Title says it all. Great, the treat printer made a video that fooled people convincingly at the low low price of a few more burned acres and a few more dried up lakes and a few more tons of carbon dumped into the sky.
Must we repeat that trick until it kills us all? 
That is indeed the situation in the Anglophone countries, but I swear, living in Norway… the responses I get when people find out I’m learning Japanese, right? It feels like most Norwegians seem to think that learning Japanese is this crazy impressive thing, no matter what my level actually is, and I’m just quietly thinking while people are going and putting me on this whole pedestal — “Motherfucker YOU’VE learned a foreign language!”
But if you want to watch/read most dumb slop it’s English by default globally.
Also business, it’s so globally dominant as a secondary language.
Also good luck in learning Japanese, the only people I know who learned it, learned it partially connected to work.
try going to hungary from a western country to learn hungarian. the first reaction of many hungarians will be a baffled “but WHY?!” :D
To be fair, learning English for a Norwegian-speaking person is significantly easier than learning Japanese, which doesn’t even belong to the same language family.
May I ask what brought you to learning Japanese?
english is probably the easiest language to learn for anyone today.
not because of any inherent feature of english as a language. but because material in english is plentiful and super easy to find, and finding people to practice with is easy.
Not just material in English in general, but specifically comprehensible input — and not just finding people to practice with in general, but specifically people to practice with in a sort of “limited” setting. Video games can be great for both of these. In a singleplayer game, if you read some English text and you don’t understand it, but you manage to brute force whatever puzzle or objective you were supposed to do, you will probably be able to relate whatever you did to the text you read, and that should give you a better understanding of what it said. On the other hand, if you’re playing a multiplayer game, you can expect what you hear or read from other players to be things related to the game, and the limited scope of what’s appropriate or sensible to talk about in that setting will make what they’re talking about easier to comprehend. This is related to why it’s said that physical team sports can be a great avenue for language learning, too.
any setting where you can talk to people face to face is great for this. the place you’re physically standing in, the gestures, the facial expressions all help a ton.
I’d argue English isn’t that easy to learn for people from other language families. I bet an Uyghur would have an easier time learning Turkish than English.
i dunno, it doesnt seem particularly hard for hungarians, which is a different family. but yeah, close relatives are easier.
The advantage of already knowing a genetically related language should not be over-stated. Each language has as I see it its own mix of “fords”, “mines”, and “dry land” — the “dry land” are the pure similarities, the “mines” are mainly things like false friends or other ways one could over-apply one’s first language in a way that could go poorly if one isn’t “watching one’s step”, and the “fords” are the points where the languages are very dissimilar and this forces one to slow down and get a little uncomfortable.
So English is still broadly easier for Norwegians than for Uyghurs, but that advantage isn’t nearly as big as some people seem to think it is. English and Norwegian have diverged plenty, and have plenty of false friends, so depending on the individual learner’s interests or needs or personality, the amount of time spent “demining” English might even make Turkish seem a little easier by comparison, at least in an ideal world where there is equal access to resources for every language in every other language.
The short answer is that I had already taught myself kana to show to my classmates that I had spent lockdown productively, and things just kinda went from there. The long answer is… I dunno, how long an answer do you want?
I’ll read whatever you write about it, so feel free to talk about it if you wanna!