Will be back ! Suggestions made* !

[RedKetchup]

Hey @RedKetchup I believe English is not your native language, is that correct? In English we would drop the 'th' from width and make it 'wider' to indicate that something had more width. We have such a collection of words in English that were borrowed from other languages that it gets a little crazy sometimes! 

yeah really not easy sometimes^^

[Hawk]

We have such a collection of words in English that were borrowed from other languages that it gets a little crazy sometimes! 

They say the English language is the hardest language to learn.

[TheOtherMicheal]

I have a friend who teaches English, he's taught in various countries in Europe and from the way he describes it, English is easy enough to learn but it's difficult to master.
Many other languages have strict rules for grammar, word meaning and so on but English can be really confusing because it sometimes uses half those rules for grammar but throws away other rules, it has no use for gender of words, some words can have multiple meanings that are not related to each other (angle is a good example, it can mean the difference between two straight lines or it can mean to go fishing), some words sound the same but have different spellings and different meanings (weather, whether and wether - all sound the same but have very different meanings).

And then we really try to mess with people's heads with words like cleave - cleave takes the same word and gives it different but completely opposite meanings,
1. it can mean cutting or splitting something apart, particularly with a sharp instrument/tool
2. it can mean to stick together or to hold together/resist separation

In many cases it's because we took similar sounding words from different languages. Using angle as an example again, the first meaning of measuring the difference between two straight lines comes from a medieval French word that originated from the Latin word angulus (a corner). The second meaning of go fish, is from an Old English word for fishhook (angil also spelt angul).
So yeah, not so hard to learn but hard to master 

[RedKetchup]

yeah i found it easy to learn... i am in a country who no one can speak it, but still learned it just by playing game and talk with people who played with me.

i would never think i can learn.... chinese... japanese... arabian... russian...
spanish , italian and german maybe. i am far to master english though. i know enough for having people understand me

like you say, there is a tons of different meaning.. take the verb to "get" ! they say in our dicts that "to get" has 110 different meaning.... 110 thats alot lol ^^
french is the opposite. with have many words that mean the same thing.  ^^


edit: oh and about "cleave" the only meaning i known for was the ability to make damage to other target in front in same time as your main target ^^ like in world of warcraft ^^

[TheOtherMicheal]

Well @RedKetchup your English is good and it's quite impressive considering you taught yourself the language from games and speaking with people 

[RedKetchup]

Well @RedKetchup your English is good and it's quite impressive considering you taught yourself the language from games and speaking with people 

yup
i think

[Hawk]

Well @RedKetchup your English is good and it's quite impressive considering you taught yourself the language from games and speaking with people 

It's as good or better than some English speaking people I've come across. 

[RedKetchup]

hehe thanks. keep in mind .... english written and spoken are 2 different things lol
i still cant watch a movie or tvshows in english... i understand nothing ^^

[Paeng]

It's as good or better than some English speaking people I've come across.

I'll say... 

Personally I don't judge language "skills"... as long as a person tries to communicate I give plenty "rope"... I'm not native english either <shrug>.

* And I think German is rather hard to learn, one for all the gender cases, but more so for the tendency to weld together two or three words into one... making for words with 20 or 30 letters 

[calli74]

I'm always very humbled by seeing people struggle to communicate in a langauge that isn't their own, even more so now that I had to learn a second language and have learned what it is to struggle, so Paeng and Red, never worry, just keep doing as you do, you are both very understandable and that goes for everyone else here that doesn't have english as a mother tongue but still does their best.

[Hawk]

As for learning or using another language other than my native English, I can count pretty fluently in Spanish and up to 7 in German. That's about the extent of my foreign language skills, well - except for a few cuss words. 

[Abandoned]

  I agree with all of the above, I too am impressed with how well others do with the English language, it is not easy, and then I keep putting American expressions in my stories.  Good thing I don't have to type in other languages, they'd be very short stories indeed.

[elemental]

I find that when I try to write something in English (especially if it's creative writing) if I try to leave out local expressions that more than likely won't make a lot of sense to non-Australians and non-English speakers it suddenly becomes much harder and it also suddenly sounds very flat and boring. English is a strange language but it does have a lot of potential for finely-tuned, nuanced expression. There can be 20 different ways to say something and they can all have slightly different meanings.

[Tom Sawyer]

There can be 20 different ways to say something and they can all have slightly different meanings.

Omg! I hope I don't sound too strange or confusing sometimes with my poor English.

[TheOtherMicheal]

 
I don't think anyone here has any trouble with our normal conversations in English, we even manage to have some technical conversations (about modding) without any real problems with the language - we English speakers often forget that over half the people we communicate with on the internet speak English as a second or third etc. etc. language because you all have good skills in English.

But it can be a little tricky sometimes even for native English speakers. As @elemental mentioned, English has a very finely tuned level of subtlety, inference/nuance and sarcasm that many other languages do not reach. This often requires slighlty changing the sound of a word to make it imply something different to what the word normally means. I know with certain European languages, changing the sound of a word often prevents people from understanding it - for example, I found Czech and Polish people had a very difficult time understanding English language phrases if they were spoken sarcastically - because those two languages don't make use of sarcasm anywhere near as much as English does!