One of my college Spanish teachers told me years ago that many people have trouble learning English as a second language because it has so many "s" sounds in it. If you don't believe me, just read that first sentence aloud - slowly - and emphasize all the "s" sounds. People speaking English to a non-English speaker sound like a hose leaking air.
And our word order - which can be described as "flexible" - is often maddening to someone learning the language. For example, the Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian) put the noun before the adjective ("chair blue" instead of the English "blue chair") to identify the thing being modified or described. It actually makes more sense to do it this way, but we don't! That's odd, especially considering the way we steal words and phrases from other languages and make them our own.
