Is English becoming easier or harder to learn? [closed]

Solution 1:

I would say that English is in fact becoming easier to learn, because the pressure from the corpus of speakers is always toward simpler and more accessible communication, and the pushback from prescriptive linguistics on a number of points that have made "proper" English more difficult to learn (such as idiotic rules about how you should refuse to casually split infinitives and that a preposition isn't a good thing to end a sentence with) has gradually eroded.

Solution 2:

Just because thousands of words have fallen into disuse does not imply that English has become 'easier'. The purpose of any language is communication, and as society changes, the things that we wish to express also change. It is therefore inevitable that any language, let alone English which is so widely used, will be in a state of constant flux.

English is no easier to learn, today. If 10 words have gone out of usage, another 10 have come into usage. It is just as hard to write good, expressive English today as it was 100 years ago.

But the amount of English spoken around and written around the world, definitely exposes people to a lot of English. So, it might be possible to pick up the language more easily just because so many people use it. So, it might have become slightly easier to learn, just because of its immense popularity.

Solution 3:

Comparing Modern English with Old English, you can say Modern English has been simplified, especially because Modern English doesn't use most of the grammar cases previously used in Old English.
Simplifying it doesn't mean to make it easier, though. It also means that English now uses a single word (with different meanings) where Old English (or Middle English) used two different words.