Funny enough, I literally just read a discussion in the guardian where a bunch of Brits were discussing how easy English supposedly was.

The less languages they knew, the more confident they were ... xD

PS: "He who learns a new language acquires a new soul" - Czech proverb(?)

The less languages they knew, the more confident they were ... xD

Native English speaker here. Pet peeve, but it's the fewer languages they knew. "less" is for continuous quantities, "fewer" is for discrete. "less money" vs "fewer pounds"

I think this illustrates nicely that English is most definitely not easy.

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🦛

Or as I like to say, "less" is "analog", "fewer" is "digital" :)

You beat me to it on that point of grammar. I would also have been keen to correct "less" with "fewer" in this usage. A corollary point here, that many English learners do not realize, and, indeed, many native speakers of the language included, is that virtually all nouns in English have both "countable" and "noncountable" forms. We typically consider something like "apples" to be discrete, and requiring the use of "many" or "fewer" in place of "much" or "less"--however, just remove the "-s" and the opposite is the case, e.g. "How much apple did the baby eat?" And then there are the words that go the other way, e.g. "How many Englishes do we have on this planet?", or "There are many rices in South-east Asia, including glutinous rice, short-grained rice, and long-grained rice."

Indeed, English is interesting...but I think many times the explanations made of it are more confusing than the language itself needs to be.

Perhaps we might agree, however, on the essence of the original point. While many say "ignorance is bliss," we might add that "ignorance breeds confidence." :)

Blessings,

~Polyglot~

In this case maybe what was intended was "the less language"?

Optimising for fewest key strokes only makes sense transmitting to Pluto or beyond

Indeed :)

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
see Wikisyntax for the Monastery}