I don't think languages are significantly easier or harder, there's a limit on how hard it can get for average person to be able to speak it comfortably. I think there are different tradeoffs taken and if you come from a language with similar tradeoffs it's easier to learn.
My native language is Polish, I know English and a little German and Spanish. Slavic languages often have the reputation of being difficult, but IMHO that's because they are easy in places English-speakers expect to be difficult, and difficult in places English-speakers expect to be easy.
There's 15 tenses in English and 3 in Polish. There's no articles in Polish, and the pronunciation is almost perfectly regular. And there's probably 20 times fewer word roots, because of the pre/post-fix system. What in English is 20 unrelated words in Polish is one word root + 20 different combinations of pre/post fixes :)
But to take advantage of this when you're learning you have to think in the language you are learning - to realize these words are related and how the postfixes modify the meaning. Otherwise you'll still need to memorize 20 separate words - and on top of that all that crap that is harder in Polish, like cases.
I wonder if this influences LLMs (for example if they "think in Polish" when producing Polish text, or "think in English" and translate on the fly). I noticed GPT-3 was much better at rhyming in English than in Polish, despite the fact that rhyming in Polish is very easy (if the final letters match
- it rhymes). When I explained this rule to it - it started rhyming better :)
I'd argue it's a bit easier in English if it comes to learning a grammatically correct expression of a thought. Polish or other slavic languages have quite a complexity hidden in "odmiany", "przypadki", and "koniugacje", etc.
My native language is Polish, I know English and a little German and Spanish. Slavic languages often have the reputation of being difficult, but IMHO that's because they are easy in places English-speakers expect to be difficult, and difficult in places English-speakers expect to be easy.
There's 15 tenses in English and 3 in Polish. There's no articles in Polish, and the pronunciation is almost perfectly regular. And there's probably 20 times fewer word roots, because of the pre/post-fix system. What in English is 20 unrelated words in Polish is one word root + 20 different combinations of pre/post fixes :)
But to take advantage of this when you're learning you have to think in the language you are learning - to realize these words are related and how the postfixes modify the meaning. Otherwise you'll still need to memorize 20 separate words - and on top of that all that crap that is harder in Polish, like cases.
I wonder if this influences LLMs (for example if they "think in Polish" when producing Polish text, or "think in English" and translate on the fly). I noticed GPT-3 was much better at rhyming in English than in Polish, despite the fact that rhyming in Polish is very easy (if the final letters match - it rhymes). When I explained this rule to it - it started rhyming better :)