On 05/02/2016 12:22 PM, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
In any case, learning any new language is hard - especially the farther it is from your own (e.g. Asian languages are going to generally be pretty brutal to learn for someone speaking a European languages).
That sounds reasonable to expect, but I'm a native english speaker who's (attempted to) study both german and japanese, and I found german considerably more difficult than japanese. But maybe I'm just weird.
I like to assume the reason was *because* german is so much more similar to english (and english makes no sense even to a native speaker!) The word genders didn't help, either.
Japanese seemed a little simpler and more logical and consistent overall (ex: not only no word genders, but very little singular/plural, and answering a negative question is straightforward instead of completely backwards like in english[1]). But that perception could have simply been due to being a novice at it.
I really do think I never would've been able to learn english if it wasn't native to me.
[1] "Did you NOT go to the store?" If it's true that you didn't go, the expected answer is..."No". Really?!? Or you could answer either "Yes, that's correct" or "Yes, I went" which are *opposite* answers despite both being "yes". WTF?!? Even I often have to pause when answering a negative question in english. I chalk it up to too many native english speakers being stupid and not knowing how to answer questions sanely ;)
