Books could be written on this, but just to give a few small examples...

The third person singular present tense conjugation typically ends in 's', right? "He buys the item", "She goes to school", "The teacher likes to play basketball"... pretty regular, right? What happens if we change our simple statements to questions? The 's', for some inexplicable reason, disappears: "Does he buy the item?", "Does she go to school?", "Does the teacher like to play basketball?" The fact that we're asking a question has made our third person singular verb change to a second person singular one, for no real reason! And don't get me started on these silly little auxiliary words at the beginning of questions, like "does", which other languages simply eliminate.

This is just the beginning of verb conjugation randomness in English; it's probably the hardest part of the language to learn. Just look at the past tense, it's a complete mess; I'm a native speaker and I couldn't even come up with a verb that uses the "standard" -ed pattern within a few seconds, everything is irregular like "came", "bought", "went", "shot".

On the subject of not following patterns, there's a way in most languages to determine if a word is a verb: Spanish verbs all end in -ar -er or -ir, Japanese verbs end in -u, and so on. English verbs don't end in anything in particular.

I have to give the English verb system credit for its use of modal verbs to change tense more often than conjugations, but that's about its only positive point. And that's just one aspect of the language; we still have to go through spelling, noun cases, adjective conjugations, and plenty more before we've uncovered all the nasty little surprises English has in store for us.

In conclusion: English is a completely illogical language, due to its heavy use my many groups of people throughout history, and I feel sorry for foreign children who have to learn it.

It`s simply because English has drawn so much from other languages (both words and patterns) that it has few definite rules. There are always exceptions that make the "rules" hard to remember for a learner... Especially as the exceptions are usually quite common and encountered just as much as the patterns that do follow the rules.
Not to mention the pronunciation discrepancies that come about from melding so many different sources.

Japanese, on the other hand, is largely independent. It doesn`t draw from every which direction and therefore the rules are generally much more definite.

I like what you said Nyororin. Just like how the USA is a melting pot, so is it's language. That's not to say it isn't difficult. I will take my Roman letters over kanji anyday.

I do thank you both MMM and CaptainThunder for your responses. I guess for me, I can just tell when a word is correct in past tense or not. It just doesn't sound right. I also never learned how English is "conjugated". I never heard that word until my Spanish class. Then again, the English classes at my school were never that strong.

On the "does" thing, I guess English is trying to be more specific?

Well, if you're a native speaker, of course you'll be able to tell if a word "sounds" correct or not; you've been exposed to it all your life, and no English class for native speakers is going to focus on such basic things as "Ok children, verbs change form depending on the subject being used..." People learning English as a second language, on the other hand, have no ability whatsoever to determine if something sounds right in English without years of exposure, and therefore have to study the grammar rules more closely.

I assume you're a native speaker, anyway. Please correct me if I'm wrong :D

It's a language that derives it's origin from multiple languages from various cultures.

That, and there's the word "equestrian".

Not entirely true... all of the Katakana words are drawn from other languages, and Kanji is drawn from Chinese, right?

No, the real difference is that in many cases, English keeps the spelling and pronunciation of the words it borrows, or makes only minor changes. This leads to words that sound the same but are spelled differently, and different ways to make the same sound, etc. But Japanese converts the spelling and pronunciation of words it borrows to follow its own rules, changing spelling and sounds in many cases. This keeps it more consistent, even though a great many of its words are borrowed.

But that has little effect on grammar. You can pull in all the vocabulary you want, but if it doesn`t effect grammar and word order it`s just additional information.
English was formed from and surrounded by a number of different languages, and this had a huge effect on the development of the language itself.

Japanese developed without that sort of influence, so in the end, linguistically it`s a more "pure" language.

English is not America's language. If anything it's England's language and you guys simply use it because you haven't/can't be bothered invented American yet.

The US has no official language, but pretty much it is English. If you want to call what we speak "American" that is your business. I understand mostly what you say, and I think you understand us.