AdamD wrote:I think the article demonstrates that the belief in a language's ease or difficulty is inversely proportional to the authors knowledge of language learning. This type of article also sounds a bit like a get-rich-quick scheme, like there's a super easy way to learn an L2 and make your friends jealous.
There is truth in what you say perhaps, but I don't think it's without merit to state that generally speaking, Norwegian is an easier language to learn for native EN speakers than many other languages based on it's close ties to English, simpler verb conjugations (than many other languages) and so on. I'm starting to wonder if a lot of opposition to such statements originates in the use of the word/terms 'easy', 'easier' etc which for me could probably be replaced with 'takes less time' is 'faster to learn'.
Language learning takes a lot of time, but some languages for native English speakers are quite simply more closely related to English or not, and this is a big factor (not taking into account each individual's subjective experience/situation/intelligence) in how long (or 'easy') it is to learn any given language. FSI and such charts take this very thing into account with their time estimations.
The author is perhaps making it sound too easy, but maybe that comes from an angle of encouragement. However it could be as you implied, that the author has insufficient experience on the matter. Still I agree with the author without experience of actually learning Norwegian, that it appears to be an easier language to learn than many others.