as if all this wasn’t enough, English got hit by a firehose spray of words from yet more languages
I think this is very interesting because it is so true. English got changed by all the people coming into and out of the country. It was very interesting to see that.
Learning a new language meant listening hard and trying your best.
I can totally understand this, whenever you are in high school and you have to take a language, you are trying to learn it and understand it. You just try your best and figure it out.
There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort.
I found this sentence very interesting because I think there are other languages that you can pick and find different words in different languages.