English is pretty easy due to the insane amounts of English media we consume.
I could speak and understand decent English when I was less than 10 or so due to watching so many subtitled shows and playing video games.
My native language is Finnish. Which is farther from English than Hindi (Which is in indo-european language tree unlike Finnish).
The biggest obstacle to using something like Mandarin is the writing system. Hieroglyphs are imho just fundamentally inferior to systems using alphabets.
>English is pretty easy due to the insane amounts of English media we consume.
As an American, I've been studying German for about 15 years, but although I've never officially studied Spanish, I speak and understand casual Spanish better then I do German. I wouldn't be able to read a Spanish novel like I can in German, but I can understand Spanish speakers and text message Spanish speakers far better than I can in German. All of this is from picking up the language through media, listening to Spanish speakers in my town, and hearing some of my wife's family speaking Spanish to each other.
German, on the other hand, is very difficult for me to encounter on the street and nearly as difficult to find cultural material to consume (Amazon carries German-language Harry Potter, 50 Shades of Grey, and that's about it).
There is a lot to be said about passively learning a language just from hearing it constantly.
I could speak and understand decent English when I was less than 10 or so due to watching so many subtitled shows and playing video games.
My native language is Finnish. Which is farther from English than Hindi (Which is in indo-european language tree unlike Finnish).
The biggest obstacle to using something like Mandarin is the writing system. Hieroglyphs are imho just fundamentally inferior to systems using alphabets.