CiaoCiao wrote:no language in the world is easy to learn, including our mother tongue, who of us can say that we know our own language quite well? or we never have grammar mistakes in speaking and writing? i cannot say that, at least. for europeans English seems to be much easier than any other ones since it originates from latin system and at the same time does not have that complicated transforms of verb as german, french etc. i am just a beginner of japanese study, frankly i find it a bit simple than learning chinese especially words can be easily pronounced without the horrible four tones of madarin. what a kind of torture to remember different tones!!! that is why i finally decided to learn japanese for instead.
As you said, for speakers of some languages, it might be easier to learn one language than to learn another. For example the Japanese languages consists of many sounds that are also inherent to
Italian, thus for Italian people, pronouncing Japanese might not be so difficult.
I think English is relatively easy to learn for Europeans because it's similar in grammar to many other languages, but I wouldn't say that English is a simple language... think of the spelling? There are dozens of ways to spell one particular sound, and many letters are pronounced very differently depending on the word.
"boar, core, poor, pour" (same ending)
"tile, isle, kyle, child" (same vowel)
"cane, chain" (same ending)
"tune, chew" (same start)
and such... Observing this I think some foreigners would rather learn a few forms of verbs rather than this spelling. I'm glad I somehow grew up with English thanks to the Internet and television, and that I didn't need to learn this from a book :beaten: