Portuguese is a lot harder to learn than English, I managed to learn English really easily (I basically played KH:CoM with a Portuguese script in another window and began comparing words and connecting the dots, that's where most of my English knowledge came from), meanwhile I still don't fully get my own language lol
This honestly intrigues me since I frequently hear English cited as one of the hardest languages to learn. All are (supposedly) uniformly easy to learn for babies/children (which is why kids in dual-language households can learn two languages simultaneously) but when we get older learning a new language becomes exponentially more difficult. Having to struggle with a new alphabet or writing system inherently makes things harder, as does a drastically different grammar system.
Anyway, Portuguese and English. English has some advantages in that verb forms are largely standardized (assuming Portuguese is like Spanish where you conjugate differently for practically every such subject) and a lack of gendered nouns. But spelling, pronunciation, grammar, and syntax can be really confusing from what I hear (and honestly I could see it). I love this quote about the English language since it sums up one of its potential problems in a hilarious way:
"To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word
fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled."
It's from the start of a book,
The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. The book's older than I am (published in 1990) but it's still an interesting read and while a few of the chapters in it about technology are slightly outdated it still does a good job of showing how English has, in a bizarre twist of fate, more or less become the language for international discourse. Check out
a portion of the first chapter if you want.
Ugh, I'm such a language nerd.