Welcome to Gaia! ::

I've come across several misspellings on Gaia. It does give one pause, does it not?

Lanzer et al. always make errors like that.

c.f. Gaia Online.

Funny, I always thought Japanese or one of those other languages that use symbols was the hardest language on earth...

But I've come across spelling errors and typos even in my favorite novels. For just being a web site like this, I'm hardly surprised at the typos and misspellings, especially with something like "collectible" that sounds like "collectable".

My Russian-native German teacher who also speaks Italian (and English, obviously, since she was teaching an American class) and was learning Arabic and Japanese said English was the easiest language for her to learn.

I've also read about numerous other people saying English is VERY easy to learn. Yes, it's a "hodge-podge" as you say, but that makes it easier, not harder. The English grammar is VERY lax, and there are so many words that mean the same things that you can pretty much say what you want to say fairly easily.

I guess collectible is becoming like 'color' and 'colour' and all those other American-British variations.

My Advanced French teacher says that between one of the romance languages and English, English is harder. Since I'm anglophone I beg to differ with that.

Out of curiosity I asked my mom and she said the same thing but not because of spelling and grammatical rules. She said that as a language, English is harder to master to make it, for lack of better words "flow beautifully," or to attain "poetic excellence." -shrugs- Her words, not mine.

Oh yes, fire fox's spell check is my favorite feature of the browser.

The English language is so troublesome to others trying to learn it because of all our lovely variations of other language's words. Like Niccea said, there are so many strange, nonsensical rules to it.
And the slang is just becoming atrocious now. The literacy of many Gaia members is quite low, and instant messaging/laziness has caused an...array...of words that are plainly ludicrous.
So I really don't put a literacy guard up while on Gaia, since the majority of members I come across (sadly) are "writg like this and DONT use muc hard words. lol. made mistkae."

But one way you can tell English is a hard language to nail is how SO many people who speak it as their main language make constant grammar mistakes. But personally, I love grammar; Maybe a bit too much...

It's true. English is a lot harder to read and write rather than speaking. It's because most languages just have simple rules that apply to everything. We have a lot of exceptions and things that throw some people off. For example: mule, raid, hate, fleet.