#the easy languages are italian and spanish because they're romance languages

[moinsbienquekaworu]

I am also incurious about the world. I am. I do it too. I know. I do it. But I don't go on tiktok to confidently say that english is the current lingua franca because it's one of the easiest languages to learn!!!!

[beevean]

Beevean, what did find hardest when learning a language? I need to gather information since one of my characters is having trouble learning a language and it's rules, so I thought it would be good to ask someone who went through that experience.

The rule of thumb is that you're going to struggle with grammatical principles and words that are not similar to your native language (or languages that you're fluent in)

I know that when Americans study Spanish, they generally have a hard time wrapping around grammatical genders, because they don't exist in English anymore. Other Romance language speakers have no trouble with it, although at worst what is masculine in one language may be feminine in the other, and viceversa. Or, when I vaguely dabbled into Korean, I noticed that it had a similar sentence structure as Japanese: I had already learned the "noun-particle-object-particle-verb" structure, so that was a passage I could skip.

I also noticed that English speakers struggle with Japanese's very simple phonetics, because they're used to a much wider range of wovels. Personally, that was very easy for me. However, I did struggle to learn the R sound (which sounds something like a mix between L and the D/T in American - pudding in Japanese is purin lol) and sometimes I forget to pronounce the H sound, which doesn't exist in Italian but it exists in English.

Sometimes, and I mention it in case you want to add a similar detail to your character, the problem might be completely personal! I have a slight defect of pronunciation: I have never learned to make a rolling R sound, which is the standard in Italian. My Rs are all pronounced at the back of my throat. Helps me a lot with English and French! I also never fell into the trap of saying R in Japanese when the sound is more similar to L/D! Very annoying in Spanish, though, which has the same sound in words with RR.

As for the rest, it depends from person to person. I enjoy learning grammar more than I do vocabulary lol. Grammar is usually logical, and it makes me picture putting blocks together to form a construction. (I may have been lucky of course lol) Vocabulary... well, if you're learning a language similar to your own, you have to look out for false friends. If you're learning a language completely alien from your own, then it's little more than brute force memorization. But this is my perspective: many people I knew hated grammar more than vocabulary lol, precisely because for them it was a bunch of rules to memorize. (then again i'm the weirdo who was good at math in school, that might have influenced me...)

And, of course, you have to practice. Often. Both actively, by speaking and writing, and passively, by reading and listening. Depending on the language, this can be easy or excruciatingly hard. Needless to say that if you're learning English, Spanish or Japanese, resources throw themselves at you lmao. Learning Albanian? Haha, good luck :)

I think I covered everything I could? I hope it was useful!

[romance-of-three-memes]

Unlike English and Chinese, Romance languages (there are a lot, but 'the big ones' are generally considered to be Romanian, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French) gender nouns and some other kinds of words like articles (words like 'the' and 'an'). Cultural relativism and all that, but gendering inanimate objects is unnecessary no matter how you slice it. But at least Spanish makes it easy. Feminine words end in -a, masculine words end in -o, or sometimes they have an e where feminine forms have an a (la vs el, which both translate to 'the'). Easy peasy.

French just can't be like that because it's basically the wild fuckin' west as far as I've found while trying to teach myself some. Some are easy like le and la (which also translate into 'the'), others are uh. Well. They're basically the same except for spelling and the pronunciation is a teensy bit different. Take une vs un, both of which translate into 'a' in English. You don't pronounce the e at the end of une (French adores throwing letters on at the end without pronouncing them), basically the only difference is that you pronounce une a bit more softly/lightly. Une is the feminine form so of course it has to be softer and gentler, because gender stereotypes are so firmly entrenched in our minds that it comes out in ways like that. To be fair, English does that sort of thing too, albeit more subtly.