Joy is in the ears that hear

franzboas asked: So i have another question. I often see native English speakers talking about how English is ~objectively harder to learn than other languages. But how would you qualify that anyway? I mean I know that some of our pronunciations seem all over the place, but compared to some of the other languages I've studied, our grammar or structure doesn't seem to be as rigid. Or maybe no one besides English majors actually care. But how would a language be fundamentally harder/easier to learn?

It’s an interesting question, and I’d say there are three main components to how easy or difficult it is to learn a second language. The first just has to do with the individual person who’s trying to learn it: some people are better at picking up languages than others are, so they’ll generally have an easier time learning language X no matter what the language is. As far as language-to-language differences, though, I would say there are two broad categories of features that make a foreign language “easy” or “hard” to learn.

First, and the one most people seem to have in mind when they make statements about some language being the easiest or hardest to learn, is the writing system. English pronunciation is “all over the place” because we have very complicated rules for what sounds standardly map onto the written form of the language. If you’re an adult trying to learn English as a written language, whether you’re already fluent in the spoken language or not, you’re going to find yourself very frustrated with learning the standard ways to pronounce the letters. You’ll also have a hard time transcribing the spoken English words you know into their standard spellings. As a system for representing the sounds of our language, English spelling is kind of a mess! (There are good historical reasons for how it developed into that mess, but it is definitely a mess today.)

So if your approach to learning a foreign language includes learning how to read and write in it, English is going to pose troubles that a more straightforward writing system wouldn’t. That doesn’t mean English has the least straightforward standard mapping between sound and writing, but there are certainly languages whose conventional alphabets have a standard one-to-one relation between letter and sound. In such languages, it’ll be easier for a new speaker to learn how to read and write the words they know.

But all of that just has to do with written fluency: there’s nothing about English’s sounds or its grammar that makes it more difficult to learn than any other language. Anyone claiming that really doesn’t know what they’re talking about. The reason people often do make that claim, though, and say that English has really difficult grammatical rules or really tough pronunciations, has to do with the final cause of acquisition difficulty: individual exposure to similar forms. As you could probably guess, it’s a lot easier for someone to learn a language with similar sounds and grammar to one they already know. The more closely related any two languages are, the easier it will be for a speaker of one to learn the other. That’s why it’s objectively easier for an English speaker to learn German than Japanese, because German is in the same language family as English, and there are a lot of similarities between the two. Japanese is genealogically very distant from English, so its grammar seems more difficult to us and its sounds are often less familiar.

It really is just a matter of individual exposure, though. I think tone languages are really difficult, because I don’t speak one myself. But for someone who grew up speaking a language with grammatical tone, it would be a lot easier to hear those distinctions in another language. And if you’re not used to some feature of English in your own language — like the fact that our verbs agree with our subjects or that there’s a difference between the sounds “t” and “d” — the language is going to seem really difficult to learn. The sounds and the rules will seem less straightforward, but just because you don’t have anything like them in your own language.

This is probably way more than you wanted to know, but I do have to mention one final caveat: everything I’ve said here has to do with second language acquisition, not first. The most important reason for why it’s silly to say one language is easier or harder than another is that children show no discrepancies cross-linguistically in learning their native tongues. Babies in an English-speaking household don’t learn to speak at significantly different rates than babies anywhere else in the world — and that alone should suggest that underlyingly, no language is more or less “difficult” than any other.