Earlier quoted context omitted.
I sympathise with the view (non-native English speaker from Europe). While it's true English has a ton of inconsistencies, complications etc. they tend to happen at a slightly higher level I think. There is a reasonably big subset of English that is quite easy. French and German, not to mention Polish, are much harder to learn IMO, since the difficulties are up-front. Some examples: - French conjugation of verbs is a…
> Tenses in English are quite nicely organised into a Cartesian product of {past, present, future} x {simple, perfect, continuous} Alas, they are not. You can have a perfect continuous, for instance: ‘I had been waiting’. Furthermore, the future doesn’t fit into the same paradigm as the other two tenses, both syntactically and semantically. I prefer to think of it as follows, at least in the realis case: {non-prospec…
It's all true, and I'm not pretending English is a trivial language. My point is, you can speak fairly good English with no knowledge of any of these complications. You simply cannot escape from fundamental complexities in all the European languages I know, that need to be navigated for even simple communication. It helps that the tenses are at least somewhat organised. This "Cartesian" model is much clearer to me than e.g. the French "bag of tenses".
Of course you can argue what's "basic communication". Something like "I go train Manchester tomorrow" is fairly unambigous, but very poor use of language. My impression and point is that it's much easier to speak simple, correct English than it is to speak simple, correct {French,German,Polish}.