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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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.
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