Like, English is a famously difficult language, and Spanish is supposed to be easier. But babies learn English or any language instinctually.
So do babies learn faster if the native language is easier, or do they acquire language at a constant rate depending on their brain development or whatever?
Why would Spanish be easier than English?
I would judge it to be slightly harder because of gendered words.
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 hard and most words have endings that hint at it.
English is a complete mess of a bastard language
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!
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.
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.
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.
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…
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…