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[Stephen Jones]

It is nearly twenty years ago that research was done showing that babies of six months had difficulties telling apart phonemes that were the same in their mother's language. Three month year old babies had little difficlty distinguishing.

So the first thing we have to do with a new language is to hear the different phonemes, and that means unlearning the behaviour we picked up as babies. It can be done, and up to adolescence with total success, but in general the difficulties of a language have to do with how different it is from one's own.

I doubt if there are hard and easy languages in abstract.