English is the objectively best language and it is in fact easier to learn most other languages.
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- Thread starter PsihoKekec
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English's difficulty to learn from a non-native speaker is highly related to it's difficulty for English speakers to learn another language. It basically has none of the easy building blocks of other languages and isn't closely related to another language like French and Spanish are. On top of this, there is little pressure to learn another language if one is from an English speaking country.
English is hard to learn because the grammar is so inconsistent and riddled with exceptions and idiosyncrasies, partly due to absorbing loanwords from so many other languages. That doesn't translate to learning other languages more easily.
That is a comically silly statement.
If you define "objectively best" as enabling you to communicate with the maximum number of people. . . oops, that would be Mandarin.
Widest global reach? English is up there, but Spanish and French are more broadly spoken, and global reach is mostly a function of "who conquered who in the past", not linguistic quality. Unless we're suddenly in an alternate universe where harsh language actually does win battles? I think the Germans rule that one though.
Easy to learn? English isn't even an competitor for this due to the wildly inconsistent grammar and lack of close relationships to other languages; it's only people who natively speak English who think it's easy.
Reality is funny.
I dunno why you'd think any of those made a language the best.
Any of those are criteria by which languages can be objectively compared, but you're making it pretty clear that you're not interested in any constructive factual discussion, just condescendingly declaring that your subjective opinion is an "objective fact".
English is the best in that it's the most useful language for traveling, as someone will probably speak it. It's also the language most programming code is written in, and the language most commonly used in business. Basically, it's a standard valuable because it is a standard, which is much more valuable than most realize.
English is a common standard, yes, but so are Chinese, French, Spanish, and Arabic. The U.N. adds Russian to the list of standard/official languages, but that's pretty much for diplomatic reasons.
"Most useful for travelling" really depends on where in the world you're travelling. If you speak all of the UN six you're pretty close to guaranteed to be able to communicate to at least a limited degree anywhere you travel; English, French, and Spanish are the clear top three for travelling in the "Western" world, but the number one slot will vary from country to country. I think Americans overestimate the spread of English versus other global standard languages because where they live and where they travel are heavily skewed towards English-speaking places in the first place. It certainly *is* a global standard language, though.
English is *not* easy to learn, period. The claim that it is is simply BS.
Morphic Tide
Well-known member
Mandarin isn't actually a standard, it's that China has a fuck-huge population and a massive ethnostate complex to keep a single language for that fuck-huge population. Arabic is in a similar boat of being widespread solely from a cultural homogenization process, and as such is also quite limited because you're essentially only opening up the Muslim world, which is fairly limited in value to be speaking to from how fucked over those parts of the world have tended to be, and you get very limited breadth because it is in fact the Muslim world.
To my understanding, French isn't used as such anymore because English took over the spot of "language of the hegemon" thanks to Britain winning the Age of Empire and the United States winning World War One, but remains in the diplomacy courses and other such places out of incestuous self-reference and institutional inertia, so it's useful because it was useful so most people who've learned a second language will have had the option of French.
Spanish faces a similar issue to Mandarin and Arabic, in that there's a lot of people who will speak it "on the street", but there's a fairly limited bredth that actually covers because of those people being similar clumps because they are in fact Spanish peoples in origin, though it does share in the prevalence of French as being "locked in" for available education in other languages.
English stands out because you actually have to learn it in some capacity to interact with a variety of practical uses. Programming languages are nigh-exclusively based on English so you have to learn it to understand large instruction libraries, the US and UK remain obscenely disproportionate for quantity and quality of scientific research so academics end up stuck getting some footing in it to readily reference relevant works in their field, the vast majority of the giant multinational conglomerates are based in the US so if you want to directly work with them, you need English available.
To my understanding, French isn't used as such anymore because English took over the spot of "language of the hegemon" thanks to Britain winning the Age of Empire and the United States winning World War One, but remains in the diplomacy courses and other such places out of incestuous self-reference and institutional inertia, so it's useful because it was useful so most people who've learned a second language will have had the option of French.
Spanish faces a similar issue to Mandarin and Arabic, in that there's a lot of people who will speak it "on the street", but there's a fairly limited bredth that actually covers because of those people being similar clumps because they are in fact Spanish peoples in origin, though it does share in the prevalence of French as being "locked in" for available education in other languages.
English stands out because you actually have to learn it in some capacity to interact with a variety of practical uses. Programming languages are nigh-exclusively based on English so you have to learn it to understand large instruction libraries, the US and UK remain obscenely disproportionate for quantity and quality of scientific research so academics end up stuck getting some footing in it to readily reference relevant works in their field, the vast majority of the giant multinational conglomerates are based in the US so if you want to directly work with them, you need English available.
Did your reply button break? Anyone who starts off with snide degrading then begs for civility and constructiveness is pretty silly themselves.
I'm not "begging" for anything. I'm pointing out that you're clearly uninterested in either, since you already refused to engage any actual points made. This is extremely obvious when anyone compares your response to that of @Morphic Tide, who actually *is* engaging constructively and making sound arguments.
You make a good point here, but on the other hand, China is something of a natural and inherent superpower in Asia by weight of her size, and regardless of this being "unfair", it is still a firm fact that if you want to pick a spread of languages for global travel, Chinese clearly outweighs any other Asian language. That's pretty much the same argument for including Russian in the spread; even though it really is only one ethnostate complex, it's a *really big and important* one.
Similarly, while Arabic is indeed of limited global breadth, it *is* undeniably useful in a global language spread. Which is exactly why the United Nations includes it in their six official languages. I think it's pretty indisputable that English-French-Spanish are far more important in practice than the other three, but I don't think the United Nations erred in going with a global six.
It's really more just the US, honestly. The UK rides our coattails.
I know, but they're at least *broadly* mutually intelligible, are they not?
From what I understand in the middle east not so much
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
Tryglaw is also Polish and has no problem writing in understandable way, same for other non-English speaking members.
And he sidesteps the point again. Good job double posting too mr. etiquette.
Not nearly as international a standard as English is. French is useless in South America, and Spanish not very useful in Africa or the Muslim world. Neither are very useful in China or Japan, two huge nations for business. Chinese and Arabic are useless outside of their local areas (East Asia and the Muslim world). But English really is spoken by someone nearly everywhere. English is the standard, the others just competing ones that aren't nearly as widely adopted.
If you look at the most commonly spoken second languages, English triples the next place contender (Hindi) by 900M to 300M. And it's that number that matters, as that's a rough estimate for international adoption. Mandarin Chinese is running behind at 200M, and who wants to guess how many of those people are still living in China? Same for Hindi. The amount english beats other languages is quite simply incredible.
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KnightTemplar
Active member
Perhaps a new thread should be created for the usefulness of the English language. It seems a bit off topic for this one.
True enough,i would try better.
Christianity do not advocated homosexuals,but old testament - yes.That is why homosexual were prosecuted and sometimes killed by protestants,but not catholics,eastern churches or orthodox.
For the same reasom most of witches was burned by protestants,and practically none in catholic countries with Inquisition.
Becouse killing both witches and homosexuals is advocated by Old Testament,and many protestants considered it as more important then New Testament.