| English CAN be easy for several reasons: 1. Very analytical, wake in inflections. 2. No genders for nouns.(As an Eastern Asian, I have serious problem understanding the motivation of introducing such concept into a language.) 3. Reasonable number of tenses comparing with rest of European languages, with the exception of probably present perfect tense, which can be fairly confusing. It CAN be hard for the following reasons: 1. Huge amount of French/Latin borrowed words that don't follow the orthodoxical way of word construction in Germanic language family, unlike German. This leads to a lot of cognitive overhead having to memorize those words since they tend to appear more often in advanced writings. 2. Related to the first argument, English pronunciation CANNOT be reliably inferred from its letter representation. Again leads to a lot of mistakes and force memorization. I think English is easier as a language for everyday use. But to read and write academic text, it still requires years of training. Personally, it takes me about 10 years to reach a certain level of confidence in writing and conversation, for speaking it is even longer. |