Apparently this reminder is needed.
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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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English is easy. The hardest part about it, which some other languages also feature, is a poor correspondence between the written and spoken language.
That feels intuitively correct to me, but I'm not sure if I'd say any language is particularly "easy". Language is complex, complicated and only makes sense in the context of understanding human communication. Although language is also more intuitive than we give it credit for.
I think spoken Japanese is possibly "easier" than spoken English, but written Japanese (outside of digital media) is essentially impossible for me because I don't have Kanji memorized.
I mean yes it's a bit under-nuanced to describe any language as "easy" or "hard". The single biggest influence is whether you're already familiar with a similar language. English is going to be much easier if you already know German; Japanese will be much easier if you already know Okinawan. And as you say, written and spoke language can be quite different.
That said, I don't think it is the case that all of the different factors trade off against one another perfectly. I would expect them to trade off against one another to an extent though, because I would imagine there are forces which cause overly complex languages to become simpler, and more simple languages to become more complex. (One aspect of complexity comes through redundancy, such as requiring agreement between inflections of words when the inflection only conveys information already imparted from the rest of the sentence. But extra redundancy can aid in understanding because the listener generally doesn't hear everything perfectly)
But yeah, some languages just have incredibly complicated and picky grammar, whilst others have relatively simple grammar. As an English speaker, Japanese grammar has lots of unfamiliar features but could still be simpler than Finnish, which also has lots of unfamiliar grammar but which is very complex.
I feel like English is fairly easy to get into and have a correct conversation level. But that it's insanely hard to master.
I have no reference for the relative difficulty of languages to master, except that I know that all languages are incredibly hard to master to the level of a native speaker.