Let's discuss learning English as a second language (or third or fourth or whatever, for you nitpickers)!
What's the best parts of the language? The worst? The most utterly frustrating? What are the things that native speakers just don't understand about their own language?
To start it off: It took me years and years before I could figure out how to pronounce "segue".
Also, it's totally awesome how English not only has about a billion homonyms ("raise" vs. "raze" is classic, as the words are also antonyms), they also have words that are spelled them same but pronounced different: "bass" (the fish) vs. "bass" (the sound).
worst parts:
it has clearly not enough vowels (3-5 vs. for example 14-15 in german)
its rhoticized vowels are a pain in the ass.
the mangling most loanwords are being subjected to is just plain horrible. acceptable would be: leaving them alone, or ending up very fucked up and cute (like in serbian).
two dictionaries, of which both are very useless when precision is a must.
best parts:
syntax that is dead easy on paper but ambiguous as hell in practice.
garden-path sentences actually work.
it's easy to break in funny ways.
300-400 years ago it was one of the most beautiful languages in europe.
> it has clearly not enough vowels (3-5 vs. for example 14-15 in german)
shouldn't that make it easier to learn?