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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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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.