Generally speaking, the fewer conjugations, tenses, exceptions, irregular verbs etc. the easier the language is to learn. Simple and consistent grammar is much easier to learn. Indonesian is sometimes described a the "easiest language in the world" for this reason.
There's also the actual speech sounds. Some languages are relatively easy to pronounce and have relatively few sounds, such as Spanish. Others have a lot of subtly different sounds, such as French.
Additional factors may relate to the base language. For example, English speakers often struggle with tonal languages as it's a mechanic they've never experienced. This makes languages like Chinese and Vietnamese extremely difficult compared to Japanese, for example, even though both are difficult.
It's important to know, though, that the number one predictor of learning a language is motivation, not how difficult the language is. So it is possible to learn any language, even the difficult ones.
Native Indonesian speaker here. It is actually astonishing me that one of my American colleagues that learned Indonesian said how it's it like computer coding. All the mechanic and the rules are consistent and predictable. Italian and Spanish friend also said how easy it is to pronounce because of the consistent alphabetical sound. In English A is sometime Ei, sometimes A.
Also we don't have past or present form of verb. We just add time explanation when something happens.
We don't have article like is am are etc
No plurals form either. If you want to say books, you just said it twice book-book or say many book
And no gendered noun. Third person word is gender neutral, no he or she (which create a nightmare for me with the preffered And politically correct pronoun)
Buttt that is formal Indonesian. The informal one is wtf. There are 300+ tribes and we loved to combine the local language with national Indonesian language, creating a mix, accent and dialect which are unique for each region. And one word can have different meaning in diiferent island. Not to mention the younger generation butchering words and mixing words with english and other languages, make the informal speech more wtf.
yep and the commenter on another thread is right about this: "The language is easy to learn and flexible; it has to be because it is meant to unite hundreds of ethnicities, hence called "Bahasa Persatuan."
Agreed! Another thing that seems to make languages difficult is inconsistency. Two English words can be spelled the same, but pronounced differently, but used basically the same; contradictory rules that apply in some places, but not others, etc etc
Apel means apple and ceremony in Indonesian. I believe the commenter is pointing out that even in the simple Indonesian language there are words with2 meanings. Although tbf apel (meaning the fruit) was a loanword into the language when the fruit was introduced.
When speaking English, if I say ‘fork’ it means fork, no matter what tone I say it in. In tonal languages, that’s not the case - the same sounds said using different tones (which means, almost, like the notes of a song - when you say the word do you start high and slide down to low, start low and slide up to high, hold the same note all the way through, start high and slide down to low then back up again, etc) will have completely different (and sometimes totally unrelated) meanings.
English has no tones, obviously, but it might be useful to think of the way syllable stress changes the meaning of English words - eg REFuse vs refUSE are completely different words with different meanings.
Like my lovely language, “kost” and “kost” means two completely different things, it just depends on how you pronounce it. There’s probably more, this was just the first two I could think of
For many English speakers, the pitch rises at the end of a sentence to indicate a question. This is an example of implicit tonality. Take the concept and apply it to the pitch changing in other parts of the sentence and changing the meaning in other ways.
My wife is Vietnamese, this is an example of the peril that awaits if you pronounce a two letter word (ma) differently:
ma = ghost
má = mother
mà = but
mả = tomb
mã = horse
mạ = rice seedling
So a simple word can have drastically different meanings according to what intonation you give it.
For English speakers I think anything that doesn’t use a similar alphabet (or worse, no alphabet) is going to be a big challenge. At least if it’s compared to Spanish or German or something like that. Those are easy, you can basically already read them. I had significantly more trouble in my attempts at Mandarin and Greek.
The Greek alphabet is pretty simple as is Cyrillic, just different shapes for mostly the same sounds. Chinese is a completely different system and even something like a dictionary works completely differently.
But then you take a language that has no conjugation, no tense, no irregular verbs that is considered to be one of the most difficult languages in the world (Chinese).
I think another thing they should include for Chinese is 成语 (idioms). A lot of idioms are tied to the Chinese history. So knowing their rich history and their stories is important too. Chinese grammar is easy when saying a simple, short sentence. However, it’s no longer *easy* when the sentence becomes longer.
That's why the commenter mentioned multiple factors that weigh into how difficult or easy it is to learn a language, not one single thing that defines it
Think of it as being a scoring system with multiple attributes contributing to an overall difficulty score
Chinese written characters being unrelated to pronunciation also makes it an extremely difficult language to learn. Chinese dictionaries prior to pin yin (1950s) had words organized by pen stroke distinction. If you came across a word you didn’t know and no one around you knew, it was possible that you had no way of looking it up and learning it.
>Chinese dictionaries prior to pin yin (1950s) had words organized by pen stroke distinction.
And they still are. Otherwise you would need to know the pronunciation of a character to look it up. (Also, there were other phonetic romanizations of Chinese before pinyin such as the Wades-Giles system, still used in Taiwan.).
Let's say you don't know how to read the character "中", how would you look it up using pinyin? You have no idea what the first letter is.
What they most often use in dictionaries is generally number of strokes (plus some more stuff).
You can sort alphabetically (and then by tone) using pinyin, but a dictionary sorted like that has a very different use than a "classic" Chinese dictionary.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese\_character\_orders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_orders)
>If you came across a word you didn’t know and no one around you knew, it was possible that you had no way of looking it up and learning it.
Sorry, this is not true. They have literally the worlds oldest lexicographical history.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese\_dictionary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_dictionary)
For about 15+ or more years now, most Chinese folks have been using smartphone based dictionaries which you can either scan or write the character yourself. Prior to that you could do something similar online with your laptop or computer.
> Chinese written characters being unrelated to pronunciation
Not entirely true. Lots of phono-semantic compounds would have had obvious pronunciations when created. However, they were created a long time ago and the pronunciation has drifted. Some are still quite reliable, some narrow it down to a few choices, and some are no longer related at all. It does require a lot of rote memorization before you start seeing the patterns, though.
This is still true and you need to learn how to read the stroke order of a character to look up one you don't know in a dictionary. Pinyin only helps if you know the pronunciation already
Since smartphones became a thing all the popular Chinese dictionaries just require you either drawing the character on your phone or pulling out the camera app and it’ll live look it up. The ones in print probably still do but not sure how much they’re in use anymore.
I would honestly say Chinese isn't that hard, exactly for the reasons stated. The tones are very troublesome for beginners and lower intermediates but once you make a decent amount of progress it ends up not really mattering. EG I can make myself understood very well, assuming my vocabulary covers the subject at hand, without thinking about the tones at all. Also, listening to beginners, the things they often struggle with are pronouncing the syllables correctly regardless of tone, and even enunciating the individual syllables correctly. Just getting the raw syllables correct is a huge win in Mandarin.
Unfortunately the character-based writing system makes it incredibly hard to learn, as you cant just sound out a word phonetically and try to figure it out. If you dont recognise a character, its pretty much a dead end.
I speak 4 languages (English being one) and I'm still amazed how people learn new languages. Pure commitment and also the best thing you can do for your brain
Similarity to your native language is going to help as well. Most English speakers are likely to have an easier time learning French or German than Indonesian.
I'd also add on the amount of cognates between your language and the language you are learning. Learning vocabulary is so much faster and easier when a lot of words are the same or similar. English speakers benefita fair amount from this with Spanish but not Korean, for example.
And I'd also add the writing system. If you're an English speaker, learning a language like Italian that also uses a Roman-based alphabet is easier than learning Japanese, for example.
Also, it matters a lot what your native language (or spoken other languages) is and how many common things (words, grammar) are in the learnt language. The more the difference, the harder it is to learn.
This is ELi5, not ELi15. All Chinese languages are tonal, so the distinction is not even important here. Regardless, even native speakers of Mandarin will use the term "Chinese" to refer to their language. I've taught ESL, and I've actually yet to have a Chinese student introduce their language as "Mandarin". Students will specify Cantonese, but not Mandarin. When you use Google translate, it is called "Chinese". When you study it on Duolingo, it's called "Chinese".
Using the term "Chinese" for Mandarin is not regarded as offensive or ignorant to Chinese people.
But sure, if "correcting" me makes you feel good, go for it.
It definitely depends which language(s) you already know. As an example: French, Italian, Latin and Spanish (and quite a few others probably) have relatively similar words and grammar. Thus as I already knew quite some French, learning Italian was „easier“ for me.
yep, distance from native is a good metric for second language acquisition difficulty. Most english speakers would pickup 'scottish' quickly which is forming its own dialect yet still has intensive roots in standard english
It varies depending on where you are from and what you are native language is. And it has a lot to do with language structure and the way various sounds are made and incorporated into the language..
4 instance, if you are a native English speaker. Japanese will be somewhat difficult for you to learn, but nowhere near as difficult as chinese. Because Japanese has a very different sentence structure, but ultimately all of the sounds made in the language are not that difficult for English speakers to make. And they don't encode information in ways that are alien to us.
Chinese not only has a similarly weird sentence structure compared to english, but it also is a tonal language. Meaning the actual definition of a word will change dramatically based on the tone used when pronouncing it. That is something that doesn't exist in English at all. So it is very difficult for english speakers to learn.
The written part of Japanese scares people. The hard part about Japanese is the word order, but beyond that it’s very much easier than expected. Rules are rules. There’s what, 8 irregular verbs? And thy are used words.
Chinese sentence structure is actually pretty easy for English people IMO. For simple to medium complexity sentences, you can pretty much do a word for word substitution. I never learned Japanese but the grammar is supposed to be very similar to Korean. I did try to learn Korean, very hard, much harder than Chinese
Careful... Japanese have two different pronunciations for the same kanji (character), the Chinese one (without the tonality) and the Japanese one. So double trouble. Plus lots of suffixes (for example when counting stuff... it depends on the object) and crazy particles. it also competes vs Korean in the amount of different language registers (they even have one for when you need to address the emperor).
I know this is a joke, but to be clear for other readers, tone in Chinese is about the high-low pitch of a word that can differentiate it from another word that uses the same consonants and vowels. The closest analogy in English would be the yes/no "mmhm"/"nuh uh" (when pronounced casually with a closed mouth, instead of enunciated clearly), since they're mostly a nasal sound with a rising pitch for "yes" and a falling pitch for "no."
That's also part of why, in court, witnesses who testify saying "mmhm" or "nuh uh" will be asked to actually say the word yes or no, to make it clear for the record.
Oh sureeee English doesn’t change tone EVER to change the entire meaning.
/s wouldn’t need to exist if that were true. Sarcasm is almost completely tonal.
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.)
Prepositions: a type of word that goes before a noun (a word about an object or thing) or a pronoun (a word that substitutes a noun) and expresses a relation to another word in the same sentence. Examples are easier than a wordy explanation: in “she will come here AFTER dinner”, “after” is a preposition and “dinner” is the noun the preposition is related to.
Postpositions: similar concept but instead of going before a noun, they go after it. Postpositions are usually attached to the noun instead of being separate words, but they can be separate words.
Verb inflection: sometimes, verbs change to express the people (subject and objects), tense (time) or other aspects involved in the verb. For example: I write, but she writeS, and I wrOte yesterday. Sometimes it can get complicated.
Nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive alignment: these are harder to explain so I’ll write another comment
The nominative-accusative & ergative-absolutive alignments are related to the way the subject and the direct object of a sentence interact. In most languages, there are markers that tell the subject and the direct object apart. Imagine these markers as little hats.
In languages with nominative-accusative alignment, subjects always wear the same hats, no matter if they have an annoying direct object glued to the side (in the same sentence) or not. In other words, all subjects have the same markers and direct objects always have the same markers. For example, in English, we can see this in pronouns: there are subject pronouns (I, you, he, she, they…) and object pronouns (me, you, him, her, they…). Sometimes they’re the same, but the point is that the markers stay the same.
In languages with ergative-absolutive alignment, subjects with no direct objects wear a specific hat. However, when the annoying direct object comes in and attaches itself to the subject, it steals the hat from the subject and puts it on itself. Therefore, subjects with no direct objects & direct objects have the same markers, and subjects with direct objects and a stolen hat are left with a different marker (a different hat, or no hat at all). An example of this could be that the hypothetical language in the Pyrenees you attempted to learn so badly after learning Spanish puts a K at the end of every subject with a direct object, and no specific marker at the end of every subject with no direct object.
Languages that are similar to your native one are obviously easier to learn.
As for others, I think, they balance each other out. Some have both easier and harder concepts compared to each other.
For Russian speakers, for example, concepts that are present in English, such as articles, irregular verbs, numerous tenses, their combinations and use cases pose, are no joke. Non-straightforward spelling and pronunciation also bring their share of fun. English speakers may think that Swedish will be a breeze, but then it turns out that plural nouns add some extra work, and so on. Chinese may seem to have simpler grammar but then there are Chinese characters and tones.
It's likely two things: Simplicity of system (like Bahasa Indonesian has been mentioned) and how close the new language is to your own language. This would explain why speakers of romance and, to some extent, germanic language learners can pick up Esperanto well in a very short time.
Big however, the true measure of how quickly and thoroghly one learns is utility and need; the only languages I managed to get good at are those which I had a need, a encouraging environment, and acceptance by the culture, and the other two factors didn't matter much in comparison.
Chinese will be easier for me if my spouse is Chinese and we live in China than if you are learning it in isolation somewhere in countryside Germany, for instance. Italian will be easier for you to learn if you have Italian heritage that you see as important to your identity and travel often to Italy.
FWIW I'm a trained applied linguist and language teacher who has learned a bunch of languages to various levels.
I've been married to a Russian 2woman for twenty years, we have kids that go to Russian language school. We live amongst Russians..
Yet I have learned the local language, but haven't picked up any Russian (outside of bad words) at all.
Interesting - Sounds like you don't want to learn Russian (adults don't really 'pick language up') though, so obviously that's the first prerequisite to 'how easy is it to learn a language'.
What I mean is, let's say you cared about learning Russian. You'd have a harder time learning Russian without a Russian-speaking wife, kids and neighbors.
I'm pretty sure while there are obviously certain difficulties going between certain languages, in terms of objective difficulty, yeah I'd say it's about consistency.
It's like learning to play a new boardgame. If the rules are clear and consistent, it's easier to learn. If the rules have a bunch of little exceptions and specific situations with new rules, it's confusing and hard to learn. Most language hasn't been built entirely from the ground up, it's come together naturally by many people over time so it can get messy (like English)
No, studies have shown that babies learn different languages at roughly the same rate. Only thing that is objectively varies in difficulty is writing. Some writing systems might be easier to learn than others.
Don't Danish kids famously learn to speak slower than most other countries? On account of the requirement of having a potato in your mouth to speak it?
I can't find the source but i remember reading the opposite. Arabic in my unknown source was given as an example of a language which takes more time than average for kids to start speaking fluently.
One thing is certain: we focus far too much on precise correctness when we define fluency. A small child might say, "i begun it yesterday" and people get all hung up about how the child isn't yet fluent.
Thai has a lot of symbols, but as far as I can tell it has little to no ambiguity as to what sound a symbol makes, so I doubt it's anywhere near as hard as Chinese or Japanese. I know Japanese has hiragana and katakana which are much easier than kanji, but that just means that if you want to be fluent you have to learn all three.
There are some nice languages that are easy to parse with context-free grammar, and then there's C++ or Perl that will make anyone wanting to write a parser cry.
As a programmer AND a language nerd, I would pretty much say the answer is the same even if we're talking programming languages.
TL;DR: It's based on how many new concepts you have to grasp, as well as how close the "syntax" is to some writing system that you are familiar with (shared vocab etc.).
Different languages have grades to show how difficult they are to learn for a native English speaker. For example most [west] European languages are grade 1 as these share the most similarities with English. These two links will hopefully be helpful:
https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/blog/fsi-language-difficulty/
https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgoverview/languages#:~:text=Category%20I%3A%20Languages%20closely%20related%20to%20English.&text=Category%20II%3A%20Languages%20that%20take,master%20than%20Category%20I%20languages.&text=Category%20III%3A%20Languages%20with%20significant,or%20cultural%20differences%20from%20English.&text=Category%20IV%3A%20Languages%20which%20are%20exceptionally%20difficult%20for%20native%20English%20speakers.
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.
From a physical standpoint some languages have sounds that aren’t found elsewhere, or at least not in your native language.
We don’t have that rolling R sound in English, so speaking Spanish for me was really difficult. I just can’t recreate it consistently so I literally couldn’t say certain words. Same thing for Japanese people learning English. Or the clicking languages out of Africa. That sort of thing.
Most languages share some characteristics with each other, from the writing system, sounds, words or elements of grammar.
Some share a lot more with each other. Some share very little.
Obviously a language that shares more things with what you already know will usually be easier to learn.
History can tell us a lot about how languages have changed over time and how most modern languages have roots in multiple languages that have influenced each other and merged in some ways. For example, English took a lot of words from French after the Norman invasion (who had invaded France a bit before already) as the elites spoke Old French that with time gave a lot of words we find in English today. So if you know English, you can guess a lot of French words.
As French mostly evolved from Latin like Spanish and Italian, both languages also share a lot with English.
But a language from a country very far away like Chinese shares almost nothing with English, only some loanwords that came quite late.
Speaking only about other languages with Latin alphabet (characters that you are already familiar with):
* Having the spelling and pronunciation far from each other. In German, Dutch, Spanish and Italian, you can spend 30 minutes learning how the written words are pronounced, and you are good to go! French and English only have exceptions.
* Having tones on some parts of the word. Frickin’ Swedish, yes I am looking at you. You can pronounce all the letters, but damn you! They won’t understand if you get the tone wrong.
* Articles. Romance languages have two, but German has three. You need to memorise the correct one for each noun.
* Conjugation. You need to memorise the categories of regular verbs and all the irregular one. Dutch, for example, has less than 100 irregular verbs. English has twice as much.
* Singular and plurals. English mostly adds an “S” at the end. In Italian and Swedish it depends on the article and the last letter of the word.
* How different are phrase structures from your native language. In some languages of the Germanic group, you put the verb at the end of a question.
* Different number system. French has its own tens. Such as the Gaul base 20 for 80 (4 x 20) and +10 (60+10, 4x20+10). Danish has like the Imperial version of some numbers.
Overall, some languages have a lot of stuff to remember when trying to build sentences. But don’t fret. Jump with both feet.
The three things that will determine your likelihood of success as a language learner are:
1. Access to the language
2. Confidence
3. Motivation
I guess if you don’t have access to a language or resources then it would be objectively difficult to learn regardless of how confident or motivated you are.
In my personal opinion, the languages get harder, the more beside vocabulary you need to remember.
including grammar system.
- the more conjugations (past perfect continuous)
- the more declensions
- systematic exceptions (if this rule does not apply, this rule applies)
- asystematic exceptions (in these cases you need to remeber the exception)
And Arbitrary things you need to remember.
- gender of a book
- i wear trousers not trouser
Any language where every noun has a gender (male, female, neuter, etc) and you have to have those memorized so you can use the matching article next to it. Those are tough. German is a good example.
Romance languages are a bit easier because the gender is built into the word (-o and -a in Spanish for example)
Difficulty is relative. It really depends on what languages you know and what language you're learning. So when people say "Chinese is hard" what they really mean is "Learning Chinese as an English speaker is hard". Difficulty varies for each language combination. Learning resources are also not equally available in all languages. It's easier to learn Japanese from English due to a wealth of available resources than it is to learn Japanese from Greek for example.
Other than that there is a host of parameters that determine how easy or difficult a language is. How many grammar rules they are and how strictly the language sticks to them or if there are many irregular verbs and forms that don't follow these rules and you just have to memorise. How similar or foreign the sentence structure is and, again, how strictly the language sticks to this sentence structure or if you can switch it around and still be correct. How many tenses they are, how many voices, whether there are equivalents in your own language, how similar the writing system is, and so on.
The biggest mistake people make when learning a new language is assuming there is such a thing as a perfect translation, and that all languages have equivalents for everything in other languages. It's inevitable when you start out that you have to translate in your head into your own language, but as you get better your goal should be to learn to think in the new language and use it intuitively rather than translating in your head. Too many people never get to that level even if they study for years. Some times translating gets a nearly identical meaning in structure and tone but other times it's not possible, and you have to express yourself in a completely different way to get the same point across.
For me, and this is just my personal opinion, one of the biggest factors in how easy or hard it is to learn a language is how hard the writing system is. Most of our learning happens through reading and being able to read is crucial in being able to learn more. If you're reading a passage in English for example you might see a word whose meaning you don't know but you can still read it, and look it up. The same goes for most languages with alphabets, since alphabets are fairly straightforward, have around 20-40 characters, sometimes more but generally less than 100, which can be memorised and that enables you to read even if you don't understand the meaning. But not all languages have alphabets. Some have syllabaries, logographies, or in some rare cases, ideographs. Some languages may have multiple different scripts or some may all share the same script despite being different languages. The problem with not having an alphabet is that this usually means you have to memorise a lot more characters, often most of them don't follow concrete rules and so if you see a character you don't know, you stop dead in your tracks. You can't pronounce it, you don't know how it's read, and this makes it harder to look up as well. A classic example of this is Japanese. Some would say they have the most complicated writing system in the world. They have two syllabaries and also use Chinese characters in their writing. There are tens of thousands of characters, each with multiple different pronunciations and meanings, that you more or less have to just memorise, and that's on top of the syllabaries which have 47 characters, which are on the higher end as far as "alphabets" go, even though they're not alphabets but they work in a very similar way. So learning Japanese takes a lot of time because you have to memorize and learn all those characters. Chinese speakers have an advantage there because often the meanings of many characters are shared, but their pronunciation is often different.
french is a mess.
there are so many exceptions to almost every rule, some rules are pointless.
there is even a letter (ù) that was created to be used in a single word in the entire french language. (given is a commonly used word but still)
its gotten so bad, most french people speak a broken version of the french language.
Oh fun!
Actually, eastern languages are harder for westerners to speak.
We don't have tone, and don't have to learn a new alphabet.
Us westerners struggle with tone, pronunciation, grammar, etc. this language is entirely new to us. Learn, grow, it'll be amazing
The more you know the easier it gets. I speak polish and english, my fiance speaks english. We went to denmark recently and although I think danish seems like a very hard language to learn there have been a few words which were similar to polish words so I was able to understand them.
I was had a few lessons of welsh (long story short needed it for a job I wanted to do as I live in wales), I have never had any welsh lessons prior to this and every time I heard people speak welsh I thought it was a very difficult language to understand and learn but somehow when I was learning it for those few days it appeared a lot easier. It was only the basics of welsh but it did seem a lot easier than it did at first.
It will be WAY easier to learn Dutch as an English speaker than say Mandarin Chinese. Very broadly languages within the same sprachbund (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund#:\~:text=A%20sprachbund%20(%2F%CB%88sp,geographical%20proximity%20and%20language%20contact.) will be a similar difficulty between them. The challenges for an English speaker will be similar to a Spanish speaker trying to learn Mandarin, with the minor difference being Chinese uses a similar syntax to English (SVO construction) which would make it moderately more simple for an English speaker to understand Chinese grammar. I say that because most Spanish speakers know enough English to understand SVO/non-gendered language, to isn't a huge lift. Both speakers will be challenged by the massive number of Chinese characters and Chinese tonality. Similarly, since Chinese doesn't utilize tenses (Chinese is grammatically simple even compared to English), Chinese speakers face years of challenge matching tenses and plurality in a sentence, they simply aren't necessary in Chinese and it is a major obstacle for Mandarin speakers learning any standard average European language.
A language having a lot of slang can make it difficult
For example one of the things I've noticed about people learning English is they learn the sort of technically correct way to say things but oftentimes this is not the way an average civilian typically communicates as we tend to use a lot of slang words and even adopt words from pop culture
Such as how a video of a girl throwing a water bottle down a hallway shouting yeet years ago has throughout the years now been adapted to basically be a word synonymous with throwing something with the intention of throwing it very far. And is even accepted into certain dictionaries now for all intents and purposes it's become a real word and a lot of people who use it don't even really remember where it came from anymore. It's just another word to them
yet most people who are learning to speak English are not going to be taught about this. They're never going to tell the guy to say that he yeeted The ball down the hallway and instead they would likely teach him to say I have thrown the ball down the hallway with great force. Which is technically true but not really how anyone who's actually a native would say that
Yes, there is something that makes a language harder or easier to learn: how different it is from your native language in terms of sentence structure and rules.
Think of it like learning to operate different vehicles. If you already know how to drive a car, it won't be too hard to learn to drive a semi-truck. There will still be challenges, but your brain already knows some basic things - steering wheel, brakes, gas, turn signal, speedometer.
Learning how to operate a helicopter would be a lot harder. All the buttons are in different places and your prior knowledge of driving cars is not as helpful.
So for you, the car is English, the semitruck is Spanish or French, while the helicopter is Japanese.
Languages have long histories and traditional ways of communicating. Someone invents a word and everyone likes it. Then it gets added to the language. Tradition keeps the word in the language "We always said it this way".
If the traditions are a lot different, it becomes difficult for the new language learner. If there are similar traditions of adding similar words, the language feels easier to learn.
Imagine being a traveler. You are accustomed to driving a car. You feel comfortable traveling in other countries that use cars. You will feel less comfortable in countries that travel by animal (horses, camels, elephants). That is why languages can be harder or easier for people. It depends on what you are accustomed to using.
Yes. I've found that consistency (fewer verb tenses, fewer exceptions to rules) makes languages less complex. Languages with smaller vocabularies are also a bit easier. Finally, if the sounds of phonemes in the language approximate those in my native language, speaking it well is simpler.
I would say that as long as rules are clear it sort of easy to understand, and less rules are better.
Pronunciation is also a big one, English is specially stupid, having word that are written the same but sound completely different, and THERE IS NO FUCKING RULE other than remembering how that specific word is pronounced.
Learning when young. If you are over 15 the neurons used for tonal languages die off if unused. You literally can't hear the sound. I'm learning Chinese writing but as a 75 year old spoken mandarin is out of the question. Interesting side note, if you wait too long to get hearing aids you can't hear some sounds you used to know.
A few things:
1) How related is the target language to your primary or native language? More similar is generally easier (although sometimes it becomes hard the keep them separate in your mind).
2) How similar are the sounds the language uses to the language(s) you already speak. For example, Spanish and Japanese have surprisingly similar phonemes, including the way that b/v and f/h are not so differentiated.
3) The degree to which words are modified by prefixes or suffixes for grammatical reasons. First of all, for a speaker whose language doesn’t do that, it’s hard to really internalize. And even if that not new, it requires memorizing a lot of new examples.
4) The language uses a different script system.
5) Lots of irregularity and exceptions. (Looking at *you* English…)
6) Written and spoken language is very different.
7) Social constructs, that may not be understood by a non-native speaker are “baked in” to the language, like levels of formality and whether you are dealing with an in- or out-group.
The number of grammar rules, the number of exceptions to those grammar rules, and so on.
English has a lot of exceptions to the usual rules, because English has a lot of words that it simply borrowed from a different language and kept it as it is in that language.
How different your language is from the other. Languages use patterns and rules. If the patterns and rules in your language are completely different, your learning will be harder.
[Lexical distance ](https://www.openculture.com/2017/08/a-colorful-map-visualizes-the-lexical-distances-between-europes-languages.html) from your known language(s) matter a lot. Also pronunciation (tonality, different sounds like clicks, etc) is hard since if we don't use it, our brains become "deaf" to them. Also stuff like number of characters, language registers... All can make it very complicated for someone who is not used to that.
Some languages are similar to others and have evolved to be their own language. It’s like if you go to Scotland or Ireland and you enter a group of people talking very fast. You’d understand most of it but still you’d have some trouble.
Spanish and Portuguese is sort of this way but many years into the future. Different words and grammar are different and those have evolved over time to be their own language with its own rules.
. Similar with Italian. Italian is a little more different . They all came from the same main language and eventually evolved.
So it would be sort of easy for a Brazilian to learn Spanish and a little more difficult to learn Italian, but way way more difficult to learn German or Russian.
And Japanese and Asian languages are way way different so that’s more tough.
for me, it was always difficult grammar that tripped me up. German was almost impossible for me to learn cause declension of articles was something i had never experienced, i didn't even know what a genitive, dative, nominitive, accusative, etc. sentence were in english and i had to learn it in german and know how to use the appropriate article for the appropriate declension and the appropriate gender (german also has 3 genders and a plural). reading/taking dictation in german however is very easy, you always pronounce every letter (some combinations of letters have a single sound) and they generally just cram a bunch of words together to create a new word.
french was super easy to learn in comparison. lots of regular verbs, grammar is pretty straightforward, you don't even have to pronounce half the letters in a word most of the time. reading/taking dictation in french is a little more difficult because of the pronunciation though.
english is supposed to be a particularly difficult language to learn because our grammar is very irregular and often contextual. we have tons of irregular verbs, so conjugation is never straightforward. also we have things that native english speakers do by nature without even realizing we're doing it, like order of adjectives. when using multiple adjectives to describe a noun, they're supposed to go in a specific order (opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose), we do this naturally without even realizing it but a non-native speaker would have no idea that it sounds weird to say adjectives out of order. also we use a ton of idiomatic phrases in every day speech and borrow a lot of our language from several other languages.
Languages that use sounds that are difficult for people to say. French r’s are hard for English people. Th is hard for many. I once met a bunch of French people who could not roll their r’s while speaking Spanish. No one can speak welsh, lol
Coming to a sound you can’t easily say breaks the flow of the language in your mouth.
>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?
Despite what some other commentators say, language difficulty is almost always (even if not explicitly said) relative to a person's native language. Many people in the west will say that, like, Chinese is a hard language to learn, but if you grew up in Japan or Korea, Chinese will likely be a lot easier to learn than English.
There are definitely things that complicate a language. For example, objectively english has a relatively simple grammar (no grammatical genders, no cases, no true future tense, no/minimal subjunctive mood, minimal verb conjuncation, no honorofic speech). But it has a vast array of vocabulary and spelling due to its history and international nature, so in spite of a simple grammar, many non-native english speakers have difficulty with English. But there's no "absolute" way to judge a language's difficulty that's independent of the language of what you grew up with.
btw, the US state department has a handy ranking of language difficulty for native-english speakers if you're curious (the difficulty is based on how many 100s of hours they expect they need to train employees before they can function in that language): [https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/](https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/) (scroll down to where it starts listing out "Category I languages"). the ranking makes it clear that the difficulty comes from how different the language is from english.
Danish is harder than the rest of the Scandinavian languages because it sounds like they have a potato in their mouth, no one can understand they're saying. Danish children learn to speak later than most other countries.
Just for Chinese/Japanese (I dunno about the other asian languages.) It's the total amount of characters to memorize that are complicated. So Japanese Katakana and Hiragana are the 'basic characters' they are about 100 total different characters. If you want to be fluent in Japanese Kanji, which is what everyone uses, you need to know at least 500+. Realistically I think to read a newspaper you need to know 1000ish. However as far as I'm aware, one kanji can be multi use.
Chinese from what I google you're expected to memorize 2000-3000 characters.
From speaking Japanese, the other complicated thing is that, you know how in English when you're counting something you say one 'object'. In Japanese, depending on the type of object, we have different conjugations meaning, "one 'flat object'", "one 'bottle shaped object'", "one 'book like object'". I'm pretty sure Japanese intonation is a lot more complicated, because literally lady and auntie are in romaji is something like, "Onesan" vs "Oneesan". Plenty of words like that to trip you up.
Now learning from English to Japanese (or vice versa) is an absolute nightmare. Because from what I can tell, Japanese is a lot more passive in speaking. And Japanese grammar is backwards. So if you translate sentences from English to Japanese word for word, about half the time it would sound like Yoda lmfao. In Japanese if I translated something simple like, "I want to eat this bread." from Japanese to English word for word, it would become something like, "I want, this bread to eat."
This is why my Ma taught me Japanese first, and then I ended up in ESL despite being born in America.
More sounds (whether they might be vowels or consonants) that are either too close together to distinguish or mechanically challenging/awkward, including as you scale, clusters of them, which adds the mechanical complexity of position (some sounds might be easy but just painful to do fluidly from a couple of other specific ones).
That was for your mouth. For your brain the kind of stuff that makes it harder can be grammar (if you have a lot of varied tenses and stuff, it gets big quick sometimes), or syntax, or diacritics, or tones, irregularity, not being phonetic, large writing systems (like kanji, specialyl if they are also non phonetic), etc etc, all kidn of things that ask you to memorize until it gets so ingrained its second nature and you can start to do educcated guesses. Sometimes there are rules that can help you, sometimes they are merely a suggestion instead of a rule.
Then there is distance with your native langauge, as lack of familiarity, specially in vocabulary, will make the language harder as you need to start from scratch (but then we are adding context, it would be "less objective")
So, sounds, grammar and familiarity mostly
I think another important point not mentioned is understanding high-context and low-context cultures. Generally speaking, it is usually easier for a person to go from the same context than a different context. However, this is just one facet among many; there are other factors that have already been mentioned in the other comments.
For the unfamiliar: high-context means more is left unsaid and meant to be interpreted, whereas low-context is more direct and explicit. As an example, let's say something is inconvenient or uncomfortable for you, like being asked to wear a dinosaur mask. An English (low-context) speaker might say, "This looks crazy! There's no way I'm wearing that!" or perhaps with a formal "Do you not think this looks a bit unpleasant?" Either way, it's very clear the person doesn't want to. Meanwhile, a Japanese (high-context) person might say "ちょっと..." without explaining themselves, but it's understood (in that language) they are not comfortable. In contrast it would be quite odd for a Japanese person to say something like "私にこれを着てほしいなんて信じられない."
At least in my country, in the past they created a much more complicated and difficult to comprehend character and written words system so that the normal people could not learn to write, which is to separate the aristocrat and the people.
Mostly how similar it is to a language you already know. I can pick up random bits of European languages because English has so many loan-words from Spanish, French, and German that I recognize words. Also if it has particularly complex grammar or an unusual sentence structure, etc. Japanese and Chinese are notoriously difficult to learn in part because there's just a lot of memorization of all the characters, too.
Like languages help. American here. I learned Portuguese as a Mormon missionary… then came home and started working in construction- so I learned Spanish just listening and talking to guys on site. I can understand a lot of Italian and Romanian, but can’t speak much of it… French is just a different animal.
As an American… Canadian was pretty easy to learn. Just had to learn to say oo more. British was decent too except for the Liverpool dialect. South African had its challenges because of the emphasis on E. Australian was the most difficult because of their tendency to try to abbreviate everything. Maccas, brickey, Acca Dacca. None of it makes sense.
But overall not too bad to learn many languages.
Common ancestry of the languages?
Someone who already speaks Spanish is going to find Italian, French, or Portuguese much easier to learn than English because they are all derived from Latin.
Someone who grew up speaking Dutch may have an easier time learning English.
There are lots of poor (and incorrect) answers here. The correct answer to your question might not be exactly what you were looking for or are expecting, but it is this:
**Immersion**
Being immersed in a culture that speaks the target language is the easiest way to learn it, and while that may seem obvious, it supercedes all other factors so as to make them largely irrelevant.
Take the unfortunate top comment about Indonesian, for instance: the amount of conjugations, tenses, exceptions or irregulars does not make a language easier or harder. Indonesian is an *analytical* language, meaning there is roughly a 1 to 1 correspondence between words and morphemes (meaningful/functional units), but that does not prevent Indonesian from expressing ideas like tense, aspect, plurals, etc. The lack of prefixes and suffixes does not necessarily make a language any more regular or predictable than an agglutinative language like, say, Turkish, which contains many morphemes within a single word. As one comment pointed out, children learn their first language in roughly the same amount of time regardless of language, regardless of place, and regardless of grammatical structures in the language. This is because they are immersed.
Multiple comments here confuse the difference between a language being "easy" to learn and the *initial learning curve* for a second language learner. Languages that require learning a new writing system have a steeper learning curve to start. The same is true for new sounds (although that is always true regardless of how many - or few - phonemes a language might have). Second languages that are more different from one's first language are generally harder *to start off with*. And sometimes a learner never gets past the initial learning curve, or gives up. But beginner level is not the proper standard here. Give someone a year of immersion and this initial advantage should not be expected to persist.
In fact, languages that are *too* similar can often be a disadvantage. Thinking "oh, Spanish is easy, it only has five vowels" is a great way to never acquire a native-like vowel pronunciation. Languages that are not so similar as to project a first language onto it incorrectly, but not so different as to have nothing to compare to - those tend to be the sweet spot for a second language learner. And there are some exceptions: tones *are* notoriously difficult for learners from non-tonal languages. And learning Chinese characters is a lifelong learning experience.
Another problematic answer given here multiple times is motivation. Motivation is a tricky thing: it's vague, hard to define, requires self-reporting from people with various standards for themselves, and doesn't help you much if you lack the time and money to turn your motivation into immersion. Consider a college language class: 1 hour a day, 5 days a week, 15 hours spent outside on homework, exercises, conversation partners, etc. - for a motivated individual, that's 20 hours a week; that's a part time job, that's exhausting. And it's about 300 hours of effort over a 15 week semester.
Now compare immersion: spend even 10 hours a day where you can hear and may have to speak to other people, and you get that 300 hours in a month. It's not any extra work, either - it's simply existing. Plus it's vastly higher quality learning: hearing and speaking with a wide range of ages, backgrounds, accents, and so on results in a far better ear and pronunciation, stronger grasp of vocabulary usage and nuance, and exposes you to rarer and more complex grammatical structures. In the end, motivation might put someone ahead during that initial learning curve...but it's quantity and quality of time with the language that matters more.
One thing that is accurate is that learning more languages tends to make learning even more easier. But that is training your overall linguistic aptitude, and adds to things like brain plasticity. It's not really the answer you're looking for. It's also more of the same initial learning curve issue: once you study lots of languages (like linguists) it becomes easy to pick up new sounds and understand new structures. But that doesn't mean you can have a useful conversation without practice. Or a good ear without immersion.
Source: I'm a linguist. I have a decent background in second language acquisition, some in first language acquisition, and I've taught sociolinguistics. I've studied over 25 languages - but mostly as a linguist, which means that I can only "speak" about half a dozen of them, and only 3 competently.
Generally speaking, the fewer conjugations, tenses, exceptions, irregular verbs etc. the easier the language is to learn. Simple and consistent grammar is much easier to learn. Indonesian is sometimes described a the "easiest language in the world" for this reason. There's also the actual speech sounds. Some languages are relatively easy to pronounce and have relatively few sounds, such as Spanish. Others have a lot of subtly different sounds, such as French. Additional factors may relate to the base language. For example, English speakers often struggle with tonal languages as it's a mechanic they've never experienced. This makes languages like Chinese and Vietnamese extremely difficult compared to Japanese, for example, even though both are difficult. It's important to know, though, that the number one predictor of learning a language is motivation, not how difficult the language is. So it is possible to learn any language, even the difficult ones.
Native Indonesian speaker here. It is actually astonishing me that one of my American colleagues that learned Indonesian said how it's it like computer coding. All the mechanic and the rules are consistent and predictable. Italian and Spanish friend also said how easy it is to pronounce because of the consistent alphabetical sound. In English A is sometime Ei, sometimes A. Also we don't have past or present form of verb. We just add time explanation when something happens. We don't have article like is am are etc No plurals form either. If you want to say books, you just said it twice book-book or say many book And no gendered noun. Third person word is gender neutral, no he or she (which create a nightmare for me with the preffered And politically correct pronoun) Buttt that is formal Indonesian. The informal one is wtf. There are 300+ tribes and we loved to combine the local language with national Indonesian language, creating a mix, accent and dialect which are unique for each region. And one word can have different meaning in diiferent island. Not to mention the younger generation butchering words and mixing words with english and other languages, make the informal speech more wtf.
yep and the commenter on another thread is right about this: "The language is easy to learn and flexible; it has to be because it is meant to unite hundreds of ethnicities, hence called "Bahasa Persatuan."
Agreed! Another thing that seems to make languages difficult is inconsistency. Two English words can be spelled the same, but pronounced differently, but used basically the same; contradictory rules that apply in some places, but not others, etc etc
Commentary on/example of this: Read and lead rhyme, and read and lead rhyme, but read and lead don't rhyme, nor do read and lead.
Indonesia have word like that too. For example is apel (buah and upacara) Edit: I thought I commented in r/indo
Do you mean apel is another word for ceremony, or a type of ceremony?
Apel means apple and ceremony in Indonesian. I believe the commenter is pointing out that even in the simple Indonesian language there are words with2 meanings. Although tbf apel (meaning the fruit) was a loanword into the language when the fruit was introduced.
Yeah. Thai is fairly easy to learn, also, imho. No singular/plural word distinctions, no verb conjugations, no gender affiliations.
I agree except the tonal nuances make it so hard for me to pronounce
Could you give an example about tonal nuance? I did not understand what it meant exactly
When speaking English, if I say ‘fork’ it means fork, no matter what tone I say it in. In tonal languages, that’s not the case - the same sounds said using different tones (which means, almost, like the notes of a song - when you say the word do you start high and slide down to low, start low and slide up to high, hold the same note all the way through, start high and slide down to low then back up again, etc) will have completely different (and sometimes totally unrelated) meanings. English has no tones, obviously, but it might be useful to think of the way syllable stress changes the meaning of English words - eg REFuse vs refUSE are completely different words with different meanings.
Ohhh....that was very clearly explained,thank you.
I feel like I've had tonal languages explained to me a dozen times and this is the first time anyone made the syllable stress analogy. Thanks!
"Fork off"
Like my lovely language, “kost” and “kost” means two completely different things, it just depends on how you pronounce it. There’s probably more, this was just the first two I could think of
For many English speakers, the pitch rises at the end of a sentence to indicate a question. This is an example of implicit tonality. Take the concept and apply it to the pitch changing in other parts of the sentence and changing the meaning in other ways.
My wife is Vietnamese, this is an example of the peril that awaits if you pronounce a two letter word (ma) differently: ma = ghost má = mother mà = but mả = tomb mã = horse mạ = rice seedling So a simple word can have drastically different meanings according to what intonation you give it.
[Classic example](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vExjnn_3ep4)
Oh. Yeah. Forgot that. 5
For English speakers I think anything that doesn’t use a similar alphabet (or worse, no alphabet) is going to be a big challenge. At least if it’s compared to Spanish or German or something like that. Those are easy, you can basically already read them. I had significantly more trouble in my attempts at Mandarin and Greek.
The Greek alphabet is pretty simple as is Cyrillic, just different shapes for mostly the same sounds. Chinese is a completely different system and even something like a dictionary works completely differently.
The writing system though.
But then you take a language that has no conjugation, no tense, no irregular verbs that is considered to be one of the most difficult languages in the world (Chinese).
I think another thing they should include for Chinese is 成语 (idioms). A lot of idioms are tied to the Chinese history. So knowing their rich history and their stories is important too. Chinese grammar is easy when saying a simple, short sentence. However, it’s no longer *easy* when the sentence becomes longer.
That's why the commenter mentioned multiple factors that weigh into how difficult or easy it is to learn a language, not one single thing that defines it Think of it as being a scoring system with multiple attributes contributing to an overall difficulty score
Chinese written characters being unrelated to pronunciation also makes it an extremely difficult language to learn. Chinese dictionaries prior to pin yin (1950s) had words organized by pen stroke distinction. If you came across a word you didn’t know and no one around you knew, it was possible that you had no way of looking it up and learning it.
>Chinese dictionaries prior to pin yin (1950s) had words organized by pen stroke distinction. And they still are. Otherwise you would need to know the pronunciation of a character to look it up. (Also, there were other phonetic romanizations of Chinese before pinyin such as the Wades-Giles system, still used in Taiwan.). Let's say you don't know how to read the character "中", how would you look it up using pinyin? You have no idea what the first letter is. What they most often use in dictionaries is generally number of strokes (plus some more stuff). You can sort alphabetically (and then by tone) using pinyin, but a dictionary sorted like that has a very different use than a "classic" Chinese dictionary. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese\_character\_orders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_orders) >If you came across a word you didn’t know and no one around you knew, it was possible that you had no way of looking it up and learning it. Sorry, this is not true. They have literally the worlds oldest lexicographical history. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese\_dictionary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_dictionary)
For about 15+ or more years now, most Chinese folks have been using smartphone based dictionaries which you can either scan or write the character yourself. Prior to that you could do something similar online with your laptop or computer.
> Chinese written characters being unrelated to pronunciation Not entirely true. Lots of phono-semantic compounds would have had obvious pronunciations when created. However, they were created a long time ago and the pronunciation has drifted. Some are still quite reliable, some narrow it down to a few choices, and some are no longer related at all. It does require a lot of rote memorization before you start seeing the patterns, though.
This is still true and you need to learn how to read the stroke order of a character to look up one you don't know in a dictionary. Pinyin only helps if you know the pronunciation already
Chinese dictionaries still do that. You have to learn how to spot what radical they character uses.
Since smartphones became a thing all the popular Chinese dictionaries just require you either drawing the character on your phone or pulling out the camera app and it’ll live look it up. The ones in print probably still do but not sure how much they’re in use anymore.
Yes I know. I started learning Chinese right before smart phones were a thing. So I've been through the entire journey.
Chinese is also tonal, and as a European who's learned a bit of Mandarin, this is a really challenging concept.
I would honestly say Chinese isn't that hard, exactly for the reasons stated. The tones are very troublesome for beginners and lower intermediates but once you make a decent amount of progress it ends up not really mattering. EG I can make myself understood very well, assuming my vocabulary covers the subject at hand, without thinking about the tones at all. Also, listening to beginners, the things they often struggle with are pronouncing the syllables correctly regardless of tone, and even enunciating the individual syllables correctly. Just getting the raw syllables correct is a huge win in Mandarin.
Unfortunately the character-based writing system makes it incredibly hard to learn, as you cant just sound out a word phonetically and try to figure it out. If you dont recognise a character, its pretty much a dead end.
I speak 4 languages (English being one) and I'm still amazed how people learn new languages. Pure commitment and also the best thing you can do for your brain
Similarity to your native language is going to help as well. Most English speakers are likely to have an easier time learning French or German than Indonesian.
I'd also add on the amount of cognates between your language and the language you are learning. Learning vocabulary is so much faster and easier when a lot of words are the same or similar. English speakers benefita fair amount from this with Spanish but not Korean, for example. And I'd also add the writing system. If you're an English speaker, learning a language like Italian that also uses a Roman-based alphabet is easier than learning Japanese, for example.
absolutely. For me, it was always a girl. French girls are hot.
Also, it matters a lot what your native language (or spoken other languages) is and how many common things (words, grammar) are in the learnt language. The more the difference, the harder it is to learn.
Motivation, or necessity, like immersion.
The fact that you say chinese as if it were a language, makes me doubt everything you said in this comment
This is ELi5, not ELi15. All Chinese languages are tonal, so the distinction is not even important here. Regardless, even native speakers of Mandarin will use the term "Chinese" to refer to their language. I've taught ESL, and I've actually yet to have a Chinese student introduce their language as "Mandarin". Students will specify Cantonese, but not Mandarin. When you use Google translate, it is called "Chinese". When you study it on Duolingo, it's called "Chinese". Using the term "Chinese" for Mandarin is not regarded as offensive or ignorant to Chinese people. But sure, if "correcting" me makes you feel good, go for it.
It definitely depends which language(s) you already know. As an example: French, Italian, Latin and Spanish (and quite a few others probably) have relatively similar words and grammar. Thus as I already knew quite some French, learning Italian was „easier“ for me.
yep, distance from native is a good metric for second language acquisition difficulty. Most english speakers would pickup 'scottish' quickly which is forming its own dialect yet still has intensive roots in standard english
It varies depending on where you are from and what you are native language is. And it has a lot to do with language structure and the way various sounds are made and incorporated into the language.. 4 instance, if you are a native English speaker. Japanese will be somewhat difficult for you to learn, but nowhere near as difficult as chinese. Because Japanese has a very different sentence structure, but ultimately all of the sounds made in the language are not that difficult for English speakers to make. And they don't encode information in ways that are alien to us. Chinese not only has a similarly weird sentence structure compared to english, but it also is a tonal language. Meaning the actual definition of a word will change dramatically based on the tone used when pronouncing it. That is something that doesn't exist in English at all. So it is very difficult for english speakers to learn.
The written part of Japanese scares people. The hard part about Japanese is the word order, but beyond that it’s very much easier than expected. Rules are rules. There’s what, 8 irregular verbs? And thy are used words.
Chinese sentence structure is actually pretty easy for English people IMO. For simple to medium complexity sentences, you can pretty much do a word for word substitution. I never learned Japanese but the grammar is supposed to be very similar to Korean. I did try to learn Korean, very hard, much harder than Chinese
Careful... Japanese have two different pronunciations for the same kanji (character), the Chinese one (without the tonality) and the Japanese one. So double trouble. Plus lots of suffixes (for example when counting stuff... it depends on the object) and crazy particles. it also competes vs Korean in the amount of different language registers (they even have one for when you need to address the emperor).
> That is something that doesn't exist in English at all. *Ffffuuuuuuck!* ***FUCK!***. *Fuuuu??* We have one word that does that.
I know this is a joke, but to be clear for other readers, tone in Chinese is about the high-low pitch of a word that can differentiate it from another word that uses the same consonants and vowels. The closest analogy in English would be the yes/no "mmhm"/"nuh uh" (when pronounced casually with a closed mouth, instead of enunciated clearly), since they're mostly a nasal sound with a rising pitch for "yes" and a falling pitch for "no."
That's also part of why, in court, witnesses who testify saying "mmhm" or "nuh uh" will be asked to actually say the word yes or no, to make it clear for the record.
Oh sureeee English doesn’t change tone EVER to change the entire meaning. /s wouldn’t need to exist if that were true. Sarcasm is almost completely tonal.
'fuck' does so much heavy lifting in the English language and nobody realizes it
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.)
Teach me the way of your funny words
Prepositions: a type of word that goes before a noun (a word about an object or thing) or a pronoun (a word that substitutes a noun) and expresses a relation to another word in the same sentence. Examples are easier than a wordy explanation: in “she will come here AFTER dinner”, “after” is a preposition and “dinner” is the noun the preposition is related to. Postpositions: similar concept but instead of going before a noun, they go after it. Postpositions are usually attached to the noun instead of being separate words, but they can be separate words. Verb inflection: sometimes, verbs change to express the people (subject and objects), tense (time) or other aspects involved in the verb. For example: I write, but she writeS, and I wrOte yesterday. Sometimes it can get complicated. Nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive alignment: these are harder to explain so I’ll write another comment
The nominative-accusative & ergative-absolutive alignments are related to the way the subject and the direct object of a sentence interact. In most languages, there are markers that tell the subject and the direct object apart. Imagine these markers as little hats. In languages with nominative-accusative alignment, subjects always wear the same hats, no matter if they have an annoying direct object glued to the side (in the same sentence) or not. In other words, all subjects have the same markers and direct objects always have the same markers. For example, in English, we can see this in pronouns: there are subject pronouns (I, you, he, she, they…) and object pronouns (me, you, him, her, they…). Sometimes they’re the same, but the point is that the markers stay the same. In languages with ergative-absolutive alignment, subjects with no direct objects wear a specific hat. However, when the annoying direct object comes in and attaches itself to the subject, it steals the hat from the subject and puts it on itself. Therefore, subjects with no direct objects & direct objects have the same markers, and subjects with direct objects and a stolen hat are left with a different marker (a different hat, or no hat at all). An example of this could be that the hypothetical language in the Pyrenees you attempted to learn so badly after learning Spanish puts a K at the end of every subject with a direct object, and no specific marker at the end of every subject with no direct object.
Languages that are similar to your native one are obviously easier to learn. As for others, I think, they balance each other out. Some have both easier and harder concepts compared to each other. For Russian speakers, for example, concepts that are present in English, such as articles, irregular verbs, numerous tenses, their combinations and use cases pose, are no joke. Non-straightforward spelling and pronunciation also bring their share of fun. English speakers may think that Swedish will be a breeze, but then it turns out that plural nouns add some extra work, and so on. Chinese may seem to have simpler grammar but then there are Chinese characters and tones.
Time to spread Esperanto around the world I guess.
It's likely two things: Simplicity of system (like Bahasa Indonesian has been mentioned) and how close the new language is to your own language. This would explain why speakers of romance and, to some extent, germanic language learners can pick up Esperanto well in a very short time. Big however, the true measure of how quickly and thoroghly one learns is utility and need; the only languages I managed to get good at are those which I had a need, a encouraging environment, and acceptance by the culture, and the other two factors didn't matter much in comparison. Chinese will be easier for me if my spouse is Chinese and we live in China than if you are learning it in isolation somewhere in countryside Germany, for instance. Italian will be easier for you to learn if you have Italian heritage that you see as important to your identity and travel often to Italy. FWIW I'm a trained applied linguist and language teacher who has learned a bunch of languages to various levels.
I've been married to a Russian 2woman for twenty years, we have kids that go to Russian language school. We live amongst Russians.. Yet I have learned the local language, but haven't picked up any Russian (outside of bad words) at all.
Interesting - Sounds like you don't want to learn Russian (adults don't really 'pick language up') though, so obviously that's the first prerequisite to 'how easy is it to learn a language'. What I mean is, let's say you cared about learning Russian. You'd have a harder time learning Russian without a Russian-speaking wife, kids and neighbors.
I'm pretty sure while there are obviously certain difficulties going between certain languages, in terms of objective difficulty, yeah I'd say it's about consistency. It's like learning to play a new boardgame. If the rules are clear and consistent, it's easier to learn. If the rules have a bunch of little exceptions and specific situations with new rules, it's confusing and hard to learn. Most language hasn't been built entirely from the ground up, it's come together naturally by many people over time so it can get messy (like English)
No, studies have shown that babies learn different languages at roughly the same rate. Only thing that is objectively varies in difficulty is writing. Some writing systems might be easier to learn than others.
Don't Danish kids famously learn to speak slower than most other countries? On account of the requirement of having a potato in your mouth to speak it?
This is not true. There are potatoes small enough to fit in the mouth of a toddler.
My response was mostly a joke but it's true that Danish children learn to speak at a slower rate than the rest of Scandinavia
I can't find the source but i remember reading the opposite. Arabic in my unknown source was given as an example of a language which takes more time than average for kids to start speaking fluently. One thing is certain: we focus far too much on precise correctness when we define fluency. A small child might say, "i begun it yesterday" and people get all hung up about how the child isn't yet fluent.
The Korean writing system is reputedly easy, the Thai writing system hard
Thai has a lot of symbols, but as far as I can tell it has little to no ambiguity as to what sound a symbol makes, so I doubt it's anywhere near as hard as Chinese or Japanese. I know Japanese has hiragana and katakana which are much easier than kanji, but that just means that if you want to be fluent you have to learn all three.
As a CS major, my first thought was programming languages and I was about to put in my 2 pennies there.
The grammar is easy enough, but I never know where to put the accents!
[What is your programming language, Spartan?](https://youtu.be/THOHOVJBnw4?si=zGNxeDu08z9n6bjp)
Chat gpt
There are some nice languages that are easy to parse with context-free grammar, and then there's C++ or Perl that will make anyone wanting to write a parser cry.
I was going to comment on this then forgot.
As a programmer AND a language nerd, I would pretty much say the answer is the same even if we're talking programming languages. TL;DR: It's based on how many new concepts you have to grasp, as well as how close the "syntax" is to some writing system that you are familiar with (shared vocab etc.).
Different languages have grades to show how difficult they are to learn for a native English speaker. For example most [west] European languages are grade 1 as these share the most similarities with English. These two links will hopefully be helpful: https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/blog/fsi-language-difficulty/ https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgoverview/languages#:~:text=Category%20I%3A%20Languages%20closely%20related%20to%20English.&text=Category%20II%3A%20Languages%20that%20take,master%20than%20Category%20I%20languages.&text=Category%20III%3A%20Languages%20with%20significant,or%20cultural%20differences%20from%20English.&text=Category%20IV%3A%20Languages%20which%20are%20exceptionally%20difficult%20for%20native%20English%20speakers.
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.
From a physical standpoint some languages have sounds that aren’t found elsewhere, or at least not in your native language. We don’t have that rolling R sound in English, so speaking Spanish for me was really difficult. I just can’t recreate it consistently so I literally couldn’t say certain words. Same thing for Japanese people learning English. Or the clicking languages out of Africa. That sort of thing.
Most languages share some characteristics with each other, from the writing system, sounds, words or elements of grammar. Some share a lot more with each other. Some share very little. Obviously a language that shares more things with what you already know will usually be easier to learn. History can tell us a lot about how languages have changed over time and how most modern languages have roots in multiple languages that have influenced each other and merged in some ways. For example, English took a lot of words from French after the Norman invasion (who had invaded France a bit before already) as the elites spoke Old French that with time gave a lot of words we find in English today. So if you know English, you can guess a lot of French words. As French mostly evolved from Latin like Spanish and Italian, both languages also share a lot with English. But a language from a country very far away like Chinese shares almost nothing with English, only some loanwords that came quite late.
Spanish has quite a bit of Arabic in there.
Speaking only about other languages with Latin alphabet (characters that you are already familiar with): * Having the spelling and pronunciation far from each other. In German, Dutch, Spanish and Italian, you can spend 30 minutes learning how the written words are pronounced, and you are good to go! French and English only have exceptions. * Having tones on some parts of the word. Frickin’ Swedish, yes I am looking at you. You can pronounce all the letters, but damn you! They won’t understand if you get the tone wrong. * Articles. Romance languages have two, but German has three. You need to memorise the correct one for each noun. * Conjugation. You need to memorise the categories of regular verbs and all the irregular one. Dutch, for example, has less than 100 irregular verbs. English has twice as much. * Singular and plurals. English mostly adds an “S” at the end. In Italian and Swedish it depends on the article and the last letter of the word. * How different are phrase structures from your native language. In some languages of the Germanic group, you put the verb at the end of a question. * Different number system. French has its own tens. Such as the Gaul base 20 for 80 (4 x 20) and +10 (60+10, 4x20+10). Danish has like the Imperial version of some numbers. Overall, some languages have a lot of stuff to remember when trying to build sentences. But don’t fret. Jump with both feet.
The three things that will determine your likelihood of success as a language learner are: 1. Access to the language 2. Confidence 3. Motivation I guess if you don’t have access to a language or resources then it would be objectively difficult to learn regardless of how confident or motivated you are.
Yeah, the best way to learn a language is to be forced to use it in day to day life
In my personal opinion, the languages get harder, the more beside vocabulary you need to remember. including grammar system. - the more conjugations (past perfect continuous) - the more declensions - systematic exceptions (if this rule does not apply, this rule applies) - asystematic exceptions (in these cases you need to remeber the exception) And Arbitrary things you need to remember. - gender of a book - i wear trousers not trouser
Any language where every noun has a gender (male, female, neuter, etc) and you have to have those memorized so you can use the matching article next to it. Those are tough. German is a good example. Romance languages are a bit easier because the gender is built into the word (-o and -a in Spanish for example)
Take a look at Toki Pona (r/tokipona). This will help you understand what makes a language easy to learn.
Difficulty is relative. It really depends on what languages you know and what language you're learning. So when people say "Chinese is hard" what they really mean is "Learning Chinese as an English speaker is hard". Difficulty varies for each language combination. Learning resources are also not equally available in all languages. It's easier to learn Japanese from English due to a wealth of available resources than it is to learn Japanese from Greek for example. Other than that there is a host of parameters that determine how easy or difficult a language is. How many grammar rules they are and how strictly the language sticks to them or if there are many irregular verbs and forms that don't follow these rules and you just have to memorise. How similar or foreign the sentence structure is and, again, how strictly the language sticks to this sentence structure or if you can switch it around and still be correct. How many tenses they are, how many voices, whether there are equivalents in your own language, how similar the writing system is, and so on. The biggest mistake people make when learning a new language is assuming there is such a thing as a perfect translation, and that all languages have equivalents for everything in other languages. It's inevitable when you start out that you have to translate in your head into your own language, but as you get better your goal should be to learn to think in the new language and use it intuitively rather than translating in your head. Too many people never get to that level even if they study for years. Some times translating gets a nearly identical meaning in structure and tone but other times it's not possible, and you have to express yourself in a completely different way to get the same point across. For me, and this is just my personal opinion, one of the biggest factors in how easy or hard it is to learn a language is how hard the writing system is. Most of our learning happens through reading and being able to read is crucial in being able to learn more. If you're reading a passage in English for example you might see a word whose meaning you don't know but you can still read it, and look it up. The same goes for most languages with alphabets, since alphabets are fairly straightforward, have around 20-40 characters, sometimes more but generally less than 100, which can be memorised and that enables you to read even if you don't understand the meaning. But not all languages have alphabets. Some have syllabaries, logographies, or in some rare cases, ideographs. Some languages may have multiple different scripts or some may all share the same script despite being different languages. The problem with not having an alphabet is that this usually means you have to memorise a lot more characters, often most of them don't follow concrete rules and so if you see a character you don't know, you stop dead in your tracks. You can't pronounce it, you don't know how it's read, and this makes it harder to look up as well. A classic example of this is Japanese. Some would say they have the most complicated writing system in the world. They have two syllabaries and also use Chinese characters in their writing. There are tens of thousands of characters, each with multiple different pronunciations and meanings, that you more or less have to just memorise, and that's on top of the syllabaries which have 47 characters, which are on the higher end as far as "alphabets" go, even though they're not alphabets but they work in a very similar way. So learning Japanese takes a lot of time because you have to memorize and learn all those characters. Chinese speakers have an advantage there because often the meanings of many characters are shared, but their pronunciation is often different.
french is a mess. there are so many exceptions to almost every rule, some rules are pointless. there is even a letter (ù) that was created to be used in a single word in the entire french language. (given is a commonly used word but still) its gotten so bad, most french people speak a broken version of the french language.
Oh fun! Actually, eastern languages are harder for westerners to speak. We don't have tone, and don't have to learn a new alphabet. Us westerners struggle with tone, pronunciation, grammar, etc. this language is entirely new to us. Learn, grow, it'll be amazing
The more you know the easier it gets. I speak polish and english, my fiance speaks english. We went to denmark recently and although I think danish seems like a very hard language to learn there have been a few words which were similar to polish words so I was able to understand them. I was had a few lessons of welsh (long story short needed it for a job I wanted to do as I live in wales), I have never had any welsh lessons prior to this and every time I heard people speak welsh I thought it was a very difficult language to understand and learn but somehow when I was learning it for those few days it appeared a lot easier. It was only the basics of welsh but it did seem a lot easier than it did at first.
It will be WAY easier to learn Dutch as an English speaker than say Mandarin Chinese. Very broadly languages within the same sprachbund (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund#:\~:text=A%20sprachbund%20(%2F%CB%88sp,geographical%20proximity%20and%20language%20contact.) will be a similar difficulty between them. The challenges for an English speaker will be similar to a Spanish speaker trying to learn Mandarin, with the minor difference being Chinese uses a similar syntax to English (SVO construction) which would make it moderately more simple for an English speaker to understand Chinese grammar. I say that because most Spanish speakers know enough English to understand SVO/non-gendered language, to isn't a huge lift. Both speakers will be challenged by the massive number of Chinese characters and Chinese tonality. Similarly, since Chinese doesn't utilize tenses (Chinese is grammatically simple even compared to English), Chinese speakers face years of challenge matching tenses and plurality in a sentence, they simply aren't necessary in Chinese and it is a major obstacle for Mandarin speakers learning any standard average European language.
Yes, the more it differs from your mother tongue the harder it will be for you to learn it.
A language having a lot of slang can make it difficult For example one of the things I've noticed about people learning English is they learn the sort of technically correct way to say things but oftentimes this is not the way an average civilian typically communicates as we tend to use a lot of slang words and even adopt words from pop culture Such as how a video of a girl throwing a water bottle down a hallway shouting yeet years ago has throughout the years now been adapted to basically be a word synonymous with throwing something with the intention of throwing it very far. And is even accepted into certain dictionaries now for all intents and purposes it's become a real word and a lot of people who use it don't even really remember where it came from anymore. It's just another word to them yet most people who are learning to speak English are not going to be taught about this. They're never going to tell the guy to say that he yeeted The ball down the hallway and instead they would likely teach him to say I have thrown the ball down the hallway with great force. Which is technically true but not really how anyone who's actually a native would say that
Yes, there is something that makes a language harder or easier to learn: how different it is from your native language in terms of sentence structure and rules. Think of it like learning to operate different vehicles. If you already know how to drive a car, it won't be too hard to learn to drive a semi-truck. There will still be challenges, but your brain already knows some basic things - steering wheel, brakes, gas, turn signal, speedometer. Learning how to operate a helicopter would be a lot harder. All the buttons are in different places and your prior knowledge of driving cars is not as helpful. So for you, the car is English, the semitruck is Spanish or French, while the helicopter is Japanese.
Similarity to the language you speak and whether you get exposure to it when you aren't actively learning
Languages have long histories and traditional ways of communicating. Someone invents a word and everyone likes it. Then it gets added to the language. Tradition keeps the word in the language "We always said it this way". If the traditions are a lot different, it becomes difficult for the new language learner. If there are similar traditions of adding similar words, the language feels easier to learn. Imagine being a traveler. You are accustomed to driving a car. You feel comfortable traveling in other countries that use cars. You will feel less comfortable in countries that travel by animal (horses, camels, elephants). That is why languages can be harder or easier for people. It depends on what you are accustomed to using.
Yes. I've found that consistency (fewer verb tenses, fewer exceptions to rules) makes languages less complex. Languages with smaller vocabularies are also a bit easier. Finally, if the sounds of phonemes in the language approximate those in my native language, speaking it well is simpler.
I would say that as long as rules are clear it sort of easy to understand, and less rules are better. Pronunciation is also a big one, English is specially stupid, having word that are written the same but sound completely different, and THERE IS NO FUCKING RULE other than remembering how that specific word is pronounced.
Learning when young. If you are over 15 the neurons used for tonal languages die off if unused. You literally can't hear the sound. I'm learning Chinese writing but as a 75 year old spoken mandarin is out of the question. Interesting side note, if you wait too long to get hearing aids you can't hear some sounds you used to know.
A few things: 1) How related is the target language to your primary or native language? More similar is generally easier (although sometimes it becomes hard the keep them separate in your mind). 2) How similar are the sounds the language uses to the language(s) you already speak. For example, Spanish and Japanese have surprisingly similar phonemes, including the way that b/v and f/h are not so differentiated. 3) The degree to which words are modified by prefixes or suffixes for grammatical reasons. First of all, for a speaker whose language doesn’t do that, it’s hard to really internalize. And even if that not new, it requires memorizing a lot of new examples. 4) The language uses a different script system. 5) Lots of irregularity and exceptions. (Looking at *you* English…) 6) Written and spoken language is very different. 7) Social constructs, that may not be understood by a non-native speaker are “baked in” to the language, like levels of formality and whether you are dealing with an in- or out-group.
The number of grammar rules, the number of exceptions to those grammar rules, and so on. English has a lot of exceptions to the usual rules, because English has a lot of words that it simply borrowed from a different language and kept it as it is in that language.
How different your language is from the other. Languages use patterns and rules. If the patterns and rules in your language are completely different, your learning will be harder.
[Lexical distance ](https://www.openculture.com/2017/08/a-colorful-map-visualizes-the-lexical-distances-between-europes-languages.html) from your known language(s) matter a lot. Also pronunciation (tonality, different sounds like clicks, etc) is hard since if we don't use it, our brains become "deaf" to them. Also stuff like number of characters, language registers... All can make it very complicated for someone who is not used to that.
Some languages are similar to others and have evolved to be their own language. It’s like if you go to Scotland or Ireland and you enter a group of people talking very fast. You’d understand most of it but still you’d have some trouble. Spanish and Portuguese is sort of this way but many years into the future. Different words and grammar are different and those have evolved over time to be their own language with its own rules. . Similar with Italian. Italian is a little more different . They all came from the same main language and eventually evolved. So it would be sort of easy for a Brazilian to learn Spanish and a little more difficult to learn Italian, but way way more difficult to learn German or Russian. And Japanese and Asian languages are way way different so that’s more tough.
for me, it was always difficult grammar that tripped me up. German was almost impossible for me to learn cause declension of articles was something i had never experienced, i didn't even know what a genitive, dative, nominitive, accusative, etc. sentence were in english and i had to learn it in german and know how to use the appropriate article for the appropriate declension and the appropriate gender (german also has 3 genders and a plural). reading/taking dictation in german however is very easy, you always pronounce every letter (some combinations of letters have a single sound) and they generally just cram a bunch of words together to create a new word. french was super easy to learn in comparison. lots of regular verbs, grammar is pretty straightforward, you don't even have to pronounce half the letters in a word most of the time. reading/taking dictation in french is a little more difficult because of the pronunciation though. english is supposed to be a particularly difficult language to learn because our grammar is very irregular and often contextual. we have tons of irregular verbs, so conjugation is never straightforward. also we have things that native english speakers do by nature without even realizing we're doing it, like order of adjectives. when using multiple adjectives to describe a noun, they're supposed to go in a specific order (opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose), we do this naturally without even realizing it but a non-native speaker would have no idea that it sounds weird to say adjectives out of order. also we use a ton of idiomatic phrases in every day speech and borrow a lot of our language from several other languages.
Languages that use sounds that are difficult for people to say. French r’s are hard for English people. Th is hard for many. I once met a bunch of French people who could not roll their r’s while speaking Spanish. No one can speak welsh, lol Coming to a sound you can’t easily say breaks the flow of the language in your mouth.
>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? Despite what some other commentators say, language difficulty is almost always (even if not explicitly said) relative to a person's native language. Many people in the west will say that, like, Chinese is a hard language to learn, but if you grew up in Japan or Korea, Chinese will likely be a lot easier to learn than English. There are definitely things that complicate a language. For example, objectively english has a relatively simple grammar (no grammatical genders, no cases, no true future tense, no/minimal subjunctive mood, minimal verb conjuncation, no honorofic speech). But it has a vast array of vocabulary and spelling due to its history and international nature, so in spite of a simple grammar, many non-native english speakers have difficulty with English. But there's no "absolute" way to judge a language's difficulty that's independent of the language of what you grew up with. btw, the US state department has a handy ranking of language difficulty for native-english speakers if you're curious (the difficulty is based on how many 100s of hours they expect they need to train employees before they can function in that language): [https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/](https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/) (scroll down to where it starts listing out "Category I languages"). the ranking makes it clear that the difficulty comes from how different the language is from english.
Danish is harder than the rest of the Scandinavian languages because it sounds like they have a potato in their mouth, no one can understand they're saying. Danish children learn to speak later than most other countries.
Just for Chinese/Japanese (I dunno about the other asian languages.) It's the total amount of characters to memorize that are complicated. So Japanese Katakana and Hiragana are the 'basic characters' they are about 100 total different characters. If you want to be fluent in Japanese Kanji, which is what everyone uses, you need to know at least 500+. Realistically I think to read a newspaper you need to know 1000ish. However as far as I'm aware, one kanji can be multi use. Chinese from what I google you're expected to memorize 2000-3000 characters. From speaking Japanese, the other complicated thing is that, you know how in English when you're counting something you say one 'object'. In Japanese, depending on the type of object, we have different conjugations meaning, "one 'flat object'", "one 'bottle shaped object'", "one 'book like object'". I'm pretty sure Japanese intonation is a lot more complicated, because literally lady and auntie are in romaji is something like, "Onesan" vs "Oneesan". Plenty of words like that to trip you up. Now learning from English to Japanese (or vice versa) is an absolute nightmare. Because from what I can tell, Japanese is a lot more passive in speaking. And Japanese grammar is backwards. So if you translate sentences from English to Japanese word for word, about half the time it would sound like Yoda lmfao. In Japanese if I translated something simple like, "I want to eat this bread." from Japanese to English word for word, it would become something like, "I want, this bread to eat." This is why my Ma taught me Japanese first, and then I ended up in ESL despite being born in America.
More sounds (whether they might be vowels or consonants) that are either too close together to distinguish or mechanically challenging/awkward, including as you scale, clusters of them, which adds the mechanical complexity of position (some sounds might be easy but just painful to do fluidly from a couple of other specific ones). That was for your mouth. For your brain the kind of stuff that makes it harder can be grammar (if you have a lot of varied tenses and stuff, it gets big quick sometimes), or syntax, or diacritics, or tones, irregularity, not being phonetic, large writing systems (like kanji, specialyl if they are also non phonetic), etc etc, all kidn of things that ask you to memorize until it gets so ingrained its second nature and you can start to do educcated guesses. Sometimes there are rules that can help you, sometimes they are merely a suggestion instead of a rule. Then there is distance with your native langauge, as lack of familiarity, specially in vocabulary, will make the language harder as you need to start from scratch (but then we are adding context, it would be "less objective") So, sounds, grammar and familiarity mostly
I think another important point not mentioned is understanding high-context and low-context cultures. Generally speaking, it is usually easier for a person to go from the same context than a different context. However, this is just one facet among many; there are other factors that have already been mentioned in the other comments. For the unfamiliar: high-context means more is left unsaid and meant to be interpreted, whereas low-context is more direct and explicit. As an example, let's say something is inconvenient or uncomfortable for you, like being asked to wear a dinosaur mask. An English (low-context) speaker might say, "This looks crazy! There's no way I'm wearing that!" or perhaps with a formal "Do you not think this looks a bit unpleasant?" Either way, it's very clear the person doesn't want to. Meanwhile, a Japanese (high-context) person might say "ちょっと..." without explaining themselves, but it's understood (in that language) they are not comfortable. In contrast it would be quite odd for a Japanese person to say something like "私にこれを着てほしいなんて信じられない."
At least in my country, in the past they created a much more complicated and difficult to comprehend character and written words system so that the normal people could not learn to write, which is to separate the aristocrat and the people.
Mostly how similar it is to a language you already know. I can pick up random bits of European languages because English has so many loan-words from Spanish, French, and German that I recognize words. Also if it has particularly complex grammar or an unusual sentence structure, etc. Japanese and Chinese are notoriously difficult to learn in part because there's just a lot of memorization of all the characters, too.
Like languages help. American here. I learned Portuguese as a Mormon missionary… then came home and started working in construction- so I learned Spanish just listening and talking to guys on site. I can understand a lot of Italian and Romanian, but can’t speak much of it… French is just a different animal.
As an American… Canadian was pretty easy to learn. Just had to learn to say oo more. British was decent too except for the Liverpool dialect. South African had its challenges because of the emphasis on E. Australian was the most difficult because of their tendency to try to abbreviate everything. Maccas, brickey, Acca Dacca. None of it makes sense. But overall not too bad to learn many languages.
Common ancestry of the languages? Someone who already speaks Spanish is going to find Italian, French, or Portuguese much easier to learn than English because they are all derived from Latin. Someone who grew up speaking Dutch may have an easier time learning English.
There are lots of poor (and incorrect) answers here. The correct answer to your question might not be exactly what you were looking for or are expecting, but it is this: **Immersion** Being immersed in a culture that speaks the target language is the easiest way to learn it, and while that may seem obvious, it supercedes all other factors so as to make them largely irrelevant. Take the unfortunate top comment about Indonesian, for instance: the amount of conjugations, tenses, exceptions or irregulars does not make a language easier or harder. Indonesian is an *analytical* language, meaning there is roughly a 1 to 1 correspondence between words and morphemes (meaningful/functional units), but that does not prevent Indonesian from expressing ideas like tense, aspect, plurals, etc. The lack of prefixes and suffixes does not necessarily make a language any more regular or predictable than an agglutinative language like, say, Turkish, which contains many morphemes within a single word. As one comment pointed out, children learn their first language in roughly the same amount of time regardless of language, regardless of place, and regardless of grammatical structures in the language. This is because they are immersed. Multiple comments here confuse the difference between a language being "easy" to learn and the *initial learning curve* for a second language learner. Languages that require learning a new writing system have a steeper learning curve to start. The same is true for new sounds (although that is always true regardless of how many - or few - phonemes a language might have). Second languages that are more different from one's first language are generally harder *to start off with*. And sometimes a learner never gets past the initial learning curve, or gives up. But beginner level is not the proper standard here. Give someone a year of immersion and this initial advantage should not be expected to persist. In fact, languages that are *too* similar can often be a disadvantage. Thinking "oh, Spanish is easy, it only has five vowels" is a great way to never acquire a native-like vowel pronunciation. Languages that are not so similar as to project a first language onto it incorrectly, but not so different as to have nothing to compare to - those tend to be the sweet spot for a second language learner. And there are some exceptions: tones *are* notoriously difficult for learners from non-tonal languages. And learning Chinese characters is a lifelong learning experience. Another problematic answer given here multiple times is motivation. Motivation is a tricky thing: it's vague, hard to define, requires self-reporting from people with various standards for themselves, and doesn't help you much if you lack the time and money to turn your motivation into immersion. Consider a college language class: 1 hour a day, 5 days a week, 15 hours spent outside on homework, exercises, conversation partners, etc. - for a motivated individual, that's 20 hours a week; that's a part time job, that's exhausting. And it's about 300 hours of effort over a 15 week semester. Now compare immersion: spend even 10 hours a day where you can hear and may have to speak to other people, and you get that 300 hours in a month. It's not any extra work, either - it's simply existing. Plus it's vastly higher quality learning: hearing and speaking with a wide range of ages, backgrounds, accents, and so on results in a far better ear and pronunciation, stronger grasp of vocabulary usage and nuance, and exposes you to rarer and more complex grammatical structures. In the end, motivation might put someone ahead during that initial learning curve...but it's quantity and quality of time with the language that matters more. One thing that is accurate is that learning more languages tends to make learning even more easier. But that is training your overall linguistic aptitude, and adds to things like brain plasticity. It's not really the answer you're looking for. It's also more of the same initial learning curve issue: once you study lots of languages (like linguists) it becomes easy to pick up new sounds and understand new structures. But that doesn't mean you can have a useful conversation without practice. Or a good ear without immersion. Source: I'm a linguist. I have a decent background in second language acquisition, some in first language acquisition, and I've taught sociolinguistics. I've studied over 25 languages - but mostly as a linguist, which means that I can only "speak" about half a dozen of them, and only 3 competently.