But nobody uses the other past tenses.

@red, the thing is that every English verb is different. Sure, it's easier to memorize all of a verb's forms in English, but in French, you only have to know one to construct them all.

Wow, so Virtual Bob, let me jump in here and defend red house's position.

English is comparatively easy to learn than other languages. Very, very few prepositions that are commonly mixed up will fundamentally change the meaning of a sentence.

As for "he will have been eaten by then" (I changed your sentence to something more fun, hope you don't mind), that is called the "future perfect." It's easy peasy to parse! Let's do it!

He (subject, masculine) will (future indicator) have been (perfect indicator) eaten (past indicator) by then (time indicator).

To translate, simply have a masculine subject complete an action by a future point in time. Easy peasy, m'boy. If you want complex, look into relative clauses and future perfect subjunctives. Mix that shit together and you get about as complex as English can be.

English is a good linguæ Franca. It is difficult for some speakers in the world to adopt English, but considering the prior LFs were Latin and French and Greek and Persian (all Indo-European, I might mention), English is far and away the easiest of those choices. My EFL colleagues in general agree. You would be hard pressed to find a better LF than English, and for good reason: every language is as difficult to learn as every other language. The difficulty lies on the front end in some (like Russian, Korean) but on the back end of others (English, Japanese). Because English is easy on the front end and the difficult parts can be avoided even by native speakers, I think it excels as a LF.

Es-ce que vous préférez continuer la discussion en français?

Merci dub. T'es le meilleur. :-)

As for strong verb relics (swim, swam, swum, etc), we only have about 60 or 70 left, I think. Not that big of a problem.

The biggest mark against French, in my opinion, is the snobbishness of the native speakers. Never met one who would forgive my attempts at their language when the attempts fell short.

Just for the record.

What Putin and ghug claimed in their post is... not true. Malheureusement. :-)

Je m'en fous.

@dubmdell ... not sure why I (or any of the rest of you) decided we had enough time for this, but one last comment ... you suggested:

"As for 'he will have been eaten by then' (I changed your sentence to something more fun, hope you don't mind), that is called the 'future perfect.' It's easy peasy to parse! Let's do it"

Future perfect is fine (though it does not always require so many "helping verbs" ... see Russian, for instance, where it is one of five simple tenses and requires no "helpers" ... but my example was actually a bit different:

'he will have been being eaten by then' ... a future perfect progressive. This (and many similar gerundives in English) simply have no comparative form in many languages. From a pure linguistic perspective (as opposed to how easy it is to learn to get by) the tense system in English is extremely complex.

And as for the claim that prepositional confusion rarely obscures meaning, (a) I am not sure that is an accurate statement, and (b) it does not change the fact that prepositions add complexity to a language.

"The biggest mark against French, in my opinion, is the snobbishness of the native speakers. "

Because they care about the quality of their language. I wish English speakers felt the same way.

"But nobody uses the other past tenses."

I opened Le Figaro online and imparfait was in the first sentence in the first article on the frontpage.

IN speech, nobody uses it. If you read a textbook or a novel, sure.

And I should amend that to mean nobody uses the simple past.

Well, passé simple is useless, I agree.

Latin?

To me, a lingua franca should be sufficiently aesthetically pleasing. It's not enough to be simple. Spanish is simple, but rather unpleasant to my ear. Italian is a gorgeous sounding language, but what the hell are articulated prepositions? That said Italian would have to be in my top 5.

1. Latin
2. Hebrew (surprisingly simple language)
3. German
4. English

@Virtual Bob, sorry, I was on my mobile and missed the "being" making it into a progressive. Still not a terribly difficult concept, and where languages lack a progressive, then your translation job is easier. Rarely will the progressive in a future perfect progressive be so integral to meaning that you must find a way to express it. As Putin so very kindly pointed out, "in speech, nobody uses [future perfect progressive]. If you read a textbook or a novel, sure." In speech, yes, we use gerunds all the time, but I really don't think the concept is hard. On-going action. Not that hard. And when a non-native uses the present active instead of the present progressive, big deal. We know what they mean.

As for the helpers, I read Ancient Greek on a daily basis. Don't tell me Russian's tense system is easier due to verb modifications. Helping verbs are easier. Period.

I did not claim that prepositional confusion rarely obscures meaning, I claimed it rarely /changes/ meaning. For example, "I will be there on time" and "I will be there in time" is prepositional confusion, but meaning is not obscured. They carry different connotations, sure, but in a fuller context, which was intended will be clear. Another example, "I took the statue in the garden" and "I took the statue into the garden." The meanings are very different, but not so vastly that they lose meaning in the right context. I'm having real trouble thinking of an example that changes meaning even in context. I'm not sure a native speaker would misunderstand preposition confusion when in context. (Obviously, outside of context, preposition confusion is much more problematic.) As for prepositions adding complexity to language, recall that all languages have prepositions (or postpositions). Saying that English prepositions are hard is a non-statement. (I would argue postpositions are harder, probably due to my Indo-European heritage, and especially difficult in Japanese, but then I only have passing familiarity with Japanese particles.)

"To me, a lingua franca should be sufficiently aesthetically pleasing. It's not enough to be simple."

Not even going to lie, this is the only reason I suggested Italian

Esperanto. If you're going to go completely against the tradition of splitting languages and letting them evolve as their own creations, it's the only sensical choice. It's probably pointless though. 1000 years from now you'd just have dialects of esperanto everywhere.

Language is a powerful thing, and I think some research has even shown that it influences emotion (i.e. Germans have a more difficult time *feeling* nuances of love than Italians do, because their language doesn't account for them). Maybe that's total crap though, I have no idea how that thought got planted. Anybody ever heard of something like this?

@YJ, you've just illustrated exactly why Klingon is the perfect choice. It's a fully constructed language, just like Esperanto, and regular speaking of the language will make us total badasses when aliens invade, assuming we don't kill each other first.