Questions about language and cultural context (3)

Are some languages more or less difficult to learn than other languages?

Subjectively, yes, people feel one language is more difficult than the other, which is due to their aptitude and learning experience for languages and some other factors. For example, most of my friends generally believe that Asians who brought up in Asia can better pronounce Asian languages such as Chinese, while not European languages such as French, and vise versa. The partial reason I believe is the innate ability that Asians born with, and some people say it's the differences lie in the shape of the tongues between Europeans and Asians.

In addition, objectively,when we compare two languages, there are still many criteria to rank the difficulties, for instance, vocabulary, pronounciation,writing and reading. When I chatted with my friend Edward, one of my Chinese classmates who speaks Mandarin, English, French, Esperanto and Shanghainese, he told me that in general he would rank from hardest to easiest language as Mandarin, French, and English (regardless Shanghainese and Esperanto). But if we break down in detail, comparing different respects the rankings change. Edward says that French grammars are way harder than English, while its reading is much easier than Chinese. As for writing, Chinese must be the NO.1 hardest language among all; it takes effort to just memorize a single character. Also, both of us agree that many ancient languages are relatively difficult to learn such as Latin, as if we learn classical Chinese which people used around a hundred years ago.

So it's really up to one's experience and feelings when evaluate a language is harder than the other or not.