As an 外國人 who learned Cantonese as an adult (I moved to HK) I'm jealous of the quantity and quality of materials that exist for learning (not Cantonese). That being said, there are _enough_ materials so it's nowhere near as rough as e.g. Shanghainese.
My opinions on hard language reduces to "is this the first language you're learning from a particular language family?" If so, it's hard to learn. But "is ontologically hard" isn't something that I think is really worth ranking. Any four year old can speak their mother tongue just fine.
But the perception of "hard to learn" did work in my favor for learning Cantonese: as a 鬼佬 who speaks Cantonese I was given lots of latitude to be bad while learning because of that perception. And now I could go back and learn Mandarin now and it would be _much_ simpler than the task that I had in learning Cantonese.
That being said I still write in 口語. Slowly learning 書面語 as I read more and more of it.
(Not sure if you remember or recognize me from this handle. I was with Chaak on the words.hk project . Also Jon spoke highly of you for helping with the tough problems on the fonts :D )
The issue is that among the more common languages that people (outside of language nerds) tend to learn, what I said still holds true for the average learner who's there to learn and whom face the practical difficulties of learning a language, and none of your totally correct linguistic facts really make them less real.
> > […] (and also the general lack of the latter).
> This is the second often repeated myth
The size of written Cantonese corpora was abysmally small up until recent (<10?) years, and much of the content was interwoven with Standard Written Chinese. You still generally can't find written Cantonese on printed materials. Until recent months, LLMs couldn't even write a proper children's story in Cantonese without inadvertently code switching to SWC.
Trust me when I say I'm one of the many people who worked hard to make this "myth" not true (not in linguistic theory but in practice). I never knew it would be thrown back to me like this as a lecture on a random forum lol.
There's a lot more to be done to make Cantonese an assessable language for learners compared with the other major languages. You can compare the linguistic properties of languages all you want, and you'd be absolutely right, but that doesn't make a difference to the prospective learner at all.