Reasons some languages are harder to learn

1. Separable verbs in German. My favourite example is "Ich bringe meine Frau (um)". "Umbringen" means "to kill". "Bringen" means, well, "to bring". So you can't start translating German to English until you hear the whole sentence a lot of the time. I believe this has a name in linguistics. Front loading of information? Something like that?

2. Word order. Again in German, "Ich habe meine Frau gebraucht" (I brought my wife). You don't know the verb until the end. For reference, the kill version is the fairly sane "umgebraucht".

3. Many Indo-European languages have strict requirements where words have to agree in case, gender, number and even article (eg in German this changes based on the definite vs the indefinite article). I have trouble believing this doesn't have a cognitive load. This does allow shortcuts. For example, it seems like it's common to omit the subject pronoun because when it's obvious from the verb conjugation.

3. Writing system. Asian languages are the poster children for complex writing systems that often don't delineate word boundaries and may have thousands of characters. I think I read once that in Taiwan in high school they have competitions for how quickly you can find a word in a dictionary. Oh and don't tonal Asian languages also not reflect that tone in the written form (genuine question)? Semitic languages are a milder version of this where vowels are typically omitted.

4. Suffixes to change word meaning also mean you need to keep that word in mind until you hear the end of it. Word order just seems so much more predictable but that could definitely be native English bias.

I find it fascinating that through a variety of means a lot of this linguistic cruft disappeared between Old English and Middle English.

English really is the red-headed stepchild of languages. In my experience, no one is the least bit concerned loan words in English whereas in French there's a Ministry dedicated to coming up with French words for foreign concepts to keep French "French".

This is why I find the hypothesis that languages constrain cultures so interesting. If your mindset has shifted to preserving your language (in essence, to resist change), how can that not impact your culture?

Many people confuse the grammatical genus (as used in practice in contemporary German) of German words with the biological concept of sex. This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender.

So, it is better to imagine the genus of German word as something like the "'color' of a word" ("color" in the sense of the "color charge" of quarks).

The US State department has the Foreign Service Institute, which is its primary training centre. With-in there they have the School of Language Studies, which teaches more than seventy languages, and over the years/decades it has been found that different language take different amounts of time to become proficient in (on average).

* Danish, Dutch, French, Norwegian, etc, take 24 weeks for an English speaker to learn

* German takes 30 weeks

* Indonesian, Malaysian, Swahili take 36w

* Albanian, Bengali, Bosnian, Polish, Urdu, etc, take 44w

* Arabic, Japanenese, Korean, Cant/Mand Chinese take 88w

See:

* https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Service_Institute

Edit: oh, Russian? Just wondering. Seen this come up a ton of times with Russian-speakers. For whatever reason it's an especially alien thing coming from that particular language.

Anyway, definite / indefinite is helpful for clarifying whether we're referring to a specific item or a generic item (i.e. any instance of that type of item, doesn't matter which one.)

Hmm, now that I think about it, it seems implicitly clear to me and that limits my ability to creatively explain its utility.

Maybe I should turn this around instead-- could you help me understand why that isn't a way of categorizing things that's employed by Russian-speakers? Why don't you need to make that distinction?

The idea is that English speakers identify light and dark as a variation of the same thing.

Are red and pink the same colour or different colours? What if you call "pink" something like "light red" instead? Are they now classified in your brain as two different things or the same one.

Is dark blue and light blue two colours or one? Does "light blue" become a different colour in a person's brain if it's label as azure as in Italian (etc)?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_(color)