I was thinking today: is English the easiest language in the world, and does this partially account for its success as a global lingua franca? So, I decided that various points of difficulty could be listed, each of which would incur a difficulty point.
- Grammatical gendering
- Politeness levels
- Avoidance speech
- Tones
- Non-alphabetic writing
On this scale, English scores 0 / 5.
Most European languages score 1 / 5.
Japanese scores 2 / 5.
There is a theory that Middle English basically evolved as a simplified trade language between Old English and Norse, so its simplicity makes a lot of sense historically.
Foreigners: what is hard about English? Our weird spelling?