"I Thought These Languages Would Be Easy. I Was Wrong"

This confession comes from Steve Kaufmann. He gives three examples of language pairs he had assumed the second should be easy to acquire. It can turn out more difficult because of a couple of reasons.

The language pairs given are European Portuguese for a second language speaker of Spanish, Korean for somebody fluent in Japanese and Arab for a speaker of Farsi.

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Portuguese should be easy for a Spanish speaker and Korean should be easy after Japanese, so why did these "easy" languages turn out to be so much harder for me to speak than I expected?

TIMESTAMPS:

• 00:00 Why easy languages aren't always easy
• 01:31 How we actually learn languages
• 02:42 Spanish and Portuguese
• 05:41 Japanese and Korean
• 07:41 Arabic, Persian and Turkish