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Do babies learn languages at different rates depending on how hard the language is?
(piefed.blahaj.zone)
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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Why would Spanish be easier than English?
I would judge it to be slightly harder because of gendered words.
Spanish is easier in the sense it's more regular. Genders don't had that much complexity if they are applied consistently, especially when you stack them against all the irregularities in English. That being said, and without claiming to be an expert, I think the consensus is that language acquisition time is similar across languages, but the time to master the language is related to how predictable/regular it's grammar and vocabulary formation is.
English is incredibly easy to learn. Why do you think it's basically the world's lingua franca? The spelling is just a matter of learning to spell and the grammar is dead easy. I was virtually fluent by the time I hit 11 because I'd been watching English language TV with subtitles.
Spelling is not taught in my language.
Because it's not necessary.
English is easy to get started but insanely hard to master. There are tons of irregular verbs, orthography is all over the place, plurals have more than a few pitfalls, etc.
It is the most schizophrenic language. Super easy to be understood even getting most of a sentence wrong, but can change meaning entirely with just a comma. Has at least two different root languages and as many as five depending on how you define root. Has words from almost every spoken language on the planet and has so many spelling exceptions you can have high level competitions just trying to spell different words.
And all that is just the tip of the iceberg.
The drawing is just a matter of learning to draw. What?
Subjective.
But I think it's "easy" to learn because it's prevalent. If Spanish or Thai were as prevalent as English you'd probably speak that and think it's just as easy.
You can learn any language basically through enough exposure to it.
Afaik until WW2 German still was the lingua franca for academia. What, it became harder after the war? Oh wait, perhaps it's just fallen out of favor while the US, having not been bombed to rubble and having had an influx of educated immigrants, enjoyed a huge economic boom and resulting political and cultural dominance.
Because the British empire was absolutely huge. Which lead to many countries having English as an official language. Which means those countries would conduct trade in English. Followed by American dominance, which also has English as its main language.
And that American dominance includes dominance in media, especially films because of hollywood. Technical documents, research and especially computer-related technical documents are mainly in English for the same reason.
Sure, English is not that hard of a language. But it's not the easiest either.
Unfortunately, English is not an easy language to learn for people who never grew up with it. I speak from experience, many of my friends do not speak English as a first language and some of the "quirks" of English are really really stupid and make it unnecessarily difficult to learn...
No language is easy to learn for people who never grew up with it (as in, it always takes effort), and every language has quirks. You’re arguing for it being hard to learn a language - this is true - not for English being uniquely hard.
But relatively speaking, whether a language is easy or hard to learn largely depends on the languages you know already, especially as your mother tongue. Dutch is very close to English, and English has borrowed a lot of French vocabulary, so if you know those languages you will not have too hard of a time learning English. To someone who only knows Mandarin, English (and French, and Dutch) will obviously be completely foreign, in everything: grammar, vocabulary and syntax.
Spanish is phonetic, what you see is what you get. There's a few rules around the pronunciation of the letter c and (q)u/h not being pronounced, but it's otherwise pretty standard. Gender in Spanish isn't that difficult.
English is a complete mess of a bastard language with more exceptions than rules.
This doesn’t have anything to do with language acquisition by babies, though. Spelling is a completely different subject than natural, spoken, language, and obviously not something babies will come into contact with.
l am German and have learned French as my second foreign language.
French's two genders are slightly nightmarish and German's three genders are no better.
Similar for the slavish languages with genders I had a peak into. I expected this to also be similar for Spanish, at least compared to English that I perceived to be quite easy to learn.
Interesting to hear otherwise.
So I now wish that Spanish had been an option at my schools. :-)
Je connais aussi le français :) C'est un peu plus difficile que l'espagnol à cause des lettres qu'on ne prononce jamais, mais pas beaucoup en fait
* Spanish and English are my native tongues, French is extra
I'm Italian and I feel that both Italian and Spanish are way more difficult to learn than English.
English doesn't have genders, it has way less verb tenses, and you don't need to conjugate every verb person in a different way for each tense!
l am German and I had the same impression. English was silly easy to learn (I may still have a slightly harsh pronunciatian, though).
No gender-dependent conjugations and the grammatical exceptions are sparse (mainly a few special cases around the tenses).
But learning French, another dual-gendered latin language: total nightmare.
So my surprise that Spanish is supposed to be easier to learn than the already quite easy English language...
Another problem with French (that Italian and Spanish pretty much don't have) is the pronunciation. They don't have a 1-to-1 relation between letters and sounds.
But that's also a problem with English.
Wouldst I have been having an origin and thus a learning experience that might have been comparable to yours, I expect I should will agree with you. But having not had had my way into English from the same vantage point, I am going to have to go ahead and will have disagreed with you, in that in my view tenses in English are son of a fucking bitch.
Look at Italian and you'll be thankful that English verbs are so easy.
This is the conjugation of "to be" in Italian. You need to learn all those tenses also for "to have" and for 3 different categories of verbs called "-are", "-ere", "-ire" (almost 4, in reality, because many "-ere" verbs are irregular).
The number of conjugations is impressive, mostly because of the genders and the plural forms. But regarding the tenses themselves, half of them are formed by adding ‘stato’ to the other kind. Meanwhile English has twelve basic tenses without getting into the subjunctive, conditional and imperative moods (congiuntivo, condizionale and imperativo). The full tense–aspect–mood system greatly complicates things.
yeah right? never met an english speaker that got past the most basic levels of spanish
I have!
Bud I don't think it's because Spanish is harder or whatever it's because English speakers generally are pretty content not to learn another language...