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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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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.