As the title says, this popped into my head while walking to my home being showered with subzero frozen rain.

Modern english is just an creole language of 5 different european languages and made super easy to mix the conflicts between those languages. Thats why its so easy to learn for most people.

    • VeryFrugal@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 month ago
      1. im, it’s definitely one of the easiest languages to learn (I speak Korean, English, and some Japanese). The fact that there are no gender distinctions or honorifics contributes significantly to its ease.
      2. The comparative ease also comes from the fact that, since it’s the de facto lingua franca, you simply cannot avoid learning it. It’s also easy to learn in terms of accessibility.
    • ThoGot@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 month ago

      In my experience and what I heard from other people, yes
      (but it’s also from a european perspective)

    • Kallioapina@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 month ago

      At least thats what I’ve always heard from various sources during my 40’sh years on this earth (beginning from our english teacher while I was around 9 years old).

      • Contramuffin@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        I would argue it’s one of the harder ones. Not the hardest for sure (that title would have to go to Japanese or Chinese, probably), but I would say that it’s significantly harder than the average language

        • vatlark@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 month ago

          One comment I heard from a native french speaker is that the “dictionary is much larger” than french. Which makes sense because English incorporated many french words.

          • Zeppo@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            5 days ago

            A language with consistent spelling and pronunciation like Spanish. English has so many special cases where words are spelled or pronounced very unpredictably.

            • taladar@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              5 days ago

              That entirely depends on how you plan to use it though. If you e.g. only want to read and write or listen and speak but not combine spoken and written word the consistency of pronunciation vs. spelling matters a lot less.

              For vocabulary I suppose you could also consider languages with compound words easier than languages with unique words for the same concepts, i believe Spanish doesn’t do so well there.

                • taladar@sh.itjust.works
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  3 days ago

                  I was actually more thinking about the use case where you e.g. only read and write online but rarely speak the language yourself and don’t watch any movies or listen to audio books or podcasts.