Quote:
Originally Posted by Kayci
To someone who grew up speaking the language, yes. But not in general
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Sorry, but I do not agree. English has no conjugation, no agreement amongst nouns/adverbs/adjectives, not many different levels of polite speech...and so on. It creates much confusion to understand that a phrase in Italian like "she knows who I am" in English is translated as "you know who I am" and the same for Spanish where they use the third person for you. In French can be even more confusing since they might say "yous" as in the plural of you, but they mean you as in singular person. In Italian and Spanish the gender of nouns can be understood by the final vowel of the word (watch out, coz it is not that simple, way too many exceptions in the way), while in French either you know it or you don't (even here the final for the female is not always there). Spanish amongst the three languages I guess I can say is the one with the more regular conjugation, but in French and above all Italian you will face so many irregularity that will drive you crazy.
As a native speaker of a latin language I found English much easier to learn than French, Dutch, Turkish or Japanese itslef (Dutch and Turkish gave up almost immediately). One of the main problems in English can be the presence of phrasal verbs, which are not of immediate understanding for foreigners and of course the fact that reading/writing English is much more difficult than other languages (too many exceptions). I was told, I don't have personal experience with those, that German and Russian are even harder than latin originated languages.
On the contrary I see many American people who have big problems in trying to learn latin languages.