I don't think that English is that hard. It has very easy grammar, you don't have to mess with genders and it has a straight forward sentence structure. Other languages like german, are much harder to learn.

[–] CheesyFox@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

yeah, i'm from Ukraine, and at some point our study program has tried to fit in our poor heads some A1-A2 german, so I can relate. Needless to mention that i can't say a word in german, all knowledge of it has been forgotten by me as some kind of lovecraftian unspeakable horror :D

[–] cows_are_underrated@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

German is a hell to learn. The same word can have different articles depending on the kasus. As example: "Er geht in DIE Küche und kommt aus DER Küche heraus". Its very hard to understand this as a non native speaker.

[–] TheSanSabaSongbird@lemdro.id 1 points 1 year ago

Again, the difficulty of language acquisition is determined by how similar the new language you are trying to learn is to the languages you already speak. There isn't any kind of objective measurement of language acquisition difficulty.

For whatever reason people are often very resistant to this fact, but just speaking several languages fluently doesn't mean you actually know shit about linguistics, and this is a very well-established concept.

So a native Mandarin speaker would probably find English and German equally difficult to acquire because they are both so unlike their own language.

Fun fact about English; Old English was even more grammatically complex than modern German but it got stripped down over the years and now accomplishes through syntax much of what it used to do with grammar.

There are also a couple of very odd qualities to English that may have come from the Celtic languages, but the idea is still pretty controversial.