Want a Cheesesteak? No Habla Espanol!

[The Cleric]

Irregardless of whether or not english is a hard language to learn, if you can't or don't know enough to order a fucking cheesesteak then you need some serious help, and are most certainly here illegally. It's one fucking word, which they'll teach you! How fucking hard can that be?

[Comrade Tortoise]

The gender appilication to ships is slang Hotfoot. Ship is still a gender nuetral term, as is gun, boat and all the others.

I'd argue that it's more than slang, but rather it's part of a mindset that has carried over from previous cultures and languages that made up English that had genders for objects built in to the words.

As far as the creation of English, it really is a mess. You've got multiple different sources making it up, resulting in a ton of contradictions, special rules, and the like. Now, I'm not much of a linguist myself, but I've studied some of the history of the language in my years trying to learn Latin.

English is one of the hardest languages in the world for foreign speakers to learn. Arguably, anyone speaking a romance language should have little trouble, as over 2/3rds of the English vocabulary consists of words originating from Latin. However, the most commonly used words originate from the Germanic which creates massive confusion when you move from words of one type to words of another. Meanwhile, the grammar is incredibly finicky. Admittedly, I've not studied German in depth, but as far as I know the largest flaw they have is that you can say a whole sentence and not have it make any sense until the last word is spoken, because you cannot appropriately assign relationships until that word is spoken.

The one point I am willing to give you is that it is most likely easier for a Spanish-speaker to learn English than to learn German, due to the inherant similarities in Spanish and English.

I have studied german in depth. The language is insane. A basic english sentence has a subject, a verb and maybe an adjective or two. In english, all of these are the same word. In german, that same sentence requires that you conjugate the verbs for the gender, tense, and case of the sentence, and do the same for all adjectives. Then you have to switch the word order around every which way, and if you mess anything up, the meaning of the sentence changes, from "I feel humid today" to "I feel homosexual today"

In fact, you will be amazed at how much in german has a homosexual double meaning.

[Scottish Ninja]

My German class (or those people sitting around me) agreed that German had harder grammar than English - Exhibit A being the five forms of "the" and the fact that some of them were used for different genders in different cases - ie "der" is both the nominative masculine and the dative feminine.

English, on the other hand, we considered just as bad because of completely inconsistent spelling - Exhibit A, the six different ways to pronounce the "-ough" ending.