Why English Sucks

We're getting ready to leave for a trip to Japan in a couple weeks and I admit I'm nervous.  I hear or use Japanese daily with my wife, but that's much different than interacting in more formal situations with people I barely know.  Japanese is a tough language, but I'm often grateful I didn't have to learn English as a second language.  Try reading the poem below out loud.  If you're like me, you'll mispronounce at least one word.  The excerpt below was shared as part of the adult literacy tutor training I just completed.

An Excerpt from "The English Lesson" by Richard Krogh

(I found the full poem here: The English Lesson)

I take it you already know

Of tough and bough and cough and dough?

Others may stumble, but not you,

On hiccough, thorough, slough and through?

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,

To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word

That looks like beard and sounds like bird,

And dead: it's said like bed, not bead - 

For goodness sake don't call it deed!

Watch out for meat and great and threat

(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

A moth is not a moth in mother,

Nor both in bother, broth in brother,

And here is not a match for there

Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,

And then there's dose and rose and lose -

Just look them up - and goose and choose, 

And cork and work and card and ward,

And font and front and word and sword,

And do and go and thwart and cart - 

Come, come, I've hardly made a start!

A dreadful language? Man alive!

I'd mastered it when I was five!

And yet to write it, the more I tried.

I hadn't learned it at fifty five.