The "u" in non-american english

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SimonSaysFYou said:

pastro243 said:

SimonSaysFYou said:

So all you foreigners, please explain why you add a 'u' to words like favourite (favorite), colour (color), and others? The words don't have the short o sound when you say them. I understand that english is a complex language with complex sounds, dialects, and irregularities...but this I've never been able to understand.

I think its very easy compared to others

Actually, I've heard from many sources that English is in fact the second most difficult language to learn, only behind Mandarin Chinese.

It depends on what your original language is, and how much it is related to english. Most germanic(English fits in here, Dutch, German, and many many others fit as well.) or romance speakers(Spanish, French, Italian, all languages that were once dialects of Latin.) On the other hand, non indo european languages that have very little recent ancestry with English will make it much harder for somebody to learn. What really hurts the learning process of English though is the ridiculous amount of exceptions to grammar and spelling. Most languages have exceptions, but none really at the level of English. That and some really off non-phonetic spellings. An example would be the words "though" and through". If you pronounced them as the sounds they make you would be looked at like you said one of the weirdest things ever.