
Martha B. answered 08/15/19
BA in Applied Linguistics
In a technical sense, there is no answer to this question. Languages are not necessarily more or less difficult in themselves. Perceived difficulty in learning a language depends on which language you are learning from. For example, English and Spanish are fairly similar, and share some linguistic ancestors and family members, so learning Spanish is not so difficult for somebody who already speaks English. English and Mandarin, however, have quite different grammars and lexicons, and you have to go a long way back in time to find any linguistic kinship between them, so Mandarin would be fairly difficult for somebody who only speaks English to learn and vice versa. If you find a language that originated far away from where any you speak did and has not had much contact with the language you speak, it will probably be more difficult for you to learn. For English speakers, think languages like Thai, Navajo, Icelandic, Urdu, etc.