The difficulty of learning a second language depends where you're coming from, but Spanish to English is hardly difficult compared to Japanese to English or English to Mandarin. English to Japanese is far easier than English to Mandarin because there are no tones and every sound used in Japanese is already familiar to a native English speaker. Differentiating between sounds in Mandarin can very very difficult indeed. And then if you go to Cantonese, with more tones than Mandarin and a distinctly different range of sounds, it gets even more difficult.
I've heard from a native English speaker who can speak quite acceptable Mandarin, that Arabic is excrutiating!
So, in context, while the articulation of a Spanish speaker might be somewhat stylised compared to any theoretical norm, it is perfectly clear what sounds are being employed. For me using the same alphabet is a huge bonus, notwithstanding the relatively small difficulty in going from a non-inflected to an inflected language. A new language system can seem daunting but the leeway given a non-native speaker is rather large and it's amazing how much can be communicated while mangling syntax and grammar
Yeah, Arabic is much harder than Mandarin... Nothing is harder than Finnish though. That language makes no damn sense. Everything about it is bizarre.
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