I thought JLB on the last album was pretty great, I thought that was the popular opinion?
Well, to be fair, Polish is the hardest, most complex language on Earth .
I can probably say I've heard that statement being said about every major language in this world.
It's not just about the language you're learning; it's equally as much about the language you're coming from. German with its three genders and four different cases must be hell for a Chinese speaker. For a Dutch person it would just be a shoulder shrug.
Totally offtopic, but this is not entirely true. Some languages are fairly scientific and thus can be learned quite efficiently by knowing the basic set of rules. A 26-letter alphabet with generally clear rules of pronounciation and grammar is way less complex than Mandarin, with it's vast amount of characters and information gap between writing and pronouncing, for example.
Yes, but the grammar of Mandarin, to my understanding, is very simplistic. There is no "the horses will have jumped tomorrow". It's just "two horse jump maybe tomorrow".
English, supposedly an "easy" language to learn, is only easy in its grammar. It dropped the genders and cases. But the vocabulary, which is a mix of old Germanic, old Norse, French and Latin, alongside with the different spellings due to that, is a disaster.
The general point is, any civilized country has a language that is complex enough to encode the subtleties of that society. The languages just plug that complexity into different spots. German has a lot of it in the grammar, English in the vocabulary.
EDIT: More on the topic, check out page 40 of this paper:
https://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_to%20appear_Language.pdfWith the exception of Japanese, all the languages there have essentially the same information flow. That information needs to be communicated somehow. Each language does it in a different way, but as a language learner, you will have to learn that.
We're discussing learning languages in the thread about DT's new album. This is what happens when we don't get any news.
Seriously