I Thought These Languages Would Be Easy. I Was Wrong

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  Today, I want to talk about why easy languages are sometimes not as easy as you think they're going to be.

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  And I'm going to refer to my own experience.

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  So what triggered this is the fact that I'm going to Portugal and then Spain,

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  and I'm going to be right on the border.

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  If you look up a map, you'll see there's a place called Villa Real de San Antonio,

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  and across the border is Huelva in Spain.

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  So we're going to go, but my wife and I are going to be there for six weeks.

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  We're going to go back and forth, enjoy the good weather,

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  the ocean, local food, practice our languages and this kind of thing.

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  And it raises the question of why have I found Portuguese so difficult?

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  Because in terms of vocabulary, in terms of structure,

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  in terms of grammatical rules, word order, it's very similar to Spanish.

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  So I've got most of it already there.

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  Pronunciation is different, but I have struggled.

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  And I'm going to talk about a similar situation where if I compare my experience trying to learn Korean from Japanese

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  and also my experience with Arabic and the influence within Arabic of Persian vocabulary.

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  So sometimes things we think are going to be easy end up being more difficult.

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  I think in general, the similarity helps.

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  So I'm not going to say that similar languages are more difficult than completely unrelated languages,

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  but they are harder than we expect.

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