Yes, I was about to say the same thing. The similarities of vocabulary and grammar among those languages make it easier for speakers of one language to learn another.

Also, it seems to be easier for people to learn another language when they already know two or three. As Europe is more multilingual than Japan, more Europeans have a head start at acquiring additional languages.

There may be other factors—stronger attachment to one’s native language and culture, resistance to seeming different from one’s peers—that make it harder for people of some nationalities to acquire foreign languages. But such claims are difficult to verify and can easily sink into superficial stereotypes, so I will be a cowardly academic and decline to take a position.

I don't know if it's the Indo-European thing or not, but it seems that the writing system is a huge obstacle. In Europe I don't even have to understand a language to be able to read text out loud, just learn a very limited set of pronunciation rules. Even Cyrillic/Greek is a more or less 1-1 phonetic mapping.

It is and it isn't, in my experience teaching ESL. The basics are incredibly easier, as students receive the benefit of cognates and (at least some) similar constructs. However, there's an interesting stage, right around the beginning of intermediate where students tend to become judgemental of the target language: there's a lot of frustrated "well, why doesn't English do it this way?" (It doesn't help at all that English is such a bastardized and inconsistent tongue that their native language's way of doing [whatever] often is more logical / concise / beautiful!) Some students get stuck there and never progress.

I recall very few, if any, Asian-language speakers hitting that particular speedbump. It's like they're prepared for English to be so different from the start that they've already made a psychological shift to English-mode that other learners may struggle to negotiate.

My kid is being raised bilingual English-Finnish. I hope he acquires an interest in linguistics, because when he examines his own language facility he will find fertile ground - a car crash of deeply different languages.

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