Everybody who has had some experience with learning English would not have problems finishing the above sentence. English is indeed easy to speak BUT hard to speak well. At the very beginning, we spoke about some of these contradictions so we will first remind you of them and then give you an opportunity to review or revise differences between American (AmE) and British English (BrE). Because even when we say English, things get complicated. There are many varieties, British and English being the most common but we could argue that we as Croatian speakers of English have come up with our own variety.
To get a perspective on things, did you know that there are 1 billion people learning English at the moment and that by 2020 this number will have doubled? It is therefore not surprising that that 1.5bn people or around one-quarter of the world’s population can communicate reasonably well in English.
Why is it English and not some other language? As we said, this is mainly because it is easy. And by easy we mean that grammar is simple, you can hear it everywhere (songs, TV, internet, media) and you can get by using only basic words and phrases. It is undisputable fact that it gets harder the more you learn it and the more proficient you get. This is due to the fact that there are lots of different words for the same thing and it can be pretty difficult to know which one is the right one. (You can say that someone is weak in 10 different ways!). There are also fixed combinations of words (You cannot ‘do a plan’, but you make it.) Maybe the biggest troublemakers are prepositions that can make all the difference (You can get up/down/on with/off with/through/in on/in with). As any other language, English loves idioms and we are not making a mountain out of a molehill if we say that this is indeed an area that is very difficult to get right. On top of everything as we have already said, British and American English are not always the same.
