On Wed, 22 Dec 2004, Mark A. Mandel wrote: > > --- Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> wrote: > > Anyway, the consensus among Europeans I know is that English > > was easiest to learn of the languages they know. > > At last, data, even if anecdotal. Look, I've (at least) twice proposed on this list a clear way to determine language difficulty, and from the resident linguist(s) have heard nothing - not a scholarly paper showing the suggestion is naive and wrong, not a description of the actual method or why the whole question is silly, not a rank-ordering of estimated difficulty, zilch. Compared to a monoglot I know a lot about [European] languages, having read books in six of them, having lived in non-English speaking countries for four years, and having a majority of my friends being non-native-English speakers - but compared to a linguist I know very little - but there's light under the lamppost.