As a native English speaker, I hear things like “this” language is hard/easy to learn. Does this mean it is only hard/easy to learn coming from an English background, or would someone who speaks Spanish also find it similarly harder/easier to learn as well?
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>Does this mean it is only hard/easy to learn coming from an English background, or would someone who speaks Spanish also find it similarly harder/easier to learn as well?
Despite what some other commentators say, language difficulty is almost always (even if not explicitly said) relative to a person’s native language. Many people in the west will say that, like, Chinese is a hard language to learn, but if you grew up in Japan or Korea, Chinese will likely be a lot easier to learn than English.
There are definitely things that complicate a language. For example, objectively english has a relatively simple grammar (no grammatical genders, no cases, no true future tense, no/minimal subjunctive mood, minimal verb conjuncation, no honorofic speech). But it has a vast array of vocabulary and spelling due to its history and international nature, so in spite of a simple grammar, many non-native english speakers have difficulty with English. But there’s no “absolute” way to judge a language’s difficulty that’s independent of the language of what you grew up with.
btw, the US state department has a handy ranking of language difficulty for native-english speakers if you’re curious (the difficulty is based on how many 100s of hours they expect they need to train employees before they can function in that language): [https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/](https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/) (scroll down to where it starts listing out “Category I languages”). the ranking makes it clear that the difficulty comes from how different the language is from english.
Languages that use sounds that are difficult for people to say. French r’s are hard for English people. Th is hard for many. I once met a bunch of French people who could not roll their r’s while speaking Spanish. No one can speak welsh, lol
Coming to a sound you can’t easily say breaks the flow of the language in your mouth.
for me, it was always difficult grammar that tripped me up. German was almost impossible for me to learn cause declension of articles was something i had never experienced, i didn’t even know what a genitive, dative, nominitive, accusative, etc. sentence were in english and i had to learn it in german and know how to use the appropriate article for the appropriate declension and the appropriate gender (german also has 3 genders and a plural). reading/taking dictation in german however is very easy, you always pronounce every letter (some combinations of letters have a single sound) and they generally just cram a bunch of words together to create a new word.
french was super easy to learn in comparison. lots of regular verbs, grammar is pretty straightforward, you don’t even have to pronounce half the letters in a word most of the time. reading/taking dictation in french is a little more difficult because of the pronunciation though.
english is supposed to be a particularly difficult language to learn because our grammar is very irregular and often contextual. we have tons of irregular verbs, so conjugation is never straightforward. also we have things that native english speakers do by nature without even realizing we’re doing it, like order of adjectives. when using multiple adjectives to describe a noun, they’re supposed to go in a specific order (opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose), we do this naturally without even realizing it but a non-native speaker would have no idea that it sounds weird to say adjectives out of order. also we use a ton of idiomatic phrases in every day speech and borrow a lot of our language from several other languages.
Some languages are similar to others and have evolved to be their own language. It’s like if you go to Scotland or Ireland and you enter a group of people talking very fast. You’d understand most of it but still you’d have some trouble.
Spanish and Portuguese is sort of this way but many years into the future. Different words and grammar are different and those have evolved over time to be their own language with its own rules.
. Similar with Italian. Italian is a little more different . They all came from the same main language and eventually evolved.
So it would be sort of easy for a Brazilian to learn Spanish and a little more difficult to learn Italian, but way way more difficult to learn German or Russian.
And Japanese and Asian languages are way way different so that’s more tough.
[Lexical distance ](https://www.openculture.com/2017/08/a-colorful-map-visualizes-the-lexical-distances-between-europes-languages.html) from your known language(s) matter a lot. Also pronunciation (tonality, different sounds like clicks, etc) is hard since if we don’t use it, our brains become “deaf” to them. Also stuff like number of characters, language registers… All can make it very complicated for someone who is not used to that.
How different your language is from the other. Languages use patterns and rules. If the patterns and rules in your language are completely different, your learning will be harder.
The number of grammar rules, the number of exceptions to those grammar rules, and so on.
English has a lot of exceptions to the usual rules, because English has a lot of words that it simply borrowed from a different language and kept it as it is in that language.
A few things:
1) How related is the target language to your primary or native language? More similar is generally easier (although sometimes it becomes hard the keep them separate in your mind).
2) How similar are the sounds the language uses to the language(s) you already speak. For example, Spanish and Japanese have surprisingly similar phonemes, including the way that b/v and f/h are not so differentiated.
3) The degree to which words are modified by prefixes or suffixes for grammatical reasons. First of all, for a speaker whose language doesn’t do that, it’s hard to really internalize. And even if that not new, it requires memorizing a lot of new examples.
4) The language uses a different script system.
5) Lots of irregularity and exceptions. (Looking at *you* English…)
6) Written and spoken language is very different.
7) Social constructs, that may not be understood by a non-native speaker are “baked in” to the language, like levels of formality and whether you are dealing with an in- or out-group.
Learning when young. If you are over 15 the neurons used for tonal languages die off if unused. You literally can’t hear the sound. I’m learning Chinese writing but as a 75 year old spoken mandarin is out of the question. Interesting side note, if you wait too long to get hearing aids you can’t hear some sounds you used to know.
I would say that as long as rules are clear it sort of easy to understand, and less rules are better.
Pronunciation is also a big one, English is specially stupid, having word that are written the same but sound completely different, and THERE IS NO FUCKING RULE other than remembering how that specific word is pronounced.
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