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.
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