Informal English usage and possible translation issues

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Standard English has relatively few grammatical quirks compared to some other languages (perhaps even many others). I think that's one of the reasons it is so widespread (aside from historical reasons, of course - British Empire and its colonies etc). It's not a difficult language to learn. For example, I started Russian at school when I was 8 and English when I was 12; we had 2 or 3 times as many Russian language lessons as we had English ones. And still I knew English better than Russian when I finished high school. English was just much simpler to learn.

Maybe English seems relatively easy to you because you learned Russian as a second language before English. I've heard that Russian, Japanese, and English are among the most difficult foreign languages to learn. The first two because they require different mindsets and English because of all the inconsistancies with weird rules and even weirder exceptions, possibly because of all the willy nilly borrowing.

One possibility for the popularity of English in addition to its ubiquity is that it tends to allow for more succinctness than other languages, which can be important when a lot of information needs to be exchanged.

[Sirtel]

Perhaps. I'm in no position to comment on that, since English and Russian are the only foreign languages I've learned (plus a bit of Finnish from watching Finnish television in my childhood).

As to various grammatical rules (weird or not), Estonian has at least hundred times more of those than English. We also have lots of loans from other languages (German and Russian, mostly). So for that reason English grammar seems quite simple and straightforward to me, regardless of exceptions. But of course I don't know how hard it is to learn Estonian as a foreign language, compared to English, for example. I haven't heard any Estonians complaining about English being difficult, though.

I guess it all depends on where you live and what your native language is.