Thank you Alyssa for the informative article.

It's said that if one speaks English, one speaks a hundred languages - and we certainly have words we've appropriated from scores of other languages.

But what gets me is how insanely difficult English is. I'd always heard that it was, but never realized the truth of the saying until I began to learn Tagalog (Filipino).

Imagine learning a language where in less than five minutes flat, you can learn how to *properly* pronounce almost every word in the language, and with a few weeks' practice, you can learn how to *properly* spell a word after having simply heard it.

And no, I'm not exaggerating. That's how easy Tagalog is. The grammar's structured in some ways like Yoda's speech ("masakit ng tuhod ko" translates as "really painful the knee mine", meaning "my knee really hurts"), but the spelling and pronunciation are so incredibly simple. That, and it's gender-neutral - there are no words like "his" or "her". What we call a boy would be a "batang lalaki", or "a child who is a male".

Just thought you'd like to hear all that.