Comment Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score 1) 1077
I'd like to add more colour to that claim. No language is objectively harder to learn than any other language. They're just more or less different than your mother tongue. It depends on the system your mother tongue(s) belong(s) to, the availability of material in the target language in your direct surroundings (including education) and the amount of languages you already know.
For instance, a speaker of Hungarian will pick up Turkish or Finnish much more easily than a speaker of English because of its structural similarities.
Likewise, English is much easier to pick up for speakers of German, Swedish or Dutch. I myself speak 5 languages plus I can read two highly inflectional dead languages (Latin and ancient Greek). This makes my studies in Russian a *lot* easier because my mind is more open and a flexible mould in which I fit the components of language, whatever order they're written in.
Chinese is not a hard language, it's just very different than ours.