Originally posted by: Lefty
English is dirived from french and latin, and also a hoard of other languages, but French and latin are the biggest. So there you have it.
Hehe, close but not quite. English is an Indo-European language, which is the same language family as French and Latin, but consider them to be more like cousins. English belongs to the Germanic branch of the family, so it is most closely related to German, think of these as being siblings. The problem with English is that when Britain was conquered by the Normans in 1066, the society there suddenly became controlled by French-speaking overlords. This resulted in quite a few French words finding their way into the English language. Also, there was this thing called the Great Vowel Shift which I'm not going to try to explain, but just take my word that it confused things more. Add to this that English is really good at adopting foreign words, and voila, you have the English language as we know it today.

Really though, it's not that hard. I'm trying to learn Russian at the moment, and the grammar is infinitely more complicated. There's like 10 b'zillion endings for every word, depending on what grammatical function it has in the sentence, as well as the gender of the word. Slavic languages are also in the Indo-European language family, but tend to be harder to learn than Germanic ones.