"So damn insane"?
"bad breath"?

I got the "Saddam Hussein" one but I can't tell what bird bath was supposed to be.

Apples and pears = upstairs in the context of "I never claimed i was sane."

Bird bath = laugh :)

Edit : sorry messed up the quote initially.

Nice. Still, to me, bath and laugh don't quite rhyme unless some people pronounce "bath" as "baff" :P

Yes they do.

This is interesting because although people here speak in different ways, it would still be consistent for example if they pronounce barf they would also pronounce larf, the same applies to laff and baff.

I agree.

Trust me, that is not true, if it were true, then there would be no need for grammar training in school. You can pick up a pretty good working knowledge without being taught it, but you definitely can't master English grammar that way, and definitely not much beyond advanced beginner under normal circumstances.
I'm not aware of any other language where it's outright impossible to master the grammatical rules. There are other languages where it's a challenge, but I'm not aware of any other language that hasn't produced at least one individual who understood the ins and outs.

Isnt it supposed to be chinese, dont they have like 3000 sylables

There is no need for grammar training at school. What you're referring to is not really grammar, even if language prescriptivists sometimes like to claim that it is. Grammar is the structural rules of a language, without which language wouldn't function. The idea that a native speaker could not know the grammar of their own language is a contradiction because, by definition, if you didn't know the grammar then you wouldn't be a native speaker.

You're talking about stylistic conventions, most of which were invented in the 18th century by people with a poor understanding of what grammar is and how it works. Mastering these sorts of rules would certainly be difficult as they are largely arbitrary and often contradictory. Even if you do manage to commit all these rules to memory, it's not really accurate to say that you've 'mastered English grammar'. All you've mastered is a set of conventions dreamed up several centuries ago by people with no more authority than the next man.

Interesting. This kind of reminds me of the whole "creek vs. cryk" debate in the States. I guess it must be a regional thing.

I´ve studied german and I must recognize that it is the most hard one I´ve studied (more than russian or hebrew). But phonetically is much more easy than english. English is a total disaster on this, it have no clear pronunciation rules.

Very ugly language to speak, one of the easiest to learn though. Shame i picked it at high school instead of french :(...
For those studying chinese - Mandarin is by the far easiest dialect (and most popular) to learn.It has only a few variations in the tonal langauge as opposed to Cantonese ( my 2nd tongue)
Did Japanese at Uni - it is fairly easy to pick up - the hard bit is the writing with all the hiragana,katakana & kanji to learn

Difficulty is relative - depends on your native language, on other languages you might know, whether you consider grammar, pronunciation, orthography. Also languages tend to balance these 3 elements in terms of complexity in various ways and various individuals will find different elements difficult.

If we're talking about completely mastering a language, then every single language is difficult, unless you live in the country where it's spoken. Esperanto being an exception, since it's an artificial language, and made to be easy (for westerners at least). If we're talking about spoken language then I think korean, japanese and classical arabic would win. Actually any language that has xy levels of politeness. If written - chinese hands down. For me, if written and spoken combined, also chinese - cantonese (don't know much about other dialects).

I'd never call english difficult. Yes the grammar on the proficiency level is a mess and the spelling sucks (actually that's the worst part), but, at least for the western speaker it's far easier than most languages to learn in order to be able to hold a decent conversation. The topic for me means exactly that, learning a language to some advanced level to be able to read, write and hold a proper conversation. What makes english especially easy is the position of english in today's world, the entertainment industry, the internet and the amount of books available in it. I don't know about other countries, but nowadays many kids in croatia learn english words before they learn croatian ones.

I think that the more "difficult" languages to learn to the previously mentioned degree are those that radically differ from your own (or those you know) and that have a bunch of cases for nouns, pronouns, adjectives, genders for all three, a bunch of tenses, etc. Because you have to learn tons of suffixes which largely differ depending on everything mentioned, and which have various exceptions. I think I'd find finnish more challenging than most "mainstream" languages since it has 15-16 cases. I have no idea how long it would take me to learn to get them all right. I haven't looked into greek much but it doesn't seem like a walk in the park either.