Helen FieldsScience Writer

The Economist had a story last month about which languages are the most difficult. It’s kind of a silly quest. For one thing, it depends what language you’re starting in. If you’re a native speaker of Korean, Japanese is probably going to be easier for you than Spanish. But, for English speakers, the Economist settles on Tuyuca, a language of the eastern Amazon. Japanese was hard enough for me – I have no plans to start on the Amazonian languages. Although I suppose if someone wanted to pay me to go there, I would give the language a try.

One of the interesting things the writer points out is that English isn’t as hard as people like to say it is. The spelling makes absolutely no sense, but other than that, we don’t conjugate verbs much, our nouns don’t have gender, and making plurals is pretty easy for most words. This makes me feel a little less guilty about being a native speaker of the language everyone else in the world has to learn.