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- "I had always understood English to be a reasonably easy language to learn, because it lacks many of the features that make other languages difficult. However, a friend told me that English is considered one of the most difficult languages to learn, because it contains so many words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings. I'd love to see your opinion about this (and if I'm right, bragging rights with my friend).
Johnson is sorry to disappoint, but the boring answer is “it depends”. Whether English is confusing or easy mostly depends on the learner’s native language. A native speaker of German or Dutch—Germanic languages closely related to English—will find English relatively straightforward. Learners whose first language is Chinese (completely unrelated) or Russian (distantly related) will find English much harder. This is roughly true of languages all around the world. If you learn a language geographically close and from a common ancestor of your first language, there will be fewer nasty surprises, at every level from sound to word to sentence.