How difficult is learning a particular language?

Sometimes people ask me how hard a particular language is to learn, or pass comments like "Spanish is quite easy really, isn't it?" or "German/Polish/Whatever seems very difficult..."

Sometimes they have a concern about what their child should choose in school, or sometimes they're interested themselves (indeed, many are probably just making polite conversation!)

BUT these types of comments and questions reveal what I fear is a rather basic misconception about the nature of language which is rather endemic throughout our (generally monolingual) society and goes a long way to explain why we're so stuck in our monolingualism.

You see, at the end of the day, all natural languages (as opposed to synthetic ones like Esperanto) are just spoken by people. The Germans are no cleverer than us and the Polish are no cleverer than the Spanish, so if they can manage to communicate using their own language, then surely it can't be that hard, can it?

I guess that some languages are more unlike English than others, if you take my meaning, which often can cause difficulties, but that would be more of an issue with asian or oriental languages than with european ones, which are nearly all related to each other somehow - either through invasion and occupation over the centuries, or simply migration, trade and even missionary work!

Anyway, Spanish is largely based on Latin. And English, since 1066 anyway, has loads of Latin in it via French, so you already know a whole bunch of words that are like Spanish. These are called cognate words. Maybe I'll post a list here later...