because English borrows so much from other languages, it is amazingly flexible....so it can be used beautifully and elegantly...or made cumbersome and stupid by ineptitude. This DOES make it difficult to learn well, and no 'simple' rules...but when it is carefully honed, it can do many things....

for example, some of G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy is so difficult in Hegel's original German, that German students regularly read it in the English translation, which seems to have 'more' words to explicate the complex concepts...