That's an interesting aspect.

Yep, it is nice to think seriously about all this. All those aspects are included in social Engineering, and we must remember that most of times the user is the greatest security "vulnerability" in any system (as most users are not security experts nor even computer engineers).

This is what happens all the time on Brazil. User gets a random email with a link, don't understand what it says, and then just blindly clicks it and infect the computer with something nasty. Most of them know how to use google translate to check out what the mail is saying, but only a few care to do it. It's really sad.

Well, google translate is not perfect too. Sometimes a large text translation becomes a no-sense bunch of words.

there's another aspect supporting your claim. Many of the phishing emails are written in poor English, which is probably the result of, well, google translate. A native English speaker will notice the low-quality wording immediately, and treat the request accordingly. A person with mediocre English, on the other hand, is more likely to miss this sign of scam.

@eran nice addition.

On the other hand, if I'm contacted by my (local) bank and they're not speaking Dutch, I'm immediately suspicious...

@Shadur maybe you that you are smart enough, but some other people may think "well... english is business language; let's click the link and i'll find a website in my own language".

English is the hardest language to learn, but the easiest to communicate in. This is why the spam scam works. The email is easy to understand what they want, but when it is written with either bad grammar, phrasing, or word choice, those adept in English will know that it is not from their bank or CEO.

If you don't know English you can't read this post :P

"English is the hardest language to learn". Really? No declensions, almost no grammatical gender, almost no grammatical conjugation, etc. And not sure what makes you think it the easiest to communicate in, you seem really biased because you speak it.

+100 points to @Oriol

@MikeP It depends on the type of spam. Some spam is designed to emulate, other spam is designed to find the most gullible people. When they want gullible people poor grammar is better because these people have already shown they will ignore red flags.

Why would anyone click on this kind of link in an email he doesn't understand? If you receive an email from your local US bank and it's written in Chinese, will you click on the links??? Furthermore, statistically people tend to disregard errors, and receiving important emails in a foreign language won't be any different...

People clicking in a link on a suspicious email that they do not understand is part of the "Social Engineering" so far used by hackers. I say many times that Users are oftenly the easiest "security vulnerability" to exploit in a system.

@Oriol ...and no pronunciation rules, unlike f.ex. Greek or Italian (and maybe Spanish, French and Portuguese) where you don't need to hear a word to know how it's pronounced, you just need to know the very consistent pronunciation rules and you can read any text pronouncing most words correctly and yet not understanding a single word. That makes English much harder to learn. Uncommon words often have in parentheses "pronounced xyz" added to them in articles or other written texts. Native speakers call the English pronunciation a mess all the time. Let's pronounce (or understand) "You read".

@SantiBailors I'm sorry, but Portuguese is much, much harder, as orthography certainly does not inform pronunciation and speakers can't agree even on basic things like the letters 'r' or 's'.

@AndreTerra Thanks, I wasn't sure about Portuguese so I had put it under the "maybe". I rest my case though; English is definitely a particularly difficult language to learn for non-natives, due to its characteristics, especially about how to pronounce it. I read this several times from linguists and native speakers; This is the first source I found: To some extent English - an incredibly complex and idiomatic language - has become the main international tongue, although Spanish would have been simpler. (Alan Watts)

@SantiBailors But you don't have to pronounce anything to understand a written English text.

@kubanczyk Of course you don't have to pronounce anything to understand a written English text, but you have to have learned the language to some extent, that's why the subject I was responding to (English being easy or difficult to learn) came out. People who learned English well enough to correctly read a written text in silence but not well enough to read it out loud do exist but are an exception.

@SantiBailors English is super-easy to learn, as long as you don't care about pronunciation. The super-easy way works for billions of people, whereas hundreds of millions can pronounce correctly. That's an order of magnitude there. 5 year olds learn it in preschools all over the world (I know mine does).

@kubanczyk And how many people try to learn it without trying to learn to speak it ? Yours is a big stretch. Most people who try to learn a language would not even consider doing so without also learning how to pronounce it. And all the arguments from your last comment have nothing to do with English, they apply to any language (also, being a 5 years old is a huge advantage for learning a language, especially the pronunciation).

@Oriol Had to look up "declensions", but it seems that that's a superset that includes singular-vs-plural. If so, then yes, English has declensions. It's also tonal in some cases, with no indication in the written language - for example, the verb "envelope" vs the noun. I couldn't say how difficult the language is, but as I understand it the difficulties come from the exceptions, not the rules.

@Izkata True, I meant grammatical cases. I always mess up the terms.

@Oriol As a one-off anecdote of an English speaker teaching himself rudimentary Japanese, I think those made the language easier to learn...