It is interesting to know about the English language

Do you know that in Shakespeare's time only a few million people spoke English? It was unknown to the rest of the world. The English language began to spread throughout the world only in the 17-th century, when the first English settlements arose in North America. The rapid growth of population in the United States in the following years increased the number of English-speakers greatly. In the course of massive migration of people in the 19-th and 20-th centuries, English became a mother tongue or one of the official languages in Canada, Australia, New Zeland and the South Africa Republic. That finally established English as a world language. Nowadays English is the most widespread language geographically, second only to Chinese in the number of people who speak it (there are 400 million speakers of English against 700 million Chinese speakers; 200 million people speak Russian and 100 million people speak German as a native language). Many people believe that the English language is rather an easy language to learn because it doesn't have such a difficult grammar as modern Russian, German or Greek. But it is true only by half. One shouldn't forget the problems of English spelling, pronunciation and prepositions; there are many exceptions to every rule; English has the largest vocabulary in the world: there are about 500 000 words and 300 000 technical terms in it. Learning any foreign language is not an easy thing. If you want to master a foreign language, you must be ready to make efforts and be patient.