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Nope, sorry. Just because you want something to be true doesn't make it true.

There is really nothing very out of the ordinary in the grammar of English (except for the usual selection of oddities that you can find in every natural language). I'm not sure how you can say it's any less "uniform" than Latin or Japanese. It's also far easier to learn than Latin or Japanese for people of most linguistic backgrounds due to its analytic/isolating nature. Latin wins on phonetic spelling, but English and Japanese are pretty comparable in terms of wackiness of the writing system.

How do you know what I want?

Anyway, understanding this objectively is not trivial. Maybe worth reading this: bit.ly/JKRzxc

As a French person who has dealt with English, German, Swedish and Japanese in the past, I tend to disagree with you on this one. Of those, English is probably the easiest to learn, and by a fair amount.

That is noticeably because you English persons have been smart enough to deal away with most of the cruft that curses German and French. Common noun genders, abysmally complex verb conjugation, dozens of article cases and declinations, stupid amount of diphthongs, and other WTF rules that serve no other purpose than adding complexity such as mandatory noun capitalization or context-sensitive past participle terminations... Basically, the English grammar, although not perfect, is nice enough than it lets us foreigners focus on the challenging task of learning your vocabulary in which all common words seem to have at least two meanings, which in my opinion should be the goal of every language.

Modern Swedish tries to get rid of the cruft as well, but it has not went as far as English in some areas such as articles, and more noticeably has a much more complex pronunciation (particularly due to the strong difference between short and long vowels, and them fiendish sk and sj). Japanese is as nice as English from a grammatical point of view (easier in some areas, harder in others) and easier to pronounce, and I'd say that oral Japanese is overall a truly nice language, but then they ruin it by having a writing system that feels completely decorrelated from the oral language, effectively requiring one to learn vocabulary twice.

Edited 2012-05-26 08:31 UTC

As with zifre above, we'll have to agree to disagree until we can get some hard data. I would define complexity as how many rules one has to know. English has few big rules, but many small ones, e.g. regarding different meanings for words, which you point out.

Now if we could only find sane gender-neutral pronouns for English to replace she / he, him / her, and so on.