![]() But languages with big groups of speakers, or many neighbouring languages, systematically tend to have fewer inflections. It found that highly inflected languages tend to be spoken by a small number of speakers, and have few neighbours. Where are the world’s hardest languages, then? Is English one of them? One study, by Gary Lupyan and Rick Dale in 2010, looked closely at inflection. This kind of inflection is not a terrible proxy for that slippery idea of “difficulty”. An English noun usually has only two forms (singular and plural), whereas the Greek or Russian noun takes numerous forms showing grammatical gender, number and case. An English verb has a maximum of five forms (speak, speaks, speaking, spoke, spoken), whereas verbs in Spanish or Latin can take dozens of forms. The distinction involves a language’s “inflectional morphology”, or the bits and pieces added to a noun or adjective or verb to make it match up with other pieces in a sentence. Next to them, in one important respect, English is easy. Would it be possible, though, to describe a language’s “difficulty” in the abstract? If so, what would it look like? English-speakers often point to a language like Latin or Ancient Greek. If you learn a language geographically close and from a common ancestor of your first language, there will be fewer nasty surprises, at every level from sound to word to sentence. This is roughly true of languages all around the world. Learners whose first language is Chinese (completely unrelated) or Russian (distantly related) will find English much harder. A native speaker of German or Dutch-Germanic languages closely related to English-will find English relatively straightforward. ![]() Whether English is confusing or easy mostly depends on the learner’s native language. Johnson is sorry to disappoint, but the boring answer is “it depends”. I’d love to see your opinion about this (and if I’m right, bragging rights with my friend). However, a friend told me that English is considered one of the most difficult languages to learn, because it contains so many words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings. I had always understood English to be a reasonably easy language to learn, because it lacks many of the features that make other languages difficult.
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