That's all well and good until you remember that a buttload of words sound the same and are spelled differently. Not that that stops us from having things like wind (moving air) and wind (to turn) which ARE for all intents and purposes spelled phonetically and end up being the same for different reasons.

Then you have to consider that not everyone pronounces the same words the same way, like the entire thing we had recently with Mauve's handle being pronounced either "mawve" or "mohve" and the revelation both are technically correct (and that she prefers "mawve").

My mother in law calls the sink a "zinc" so dialects are going to confuse things. As far as similar words go, we just need to redefine letter sounds.

Technically speaking wind "as in wind up" is a long I and should have a silent E at the end to make it long. We make up rules then break the shit out of them.

That is why English is stupid.

I see languages as clubs to beat the stupid people with. Spanish is mostly uniform and allows for efficient beating without much flair. English is the boulder-with-a-handle that has so many bells and whistles that you can hurt someone without hitting themwithout them having to understand it.

I believe the english language does have a ton of pronunciation crap to it but the bigger issue is how bloated it is. I'm sure you could reword a sentence more ways in english than with any other language combined.

And to Bells comment about learning English through pokemon and video games:

I tried the same idea with learning Japanese by playing Super Robot Taisen: OG Saga, Endless Frontier. All I learned is that the guy who voices the main character voices Shadow the Hedgehog in japanese versions of Sonic, and japanese people are right up there with spanish-speakers in the "holy shit, you're talking to fast" spectrum.

This. Also, most of my english I learned from english speaking (mostly american) movies, tv-series and games. By high-school I was too bored at english class to actually study anything. Still I always got a 9 (out of 4-10) in the final exams.

EDIT: In finland, most start studying english at 3rd grade. Myself included.

English is not my first language, and it was pretty easy to learn to read and write. All those thousand million words people apparently have trouble spelling because they sound like something else come naturally to me. ("Fish"? What the Hell?)

Hilarity would occur when I first tried to speak with native English speakers however.

The swedish accent is so frickin' weird.

As opposed to the German accent, which sounds so hot, it makes guys change their pants and women moan and squirm AND change their pants.

I found English to be rather easy to learn as well. Even though it was taught in school, I didn't really pay attention because my teachers, for some reason, always tried to fake a British accent. Sorry, I just couldn't take those seriously.

They tought us british english at school mostly. But having learnt most of my english from movies etc. my accent became more american. Although with an obvious touch of finnish. I think I could fake it enough to not appear foreign if I travelled to the states, but that would require more careful thinking.

I am rather disappointed that no one has officially noted the distinction between the different dialects of English. 300 years of separation and we're still lumped in together under "English.You now realize that Mexico and Spain are dealing with the same situation

They should go ahead and start calling it British English and American English.

I wish English weren't my first language. I hate it with a passion. The rules are fucking confusing to refer to (oh sure, I know the rules and use them because they've been ingrained in my head, but dammit if I can't really refer to them without needing a textbook), as opposed to other, far simpler to understand things like the other Romance languages.?And a couple of Eastern languages....

Je prefere le francais et l'allemand. Y yo hablo espanol tambien.

EDIT: I guess NPF is not compatible with Vista's Japanese language bar.

Kinda like this?