Comment on Do babies learn languages at different rates depending on how hard the language is?
starlinguk@lemmy.world 11 hours agoEnglish is incredibly easy to learn. Why do you think it’s basically the world’s lingua franca? The spelling is just a matter of learning to spell and the grammar is dead easy. I was virtually fluent by the time I hit 11 because I’d been watching English language TV with subtitles.
The spelling is just a matter of learning to spell
The drawing is just a matter of learning to draw. What?
and the grammar is dead easy.
Subjective.
But I think it’s “easy” to learn because it’s prevalent. If Spanish or Thai were as prevalent as English you’d probably speak that and think it’s just as easy.
You can learn any language basically through enough exposure to it.
Because the British empire was absolutely huge. Which lead to many countries having English as an official language. Which means those countries would conduct trade in English. Followed by American dominance, which also has English as its main language.
And that American dominance includes dominance in media, especially films because of hollywood. Technical documents, research and especially computer-related technical documents are mainly in English for the same reason.
Sure, English is not that hard of a language. But it’s not the easiest either.
Unfortunately, English is not an easy language to learn for people who never grew up with it. I speak from experience, many of my friends do not speak English as a first language and some of the “quirks” of English are really really stupid and make it unnecessarily difficult to learn…
ViatorOmnium@piefed.social 10 hours ago
English is easy to get started but insanely hard to master. There are tons of irregular verbs, orthography is all over the place, plurals have more than a few pitfalls.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
It is the most schizophrenic language. Super easy to be understood even getting most of a sentence wrong, but can change meaning entirely with just a comma. Has at least two different root languages and as many as five depending on how you define root. Has words from almost every spoken language on the planet and has so many spelling exceptions you can have high level competitions just trying to spell different words.
And all that is just the tip of the iceberg.