They say English is the international language. (Though Mandarin Chinese technically has more speakers. But most of them are in China of course. I digress.) And there's a simple reason. Well, of course it was spread far and wide by the British and American empires in the 18th and 19th centuries. (The sun never sets on the British empire they used to say. Because the sun was always shining on part of it on the earth. That's weird but true, you know.) But it's also because of how simple it is and easy to learn. I'm serious. We have only one form of the definite article. The. That's important for things like easily locating the subject in sentences you know. Artificial languages like Esperanto and Interlingua even copy this. Because it's so ingenious. (Well, it's not ingenious, because no one planned it that way. But you know what I mean.) Our verb structure is incredible simple. Our verbs only have four endings. "-(e)s", "-ed", "-ing", and rarely "-en". Everything else is done by auxiliary verbs. Our adjectives and adverbs never change. And they don't have to agree with the noun or verb in any particular way, respectively. All our case and prepositional notions are expressed by word order and prepositions. And we have natural gender. Almost all the languages of the world have grammatical gender. Which is just a way of classifying nouns. Our HS French teacher told us a door in French, la porte, is not feminine because it is a beautiful woman. It is just classified that way. And a teacher, le professeur, is always masculine, she told us. Even if your teacher is a lady. Our spelling is kind of silly. But so is the spelling of French. (In Italian they use the Montessori method of spelling, where as soon as the pronunciation of a word changes, so does the spelling. But who cares. And language is usually spoken, not written anyways.) And our pronunciation. Very few languages have our two "th" sounds. Only 40 actually (including Icelandic, European Spanish, Greek, and Welsh). But again, who cares. Because I'll let you foreign language students in on a little secret. When you pronounce those two sounds as an "s" or "z", we'll know what you mean. Because French speakers, for example, do it all the time. For example, if you say "I saw the giraffe at the zoo" and say instead "I saw 'ZAH' giraffe at the zoo", we'll know what you mean. Or if you say "that's a 'SIN' piece of paper" instead of "that's a THIN piece of paper", we will again. Because people who have just learned English do that all the time, and we know what they mean. English is one the few languages of the world that there's always one person who speaks it. In every village, in every neighborhood, in every store. It's also the language of the internet now, they say.
Also, I might as well add. My mother's first language was Polish. She grew up, really in Hamtramck, MI. A suburb of Detroit, known for it's Polish population. (Technically she was in Detroit, right on the border all her life. But her school, stores, doctors, etc. were all in Hamtramck.) But she told me. They don't have the two th sounds in Polish. And they taught her English in grade school, as was the practice back then. They told the students, say an S or Z sound, but stick your tongue all the way out. Which probably looks weird at first. But once you master the two sounds, you can avoid doing that. (Personally I think just substitution an S or Z sound would be enough. But I don't know if they teach them that when they are learning English as a second language.)
