Comment on Do babies learn languages at different rates depending on how hard the language is?
sbeak@sopuli.xyz 1 day agoUnfortunately, 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…
DonAntonioMagino@feddit.nl 1 day ago
No language is easy to learn for people who never grew up with it, and every language has quirks. You’re arguing for it being hard to learn a language - this is true - not for English being uniquely hard.
Whether a language is easy or hard to learn largely depends on the languages you know already, especially as your mother tongue. Dutch is very close to English, and bas borrowed a lot of French vocabulary, so if you know those languages you will not have too hard of a time learning English. Relatively speaking, of course - to someone who only knows Mandarin, English (and French, and Dutch) will obviously be completely foreign, in everything: grammar, vocabulary and syntax.