This is one of the most irritating things in the English language to me. Studying Japanese, one of the first things you're taught is that there's no stress on any syllable more than any other when saying a word. It's a Mora-timed language, where English is a stress-timed language. Mora-timed languages don't put stress on certain syllables the way we do in English. By changing the way we are using a word, and thereby changing our intonation, the language just keeps getting more confusing; stress one syllable wrong and everyone in a three mile radius will go, "Why did you say that like that?"

I've always wondered about this idea, too. English, even for native speakers, is often impossible. There's so many rules about the order that words have to fall in (lazy brown dog instead of brown lazy dog, for example) and the way that we intonate and pronounce. I don't find English to be more flexible than any other language; indeed, its structure is just as, if not more complicated, than any of the romantic and east Asian languages that we struggle so much with.

I find it really interesting that we still have some class systems in modern English. It's hard to notice, especially in formal English, but there's definitely some situations where class comes into play in our language.