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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You’re a native English speaker. You want to learn Spanish.
You come across something that’s called “prepositions”. You may not know what they are, and they may look scary, but you realise English has them. Now you just have to learn the Spanish words and rules for them.
You then come across something that’s called “nominative-accusative alignment”. No idea about what that is, but, after someone explains it to you, you realise it’s the exact same thing in English. You don’t have to learn anything this time.
Later, it’s turn for verb inflections. English has them, but on a much smaller scale. You’re going to have to spend time understanding the concept, and then learning how it works in Spanish.
Once you learn Spanish, you decide to learn another language. Some old language with less than a million speakers spoken in the depth of the Pyrenees. Cool! But they don’t use prepositions. They use postpositions instead. They don’t have nominative-accusative alignment; they have ergative-absolutive alignment instead. And they inflect verbs, just like Spanish does.
Now you have two more grammar concepts you need to understand. And, in fact, many people never manage to truly grasp what the ergative-absolutive alignment is. Good luck on your trip to the Pyrenees. You may want to stick to English.
Edit/summary: The difficulty of a language is often a subjective thing. It depends on your native language, and, to a smaller extent, on the languages you’ve already learned. (If your native language is an isolate, like mine is… you’re screwed.)
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