on Middle English, I do know some about the Hundred Years’ War’s effect on its usage, I do roughly understand the Great Vowel Shift, and I have a fuzzy understanding thereafter. I guess I know that some political loanwords (like the 18th-century “bureaucracy”) and some cultural ones (like “boutique”) made their way into English, but I really don’t know much else.