this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

I know this is really just pointing out some amusing homonyms for laughs, but languages aren't really harder or easier to learn. How hard or easy you find a language depends on you, the languages you know and how different the other language is.

It's common to hear that English is hard because English is the most common second language, so there's are just more people who've tried to learn it and thus more people who've struggled.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I've never heard anyone saying English is hard. The only hard part of English is the pronunciation, because it doesn't make sense, you just have to know all the words...

It's wide adoption has probably been helped by the ease of learning its basics.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It’s not hard, it’s just that you have to know everything!

…that makes it hard!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Nah. If I say "I thinked" instead of "I thought", I'm pretty sure you're going to understand me anyway. And with the written form you don't have problems with stuff like "read-read" or "colonel".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

To my surprise, I have heard a lot of French people say English is easy to learn.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Why would that be surprising?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Because we barely pronounce anything compared to Romances

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

And these kind of articles always seems to have been written by monolinguist native English speakers, who have no idea that the mentioned examples are in no way exclusive to English, but is in fact just how most languages work.