Chou pas gothEnglish is a tricky language (from a French point of view). It seems easy enough to learn compared to French, and yes, it does lack the pesky silent letters we have, and then... You realize that between accents, and letters combinations, etc., while it's easy to speak broken English, it's actually hard to speak good English :)
Andrew Kirch@jenesuispasgoth I live in the USA and we can't tell anyway. Most people born here can't speak the language properly.
Doc Edward Morbius ❌@jenesuispasgoth So ... what are the easiest and hardest languages to learn? To speak with something resembling native fluency?
@dredmorbius I really couldn't say. From a French point of view, Spanish is probably one of the easiest, because it has very few exceptions. The only hard thing is tense concordance, because that's the ONE thing we simplified in French which wasn't in Spanish.
@dredmorbius it also depends if we include ALL languages. For example, from a French pov, Japanese is relatively easy to pronounce, but the very different set of symbols and grammatical rules makes it pretty hard. Chinese (Mandarin) is hard all the way because it is both very different to read/write, but the tone thing and many sounds are difficult to reproduce from a French perspective.
@jenesuispasgoth Agreed on charactersets and pronunciation, but Mandarin's /grammar/ is actually pretty straightforward. The cultural contexts and norms add to the complexity though.
@dredmorbius agreed on this too. :)
BasqueInGlory@dredmorbius I think English and Mandarin Chinese are rated as the most difficult languages to learn by non native speakers. The easiest languages to learn are probably Spanish and Esperanto.
@BasqueInGlory Latin was on my short list. German, other than the cases. Russian's pretty straightforward in grammar, but there's the alphabet problem. I can't speak to Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, or similar Semitic languages.
SS Africa and Oceania should be interesting linguistically as well. The first as the origin point of most, and with deep overlays. The latter for propogation and drift.
@BasqueInGlory </me looks at username>
And, yeah. Basque is an interesting case.
@jenesuispasgoth English is what happens when German and French mate, and their child grows up to rob Welsh of all of its spare vowels.
@BasqueInGlory ha! That's a very accurate description :D