Are some languages inherently easier to learn than others?

Question

It's fairly clear that depending on your native language, some languages are easier and some are harder to learn.

It's also evident that some languages' orthography is easier or more difficult inherently. I think you can pretty fairly say that Chinese characters are inherently more difficult than a phonetic writing system, and among the phonetic systems some are more consistent (and therefore presumably easier to learn) than others, for example English notoriously has lots of idiosyncrasies with its spelling rules.

I'm wondering if the same is true of spoken languages?

Answer 1

Some languages have more complexity in spoken language. For example Russian have more declensions and Arabic have more persons (I, you singular masculine, you singular feminine, you dual, you plural,...) which make them richer, but more complex and more difficult to learn.

Artificial languages like Esperanto are made to be easy, so they don't have all the historic complexity of natural languages. Every verb is regular, even the verb to be. Another example of a language that make this obvious is Toki Pona: an artificial language that have only 120 words. So even if they are far from your native language, you can learn all of them very fast. The difficulty is to find a way to express the words that doesn't exist (like saying a cold box for a fridge), but it's the same for every mother tongue.