English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

Or even phrases that later entered mainstream English - "long time no see", "no can do", etc.

Yeah, part of the bargain of making English the international language is a shared understanding that bad English is good enough. It doesn’t fly in any other language that I’ve used.

Sometimes I point this out to mollify friends who complain about English linguistic/cultural hegemony. The flip side is that, e.g., my French colleagues are much more able to insist upon standards in their mother tongue.

> these words are of french origin

It seems they are derived from Latin, not French.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/exacerbate is from Latin or from:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/exacerbation

https://www.etymonline.com/word/defenestration

I think there's a lot of bad linguistics in the linked article and in these comments, but your comment being more substantial than most I decided to focus my criticism there, sorry if that comes of as a bit adversarial. I just think that the general point that $language would be objectively easier/harder/more efficient/less efficient than $other_language based on arbitrary factoids is almost always at best irrelevant and at worst wrong. The easiest language to learn is the one that's most similar to yours. A Japanese speaker would find Korean significantly easier to learn than Spanish. Any attempt to go beyond that is IMO a fool's errand that's just going to confirm your own biases based on the languages you know and the languages you don't know.

>English has a very simple, pre-defined sentence structure. Run-on sentence are discouraged. The language has almost logical decisions regarding the use of the verb “be”. Words are rarely skipped because they are implied. By contrast Russian is much more contextual and free flowing. “I love you”, “you I love”, and “love I you” are all valid sentences with slightly different meanings. “To be” is often skipped. “I hungry” is valid because what else would you put between those two words other than “am”?

You make many points that I'm not sure I follow. Most of it boils down to "English is rather analytical, Russian is rather synthetic", which is of course correct but doesn't really mean much.

Chinese is even more analytic than English, Spanish is significantly more synthetic than either of them. What can we extrapolate from that? Not much.

Regarding the copula "to be" it's an other arbitrary attribute of a language. Some English dialects actually allow it to be dropped, in sentences like "he stupid". Japanese is also zero copula as are many languages from many language families: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_copula , I don't really think it means a lot when it comes to the difficulty of these languages.

>2. English has almost no conjugation. The only word changes that happen. Are for present to past or past perfect tenses (go/went/gone). By contrast in Russian you end up conjugating loads of words depending on the relationships between the object and the subject based on direction, action, possession, and gender.

>3. English has nine tenses plus the infinitive. Russian has 3+1, which encapsulate the meaning of the 9+1 in English with implied context.

Again, what's the argument? If anything it sounds like Russian is easier then?

Russian has verb aspect (perfect and imperfect forms) which is a rather big hurdle for us western learners not used to memorizing verbs in somewhat arbitrary pairs. You also have a huge mess of verbs of motions that are some of the most common ones and require a lot of practice to get right. идти/ехать/ходить/сходить/зайти/пройти... I get PTSD just thinking about it. However Russian conjugations are for the most part rather simple. Meanwhile Portuguese has 12 synthetic tenses (including 3 subjunctives for your pleasure), not counting the compound ones with ter/haver. Aspect is expressed through different tenses, not through different verbs like in Russian. What do we conclude from this? Again, not much IMO.

>5. Word munging is uncommon in English. When a new word is coined it is mostly atomic (app, tweet, selfie). You rarely can take two existing words and combine them with a prefix, a suffix, an ending and get a new word that is grammatically correct. In Russian “protoplanotraincycled” would be a word you could coin and use on the fly.

Just give up. Give in. Give it back. Take me on and attempt to take me over. Take it up with the linguists if you won't take my word for it. That's my take. It's a bit silly that I have to undertake this argument. We should really take it for granted that is is not true.

Some languages like Russian and German like to build compound words, in modern English and French it's a bit less common and productive. Again, so what?

Note that many English word have this compound structure, it's just often less obvious because they've been borrowed from latin or French so it obscures it somewhat. "впечатление" and "impression" for instance have exactly the same structure (в + печать + ~ение", "in + press + ~ion"), it's just probably less obvious to a native anglo than it is to your average drug because the English word is a direct loan from french. "app" is short for "application" which has exactly the same structure as приложение.

>Aside from the extra/more specific tenses and the articles, Russian contains all the complexity of English.

And English contains all the complexity of Russian. It's just expressed differently. I defy you to find an idea or concept in Russian that couldn't be expressed in English, Catalan, Arabic or Chinese. They would just sometimes be expressed differently.

If you're talking purely from a grammatical perspective then I disagree. English tenses are more varied than Russian ones, especially in the past and in the subjunctive. "If he had been there, he would've known". I've seen many Russian speakers with a high level of proficiency in English who still routinely make mistakes in these types of constructions.

>Where the drudgery of English comes in is vocabulary.

лекарь/врач/доктор, состояние/условие, перестать/остановить, вдруг/внезапно/неожиданно, прожить/выжить, идти/ехать/езжать, революция/переворот/восстание, международный/интернациональный, русский/россиский, шофёр/водитель. That's just out of the top of my head.

Interrestingly English and Russian share a similar trait here: English has many doublons like freedom/liberty which are from germanic and latin roots respectively. Russian does the same thing but with slavic and western european roots (generally german and french, nowadays also routinely english).

These faux-synonims that translate to the same thing in your language but carry sometimes important distinctions are always tricky, and in my experience they exist in every language. English has "do" and "make", French has only "faire" but English only has "know" while French has "savoir" and "connaitre".

English has "to put" while Russian has "положить" and "поставить". Russian loves to use very specific verbs where English would just use "to be": находиться, стоять, лежать, висеть and a few others. Similarly Portuguese has "ser", "estar" and "ficar" which can't usually be used interchangeably.

Anyway, I could go on. My TL;DR is that the concept of a language being objectively easier than an other is usually very shortsighted and just demonstrates a certain bias caused by the speaker's own language. Spanish is generally considered to be a relatively simple language by native English speaker, yet it's not grammatically simple. Chinese is vastly more analytic than even English, most learners will tell you that its grammar is usually very easy to grasp, yet it's often considered one of the hardest "mainstream" languages to learn for westerners.

The idea that a language like Russian would be harder to pick up or easier to master than English is laugable to me, as a non-native speaker of either. Russian is riddled with unpredictable stress patterns, irregular declensions and subtle use of word order (“I love you”, “you I love”, and “love I you” only mean the same thing superficially, mastering the nuance is where it gets tricky). English has complicated spelling rules, a mish mash of vocabulary from various origins in common use, conjugations that are only superficially simple (the forms are simple, the usage isn't). It also has phonemes like "th" which are rather uncommon and are hard to pronounce for most non-native speakers.

As for Russian's advanced stuff: after две you put feminine adjectives in the nominative plural and the noun in the genitive singular. But you can also put adjectives in the genitive plural if you want, but it's less common. Unless the stress position in the noun is different between the nominative plural and the genitive singular, in that case native speakers are more likely to use the genitive of the adjective.

That's just one random factoid I have in the back of my brain for having studied Russian. I could go on for a long time.