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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I think the real measure is how fluently children at the same or similar levels of development and education can speak their respective languages. That is what we should call the “difficulty” of the language. I suspect most languages are roughly the same in this regard, with some caveats that the written language is much harder in some languages than others.
With that in mind, what is perhaps more relevant to our conversation is how *different* the languages are. It’s very hard to learn Japanese if your native language is English, but maybe less so if you start with Chinese or Korean as your primary language. Both of these languages are very different from Japanese in some ways, but certainly more similar to Japanese than English is. For the same reason, German or Dutch is comparatively easy for native English speakers, but likely more difficult for a Vietnamese or Portuguese person to learn.
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