this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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ShowerThoughts
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Sometimes we have those little epiphanies in the shower.. sometimes they come from other places. This is a home for those epiphanies.
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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
What would you consider a language that is easier to learn and why?
A language with consistent spelling and pronunciation like Spanish. English has so many special cases where words are spelled or pronounced very unpredictably.
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.
Yes, I would prefer to be literate.
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.
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.