> English grammar is not simple. It has what (12?) tenses. (on the contrary Russian has basically 3 tenses) And it's full of exceptions. Why 'I see', but I'm lo

> English grammar is not simple. It has what (12?) tenses. (on the contrary Russian has basically 3 tenses) And it's full of exceptions. Why 'I see', but I'm looking at you. There's simply no reason. It's an exception. Thousands of them. This is actually not such a great example. Yes, English can express 12 tenses, but it doesn't have them in the sense that Russian, Italian or Czech do with affixes and declensions and what have you. > Let's just take 2 sounds. etc In this, of course you're right, but I didn't dispute this fact: English is a Germanic language and as such has a much larger number of phonemes than most other languages in the world (though it has far fewer than other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian, which have an - by global standards - insane number of vowels). Like I said, English isn't ideal, but it could have been worse. German, Polish or French (which has the added bonus of written French and spoken French being essentially two entirely different languages)would have been much worse. Indonesian/Malay, Tok Pisin or Swahili would have been much better in this regard, but alas, we have English. > "In general, English spelling does not reflect* the sound changes in the pronunciation of the language that have occurred since the late fifteenth century." Right. The ortography of English is atrocious and difficult to learn, even for native speakers. So there's that. It's definitely a point against English and it's a matter of taste whether this detracts significantly from its good points. > Artificial != bad. We have tons of artificial things in our life that are awesome! This, I think, is our true bone of contention. My argument is Esperanto brings very little to the table an organically developed Western European creole doesn't already have. You're free to disagree, of course, which brings me to: > Esperanto is several times faster to learn than English for anybody (given similar conditions). Linguists say it and I second that based on experience. Do you have sources for this? I'd be very interested to see the research on this. I would think the chief difficulty in learning a language that is wildly different from your native language is the fact that it's, well, wildly different from your native language, but I am very much open to evidence that learning a language from an entirely different language family than your own becomes easier if that language is rigorously structured and cleaned up instead of being merely an example of a worse is better organic jumble.