One reason why English is hard to learn

The ten most common verbs in the English language are all irregular verbs, which means one cannot conjugate them according to the standard rules. The past tense of "be" isn't be+ed, and in fact isn't any form of "be" at all - it's "was." No wonder English language learners struggle, since many verb forms have to be memorized. This great article talks about why this is so, and where some verbs come from. Did you ever wonder why politicians "grandstanded" but never "grandstood"? It's because that verb comes from the noun grandstand and not from any verb form of stand.

The author also laments that many newer verbs that come from nouns take the boring regular form of conjugation - this would apply to the real verbs that are fairly recent additions (inputted, emailed) and the newly evolving ones (IMed, texted).