Are different languages easier to learn for each person?

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I started learning French in school two years ago, and I was ok at it. Then the next year we started German, which I was completely useless at. Then a few days ago I went online and found a free course in Italian, and I'm picking it up really well. I don't know if the course is just better than the teachers at my school (that's very likely, actually) or what. I'm sure I could quite possibly one day be able to speak Italian as well as I speak English.

Anyway, a lot of people at school have said that they find German a lot easier than French, which is the opposite to me because with French the words are easy to guess even if you don't know them most of the time, but in German the words always seem to get all jumbled up in my mind. So I was thinking maybe certain languages just "agree" with different people, like. Maybe I was Italian in a past life or something, because the culture matches me perfectly as well!

With French and German, during the lessons I am just consciously translating the words in my mind (well, in German I'm more like thinking, "What did the teacher just say?! Am I the only person who is totally lost?" but you get what I mean), but with Italian it's like the words I know are already there in my mind after I learn them just ONCE, and I'm actually having to restrain myself from randomly talking in Italian whenever I feel like it, because that could soon turn into yet another of my irritating habits, LOL.

Thoughts?

Some teachers just make their students memorize fundamentals.

memorization =/= fluent conversational speech

One thing that makes Romance languages superficially easier for native English-speakers is the large number of shared cognates between the languages. English, of course, inherited all these Latinate words mostly from French. It's really helpful form me with Spanish, for instance. However, the grammar is different, so that makes Romance languages harder to learn.

I find German to be a pain to pronounce, personally. A sentence or two and I'm out of breath. I find Spanish much easier in this regard. Never taken a French class, though I imagine that would be a bit harder. I don't really remember any German, but that's OK because I prefer Spanish.

Some languages definitely agree with me more. Spanish was not a problem, but French turned out to be easier. Japanese proved quite straight-forward, but German for some reason proved a bit tricky. And so it went with the several others I've learned parts of.

I have synethesia, which I'm convinced has an effect on my ability to learn languages, and to relate to particular languages. I also found that, obviously, one builds to the next, at least if you stay within a particular family (or branch of a family).

I tend to learn languages in a highly systemic manner, starting with the script and phonetic system, then the niceties of grammar - conjugation, declension, structure and all that good stuff, then the numbering system. I'll build vocabulary as I go, often very unevenly - often knowing quite a few unusual or specific words while not knowing how to say much more basic things. Languages are a special interest of mine, and I'm almost always in the process of learning something linguistically related.

What impedes me most in learning a language is how its morphophonology translates into real-time speech. Some languages, such as German, are pronounced with brief but discernible pauses between words, while in languages such as English and French multiple words (not just clitics) are pronounced together as though they were single words, making it much harder for one already struggling with an auditory processing disorder to keep up. English is also terrible for supporting "lazy speech", where actual pronunciations often deviate substantially from the official phonetic forms. Being my first language, this is not so big a problem for me - most people I understand well, although there are more than a few who are a struggle to comprehend. Invariably, I can read a new language before I can understand it spoken, and tend to be more clumsy speaking than writing.

I'm now in Serbia, so learning the language here is necessary. With a sensible "write as you speak" spelling regime and a reasonably regular grammar system, I am finding it one of the easier languages to learn, even when written using the Cyrillic script.

Overall, I found Korean (which I kind of gave up on) and French the hardest to reach a basic "conversant" level (meaning I can be polite, ask for/receive/give directions, order food and count), then Japanese (which I subsequently forgot much of), with Spanish, German, Serbian and Inuktitut being the easiest.

Hm... What makes German difficult for most? The inflections? Just speaking? (As with previous.)
I would imagine that cognates and other general similarities would make things easier. Of course, there's quite a bit of divergence between German and English, but if you learned Old English... Or, for that matter, Frisian, then it would likely be easier.
...Though using Frisian as an intermediary might be more trouble than it's worth.

It's easy for me to learn German and for Germans the other way around, because Norwegian and German is of the same origin, if you listen closely, you will see similarities.

Same with English and German...
Or English and Danish.

And then, realizing that the Germanic family is related to the Romance family, Norwegian and Italian.
...Maybe a little too remote.
Though I have noticed words in Latin that are very similar to ones in Old English.
Latin vir (pronounced wir) versus Old English wer.
Latin pater versus Old English fæder. (A P in Latin is an F in English.)

Considering that, I wonder: do cognates considerably help in learning of other Indo-European languages?

heck yes.
my sister learned turkish in one year, she speaks fluently. i am in my 5th year here, and i still fail very considerably.

There is so much about language learning
It needs a thorough analysis to know all the factors that influence why you learn something easier than something else.

'how and why do people learn another language?'
it's a question i ask myself every day (i'm a language teacher), it might have to do with the general mood of the group.

if it's taught in a way that suits you or not .
If you are a visual thinker and you are in a verbal group with a verbal teacher, the chance you will pick up something is rather small.
Is the teacher working in favour or against your own natural skills and what about the other students?

Are you familiar with the sounds of the language (like maybe you heard Spanish songs all the time when you were four and never any German songs)

Motivation counts a lot too, maybe you dream about going to Mexico or Spain or France, and you like Picasso and Dali but not Max Beckham or Ludwig Kirchner?

second thing is, what about judging how well one speaks/understands/reads/writes a language? Is there one person who can tell you how well you speak both languages and can you test that in a similar situation?
And maybe you are able to write one language, but can speak the other language better?

there are many factors:

1) young kids. their brain "soaks up" languages in a way adults can only dream of.
2) living somewhere foreign. you learn the language pretty quick.
3) bilingual upbringing, your brain is allready more open to language variations, and different languages.
4) autie tendencies ;] good old info-soak-ness of aspies, ive noticed also works for languages

it also depends how well you prepare your brain to grasp whats being said. we're both germanic speakers, right? you speak english, i speak norwegian. german is closely related.

i used to dismiss german as completely incomprehensible, untill i actually had a genuine interest in it. and then i realized how easy it actually is to grasp, written at first, but then also spoken once you know what to listen for.

*båt, boat, boot
*å = o
hus, house, haus

many words are cognate, like lukk (close) and lock. *deg/dich and thee. *g=i (only in the cases if meg/deg)
it helps to know these too, cus theyre easy to recognize, and they bring the associations vital to grasping a language.

The only one I was decent at, all others I am aboslutely awful at.

The norwegian and german languages are intertwined, they are of the same origin.

Tengo la teoria de que cada idioma esta hecho para un tipo de personalidad especifica, la personalidad comun que tenian los que formaron el idioma.

Por ejemplo, me da la impresion de que el ingles se habla con la lengua estirada y el español con la lengua contraida. Por eso a los hispanos se les facilita la doble erre y a los ingleses el 'th'. Osea que de repente los que formaron el ingles tenian un distinto tipo de quijada y lengua que los que formaron el español, y como del tipo de personalidad depende en cierta medida la estructura del cuerpo... hmmmm...