English is evil: do you know the correct writing of the word "fish"? It's "ghoti"!

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.