RE: How people learn foreign languages.
Native English speakers statistically are less likely to be bilingual, which is a shame because there are proven mental benefits to being bilingual.
English grammatical structures are very simple and therefore easy to learn. However, it is a very chaotic language, because it has borrowed from many other languages over the centuries. Also, being a lingua franca all over the world means that the language is changing in different ways in different places at the same time, which makes it even more chaotic. There are no hard and fast phonetic rules in English, which makes the pronunciation very tricky. You can't read an English word and automatically know how it's pronounced. You can do that in most languages.
So English is an easy language to learn, but a difficult language to master. You've probably noticed this when you speak to the many, many non-native English speakers that you have met. Their grammar is usually pretty good (maybe a few mistakes with the word order, but nothing more than that). However, they mispronounce a lot of words. It doesn't matter though, because they are still able to communicate clearly with you. They know English, they just haven't mastered it yet.
Very true. My friend @niamilena is russian her English is excellent now but at first it was hard. I've heard that the latin languages are eaaier to learn such as Spanish, Italian, french as they are all based around the same aet of worlds.
Like pinapple everywhere else says Anans is it and we say pineapple ha ha
The Latin languages are usually pretty easy if you already speak a Latin language. For example, I know Italians that live in Spain, who speak Italian with the locals, who reply to them in Spanish, and they can communicate effectively enough.
English is a Germanic language; however after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the country was ruled by the French for 600 years, and Latin was used in church until Protestantism took over from Catholicism. So English has absorbed so many Latin words to the point that around 60% of the words in the English language aren't from Germanic origin. That gives us a bit of a boost when learning Latin languages. Here are a few examples of English words and their Spanish equivalents, to give you an idea.
What makes Spanish tricky is that there's 49 ways to conjugate every verb. For the verb "to be", there's 98, because they have two different versions of the verb. There's a few other tricky aspects, but overall, Spanish isn't all that difficult, although definitely a bit more difficult than English.
How interesting!!! Thank you for sharing the knowledge.
I had no idea that high of a percentage actually came from Latin not Germanic.
It's so fastinating and to think of all the variants of English you mentioned earlier play into all of it and of course slang terms.
There's literally thousands of cognates going from English to Latin languages. In the case of Spanish, they usually adhere to some very easy rules. But there are a few of what we call "false friends". For example, "embarazado" in Spanish means "pregnant", although you'd think it would mean embarrassed. And it's not too hard to see how pregnancy and embarrassment could come from the same etymological origin, but nonetheless, they mean very different things.