Examples of why English is so hard to learn...

And this is my first language...

Word Wars
Try to read these outloud as fast as you can!

1- The bandage was wound around the wound.
2- The farm was used to produce produce.
3- The dump was so full that it had to refuse refuse.
4- The soldier decised to desert his dessert in the desert.
5- Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
6- They were too close to the door to close it.
7- After a number of injections my jaw got number.
8- A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
9- The buck does funny things when the does are present.
10- When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

Word Confusion
1- There is not egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. (and we wonder why kids refuse to eat things...)
2- Sweetmeats are candies, while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.
3- Quicksand works slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither a pig nor from Guinea.
4- Why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?
5- If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth?
6- If teachers taught, why don't preachers praught?
7- If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
8- How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?
9- In English, your house can burn up as it burns down, you fill in a form by filling it out and an alarm goes off by going on.
10- Why doesn't "Buick" rhyme with "quick"?

(I read some of these to a Romanian woman who has lived in the United States for 13 years. She laughed and said "It is true!")