In French if something isn't functioning properly you say that "il ne marche pas." Now, in my studies, "marche" means "walk." So to me that says "it doesn't walk." I asked a native speaker about that and they told me, no, that is not what that means.
I'm English Canadian with a lot of French Canadian family and friends ... I don't speak French but I've been around it all my life .. here's one for you ...
When tweetle beetles fight, it’s called a tweetle beetle battle.
And when they battle in a puddle, it’s a tweetle beetle puddle battle.
AND, when tweetle beetles battle with paddles in a puddle, they call it a tweetle beetle puddle paddle battle.
AND, when beetles battle beetles in a puddle paddle battle and the beetle battle puddle is a puddle in a bottle they call it a tweetle beetle bottle puddle paddle battle muddle.
English is only "hard" because it is shit. There ain't no rules for nothing. All the "rules" have exceptions, which have exceptions, which have have exceptions.
That feels intuitively correct to me, but I'm not sure if I'd say any language is particularly "easy". Language is complex, complicated and only makes sense in the context of understanding human communication. Although language is also more intuitive than we give it credit for.
I think spoken Japanese is possibly "easier" than spoken English, but written Japanese (outside of digital media) is essentially impossible for me because I don't have Kanji memorized.
I mean yes it's a bit under-nuanced to describe any language as "easy" or "hard". The single biggest influence is whether you're already familiar with a similar language. English is going to be much easier if you already know German; Japanese will be much easier if you already know Okinawan. And as you say, written and spoke language can be quite different.
That said, I don't think it is the case that all of the different factors trade off against one another perfectly. I would expect them to trade off against one another to an extent though, because I would imagine there are forces which cause overly complex languages to become simpler, and more simple languages to become more complex. (One aspect of complexity comes through redundancy, such as requiring agreement between inflections of words when the inflection only conveys information already imparted from the rest of the sentence. But extra redundancy can aid in understanding because the listener generally doesn't hear everything perfectly)
But yeah, some languages just have incredibly complicated and picky grammar, whilst others have relatively simple grammar. As an English speaker, Japanese grammar has lots of unfamiliar features but could still be simpler than Finnish, which also has lots of unfamiliar grammar but which is very complex.
I have no reference for the relative difficulty of languages to master, except that I know that all languages are incredibly hard to master to the level of a native speaker.
But an acronym that was intentionally made to be the name of the animal, so it's just a duplicate, like all three of the non-singer seals, which just mean to lock something in or out. There are only 2 meanings of seal here, plus a singer who named himself after one of them.
Ohhh they're all seal ok, I thought the top row was something else, the brush threw me off, I thought the center one was some sort of "brush" for something mechanical, like how you have a "brush" for motors and then some military unit nicknamed brushes lol
If you'd like to have your mind blown by something you haven't ever thought that hard about before in your life, sit down and try to come up with a list for all the definitions and use contexts for the word "set."