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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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Since the main question here has already been answered by the Danish/Norwegian post, I would like to address something different. My native language is Spanish, and I completely disagree with you.
English is a lot easier to learn to speak than Spanish. Spanish has everything English has, plus:
The complications in English are later, after you know how to speak and have to learn how to write it, but we're talking babies learning here. Spanish writing is much easier than English because it's very phonetic, but just the conjugations are enough to drive English speakers insane trying to learn them because in English you use constructions to achieve the same effect, e.g. I run: yo corro; I ran: yo corrí; I would run: yo correría; I will run: yo correré; I used to run: yo corría; so that I would run; para que yo corra; so that I could run: para que yo corriera; run!: corre!; don't run!: no corras!. Different verbs would use the same construction in English but may be different sounds for different verbs in Spanish: e.g. I ran, I walked, I had vs Yo corrí, yo caminé yo tuve (and yes, I get that using run is a bad example here since it's irregular, but it's only one of a handful, whereas Spanish has different conjugations for different verbs plus some irregular ones)
I think this stuff is tricky for an older language learner, but for a baby I think they would just learn it without thinking about it.
In English you have lots of words that sound the same but mean different things and in Spanish you don't have that as much.
Yes, we don't know the rules to conjugations, we just know them. But you know what's faster than that? Not having that to begin with.
In Spanish we also have lots of words that sound the same but mean different things, for example Punto means dot, point, spot, stitch, stop (in the meantime of bus stop). Plus, I would argue that's not a problem when you're learning the language, in fact the opposite is true, having many words to mean the same thing makes it hard to learn since the same thing can be said in a multitude of ways, and it might be because English is not my first language, but I find Spanish to have lots more synonyms or entirety different ways of saying the same thing.
I can't speak to Spanish, but in English and French anyway, there are many ways to say almost the same thing, but they all have slight variations and nuances and meaning. That's why poetry is so fun.
Yes, that's the same with most languages. My point is that being proficient in several languages I find English text a lot more repetitive, whereas Spanish text has multiple turns of phrases used to avoid repetition, which also makes it a lot harder to learn (although I don't think we expect kids to know many synonyms for stuff, and children books tend to stick to simpler construction of phrases).
The things I've seen people point to English to claim it's hard are not really needed to be fluent in speaking the language (which is what kids do).
The main difficulty I guess is more for reading and writing than speaking I guess... when you are encountering a new word, you don't know how it is going to be spelled or pronounced, and it can be difficult to predict what it will mean sometimes because of all the different roots and pre-postfixes. You just have to learn it and remember it. There is no overarching system like in Spanish, there are many competing systems.
Yes, I agree, learning to write English is harder than to write Spanish, in fact Spanish has the most phonetic writing of all the languages I know. But your question was about babies learning, which is solely spoken language, you only learn writing after you're already a fluent speaker.
Yes the original question was about how long it would take to be able to speak, and you're right I don't really know which would take longer, English or Spanish.
I learned that Danish takes a long time though lol.