> Difficult is subjective. You're not responding to the evidence presented in this thread that there is evidence that some aspects of language learning is obje

> Difficult is subjective. You're not responding to the evidence presented in this thread that there is evidence that some aspects of language learning is objectively harder. Specifically: * There's pretty strong evidence (comparison between literacy rates of children with different native languages) that some languages have writing systems that are harder to learn than others. (I feel obliged to point out that writing is the least important part of language acquisition--after all, writing dates to only ~6,000 years ago, whereas spoken language dates at least 100,000 years ago, possibly earlier. Of course, for most major modern languages, a language learner is equally expected to read/write in it as they are to listen/speak in it) * There is some evidence, albeit more controversial, that there is a critical age range in which it is far easier to acquire pronunciation of phonemes than learning subsequently. * Again, there is evidence that some phonemes are physically easier to pronounce than others, discovered in part by the order in which toddlers acquire various speech sounds. If you've got a toddler learning to speak, listen to the sounds he/she can pronounce and also the ones that aren't properly pronounced. I wouldn't attempt to chart out a full objective scale on which phoneme is harder than the other one, but I would be moderately confident in asserting that an Arabic ayin is objectively more difficult to pronounce than an `m' sound. * I also mentioned evidence that some grammatical features may be more complicated: the developments of lingua francas, or additionally creoles, does suggest that languages used heavily as second language acquisition tend to drop several grammatical features. (Now I should also addend that just because something is objectively more difficult doesn't necessarily mean that is specifically "hard." It is clearly objectively more difficult to lift a box 2 meters than to do so 1 meter... but that doesn't mean that it's hard to do so.)