Language Learning Difficulty

If your native language is english, surely romance languages are going to be easier than something like japanese

The fact that English is easier to learn :)

A lot of native English speakers think English is a difficult language to learn. It's true that English has a lot of spelling and pronunciation inconsistencies caused by mixing German, Latin, Greek, etc. But English is structurally very simple: few subject/verb agreement classes, few tenses, modifications like "ask vs. command" or "desire vs. predict" are achieved by adding words instead of conjugation. There are no genders to memorize. It's probably easier tha

I learnt French, German and Italian in school. Those languages may have complexities (eg. In German, Gender for a table is male, a fly is female). However, if you heard a word, you could spell it and vice versa.English has many inconsistencies: Spelling vs pronunciation, completely different words for tenses (eg. Go/went), inconsistent pluralisation rules (look up fish vs fishes as one example), "me and" vs "and I" rules, etc.I've heard many people say that

Latin is easier to learn than English. A lot fewer edge cases and ad-hoc grammatical constructions

Arguably that makes it easier to learn for people who speak either Germanic or Romance Languages. The hard part about english is our vocabulary, compared to any Germanic or Romance language its huge, because of the history of english we have two or more words for many things - some are context based, some are just archaic, and some are in every day common use.

I think English is actually not that hard to master. What's difficult is writing it down.For every common word, English has a version derived from Celtic, Germanic and early French. Sometimes there are also versions with Latin or Greek descent. If you know any European language (stemming from Indo-European, languages like Hungarian and Finnish are something else entirely) then you'll quickly find words that you can link back to your own language.Learning all the different

I sympathise with the view (non-native English speaker from Europe).While it's true English has a ton of inconsistencies, complications etc. they tend to happen at a slightly higher level I think. There is a reasonably big subset of English that is quite easy.French and German, not to mention Polish, are much harder to learn IMO, since the difficulties are up-front. Some examples:- French conjugation of verbs is a whole world of its own- German has noun cases, and you have to re

What's with the bashing of languages excluding English & countries that are not part of the English speaking world as of late on HN?It's getting annoying and bordering on obnoxious chauvinistic & ethnocentric rhetoric.Not the prettiest nor easiest one to learn either.What makes you think that English is any better?Actually and this is an objective assessment English is one of the hardest languages to learn at least from orthography and pronunciation standpoin

Don't know German, but I've learned Spanish. I feel that English is easy because it's relatively hard for a learner to accidentally completely change the meaning of a sentence and make themselves misunderstood or, worse, say something offensive. In Spanish, a single letter changes the subject from him to me, the mood from indicative to subjunctive, etc. The use of pronouns in Spanish is especially difficult for English speakers.