I know our irregulars suck but you've got to give us credit for depth of vocabulary.
You should see French - we have even more exceptions to our rules. German manages a much more sane exception/rule ratio, but that's mostly by having much more rules.
I think the biggest problem for foreign learners isn't irregulars, but the preposition in phrasal verbs - the way say "give up", "give in", "give out" or "get up", "get away", "get about" etc. all mean different things that can't just be deduced by what you know about the verb or the preposition alone.
Emile:
I think the biggest problem for foreign learners isn't irregulars, but the preposition in phrasal verbs - the way say "give up", "give in", "give out" or "get up", "get away", "get about" etc. all mean different things that can't just be deduced by what you know about the verb or the preposition alone.
These are indeed very difficult, but in my experience (and also from my observations of other fluent non-native English speakers), by far the hardest problem is the definite article. With a...
In Russian we have the word 'Mirozdanie', which means all that exists, no matter do we know anything about it or not. The sense of this word includes you and me and every man, and every star, and every planet and all universes and all space (super) civilizations, if exist, and this world and any other worlds, if exist, and so on. Is any English word with the same sense? Or in other words, how correctly and adequately translate the Russian word 'Mirozdanie' in English? I have my web project (in Russian) “Dossier on Mirozdanie” ( http://www.mirozdanie.narod.ru ) To tell about it in English sometimes I use the word, that Google and other dictionaries recomend - 'Creation' (Creation Dossier), sometimes, when I am afraid of being accused of creationism, I use the word «Multiverse» (Multiverse Dossier), but I think, every of this words has a great shortage in the context - both of them are based on hypothetical conceptions.