The absolute hardest part (for me) about learning a language is listening comprehension. I can read, write, and speak French at a reasonable level, but I've never been able to understand a native speaker. It would take a lot of work and exposure to bring my mastery up to the level of my second-year written French. A large part of that is because spoken French is a hot mess compared to the written form, but I digress.
A written language without a spoken form is a lot easier to grok. Especially programming languages and their limited grammar. But I think there's more to it than that. One of the reasons I find it trivial to learn programming languages is that code is code is code, no matter which flavor of sugar you shovel on top. The language is simply an abstraction for a logical construct. Skilled programmers work on that logical construct directly, and the language is nothing more than a means to an end.
Also there's the fact that the written word is intransient. You have time to pause and search your memory or dictionary for a word. A spoken language requires extensive training to literally rewire your brain. You can't stop to ponder a word because it's gone before you can reconstruct a word from sounds. There's a very good reason that our brains have hardware to turn sounds into linguistic tokens. It's just too much processing to do at a conscious level at any reasonable speed.
The absolute hardest part (for me) about learning a language is listening comprehension. I can read, write, and speak French at a reasonable level, but I've never been able to understand a native speaker. It would take a lot of work and exposure to bring my mastery up to the level of my second-year written French. A large part of that is because spoken French is a hot mess compared to the written form, but I digress.
A written language without a spoken form is a lot easier to grok. Especially programming languages and their limited grammar. But I think there's more to it than that. One of the reasons I find it trivial to learn programming languages is that code is code is code, no matter which flavor of sugar you shovel on top. The language is simply an abstraction for a logical construct. Skilled programmers work on that logical construct directly, and the language is nothing more than a means to an end.
Also there's the fact that the written word is intransient. You have time to pause and search your memory or dictionary for a word. A spoken language requires extensive training to literally rewire your brain. You can't stop to ponder a word because it's gone before you can reconstruct a word from sounds. There's a very good reason that our brains have hardware to turn sounds into linguistic tokens. It's just too much processing to do at a conscious level at any reasonable speed.