English, oh, English...

English can be described with a lot of adjectives. 
"Easy" sure as hell isn't one of them.
What- you don't believe me?
Well, then read this (and mind the correct pronunciation ;) )

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~clamen/misc/humour/TheChaos.html

For the ones of you who are too lazy to click on the link, here is an excerpt of the poem:

   Dearest creature in creation,
   Study English pronunciation.
   I will teach you in my verse
   Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
   I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
   Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
   Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
   So shall I!  Oh hear my prayer.
  Pray, console your loving poet,
  Make my coat look new, dear, sew it! 

   Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
   Dies and diet, lord and word,
   Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
   (Mind the latter, how it's written.)
   Now I surely will not plague you
   With such words as plaque and ague.
   But be careful how you speak:
   Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
   Cloven, oven, how and low,
   Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
 
   Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
   Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
   Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
   Exiles, similes, and reviles;
   Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
   Solar, mica, war and far;
   One, anemone, Balmoral,
   Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
   Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
   Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

The first two are quite ok, but the third one gets really tough, right?
If you feel like your world has turned upside down because a minute ago you thought you knew English...believe me, I know that feeling...I've been there :P



So today we had a barbecue at a friend's place. He lives in a dorm with lots of other students and he invited Lucas, an exchange student from Canada, to join us. After a couple of hours when it got too cold to sit outside, we went to my friend's room, and soon the topic "languages" came up. Another friend had previously stumbled upon this poem and was so fascinated by it that he kept telling us to read it. He saw his chance when we were all sitting together and opened the link. Since Lucas is a Native Speaker, we asked him to go through the poem with us. We read it step by step and he tried to explain every word we didn't know.
Once again this showed me that studying languages is something you do for a lifetime. It never stops. There will always be this one word you don't know. This one phrase you've  never heard.
Even though this is hard to accept, it's exactly what fascinates me most about languages.