English is one of the meanest languages in the world. It persuades you when you start learning it. It tricks you into a warm gut feeling, making you believe that it is easy to learn and to master. What your teacher does not tell you: as a non-native speaker you almost never get past a point of basic understanding and even more basic capacity of expression.
Just one example is English spelling, which is extremely decoupled from pronunciation. There is a popular story about G. B. Shaw, where he sarcastically suggests to the English speaking community to spell the word fish as ghoti: f like in tough, i like in women, and sh like in nation.
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