Quote:
Originally Posted by Sirtel
Standard English has relatively few grammatical quirks compared to some other languages (perhaps even many others). I think that's one of the reasons it is so widespread (aside from historical reasons, of course - British Empire and its colonies etc). It's not a difficult language to learn. For example, I started Russian at school when I was 8 and English when I was 12; we had 2 or 3 times as many Russian language lessons as we had English ones. And still I knew English better than Russian when I finished high school. English was just much simpler to learn.
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Maybe English seems relatively easy to you because you learned Russian as a second language before English. I've heard that Russian, Japanese, and English are among the most difficult foreign languages to learn. The first two because they require different mindsets and English because of all the inconsistancies with weird rules and even weirder exceptions, possibly because of all the willy nilly borrowing.
One possibility for the popularity of English in addition to its ubiquity is that it tends to allow for more succinctness than other languages, which can be important when a lot of information needs to be exchanged.