Am I the only one getting up an advertisement for Sarah Palin's new book next to this article?

The "men" you are refering to are, presumably, us slashdotters?

English easy to learn? Although the grammar might be quite easy, think about the relation between how words are pronounced and how they're written. The classic example of writing fish as "ghoti" comes to mind. "gh" from "rough", "o" from "women" and "ti" from "nation". English has 40 phonemes and over 1000 different ways of writing them (Citation Steve Jones - Y: The Descent of Men). From an italian's (for instance) point view, for instance, this is just absurd. The argument that pronounciation isn't important for a programmer doesn't really hold either. Human beings obviously have great use of auditory memory in addition to visual memory when learning a language. Just try to learn a natural language without any idea on how to pronounce things.