Easiest language to learn? {for an English speaker}

In My Humble Opinion
1

{I hope this won’t offend anyone, as that is not its purpose. If I do so I apologize-
all languages look and sound strange to the untrained ear.}

What IYHO is the easiest language to learn? Based wholly on my admittedly very
limited linguistic knowledge, I’d say Spanish, which is what I learned in HS & college,
is probably the easiest: has few weird pronounciations (for a native English speaker),
rules are commonsensical for the most part. Yes it has some strange irregular verb
tenses, but nothing that some intense brute force memorization can’t handle.

Latin & German also don’t look too hard. For me Latin probably would be a breeze
because of my very large vocab, much of which borrows from Latin, and my Spanish
experience.

But French-gaah. All those silent letters! Strange pronounciations galore!
(“Where does that “waah” sound come from?”) Straight vocab doesn’t look too
bad (given all the Latin roots). Still wouldn’t want to try it if I had a choice tho.

Russian requires learning a new alphabet, but one which has quite a few letters
in common with the Roman one. But Arabic and Chinese… I have 3rd graders
who still get b & d mixed up: well try differentiating them where the only
difference between characters is a tiny dot! Arabic & the eastern character sets
(Japanese & Chinese) are certainly some of the most beautiful languages to look
at but must be a bear to learn.

Okay in the interest of fairness English ain’t no picnic either. We’ve got tons of
exceptions and getting the grammar correct with all the seemingly conflicting
rules can’t be easy by any stretch.

2

German, not bad at all since the structure is a lot like English and a lot of the words sound alike.

Spanish, PITA if you ask me. Too many tenses and such. I gave up after a year.

Latin. PITA times TEN. HoSHIT. I’ve never seen so many conjugations in my LIFE! They conjugate everything! Verbs, nouns, adverbs, adjectives, NAMES. @_@

Japanese. Love. SO easy to learn to speak and comprehend. Very few tenses and conjugation is simple and uniform. Reading/writing it is a bit more work but not impossible.

3

Esperanto was designed to be easy but it has limited usefulness unless you seek out the speakers on purpose.

Languages aren’t really my thing but my university had a language proficiency requirement that I found pretty brutal. It was full immersion after the first semester and we were required to be conversant by the third semester including giving speeches and lectures on academic topics with question and answer periods. I chose Spanish and I did manage to become conversant but I don’t really know how. I even got A’s on the speeches including full points for my accent and not many people did as well. I still feel like a faked it. I would memorize an entire 45 speech and practice the pronunciation of all the harder words I was going to use. Then, I would anticipate what questions were going to be asked and memorize a good answer. That strategy worked well for classroom purposes but it certainly didn’t stick although I can still read some Spanish.

If Spanish is the easiest then I know I am screwed. I was surprised to hear that Japanese is easy although several people have told me that now. I always thought it would be as hard as Chinese or something even though I know they aren’t really related.

4

A nephew learned German, his feeling was that it was relatively easy. Although English borrows from many, many languages, technically English and German have common roots. I think many of the rules of grammar are similar, but I could be wrong.

You gotta be kidding about Latin. It died out for a reason: too difficult. No regular verbs to speak of, etc. Only the rich intelligentsia could read and write it, or, for that matter, speak it once Italian evolved from it. Italian is the closest language to Latin and is much simpler. Once the printing press was invented and cheap books became available in Italian, the death knell sounded for Latin. BTW, that’s one of the fortunate byproducts of the printing press: language got both simpler (to save space and appeal to the unwashed) and more standard (one version of a language for everyone, so regional dialects started dying off).

You’re not wrong about French, exactly… but the numerous silent letters aren’t that hard to memorize (I took French years ago). However, there are 14, count 'em, 14 verb tenses. Admittedly, some are used for special cases that don’t often come up for most people, but still. The ultimate problem with French is the French. Their sensitivity to their language is legendary. Mention the French to a group of world travelers and watch people line up to tell you their horror stories.

5

Japanese is easier than Chinese for a number of reasons. First, it’s polysyllabic. The words have multiple syllables. Chinese is monosyllabic, which is very apparent when you hear spoken Mandarin or Cantonese. Chinese also doesn’t have a set alphabet (that I know of) like Japanese does. Once you know the Japanese alphabet, you can pronounce any word. There’s no weird exceptions like in other languages. It’s spelled/pronounced exactly how it sounds/looks.

6

I would guess that Frisian would be the easiest language for a native speaker of English to learn. Frisian is the closest living relative to English, and there are a lot of words and structures that English and Frisian have in common.

7

Not true at all. Latin didn’t die out because it was “too complicated”. In fact, it didn’t die out at all, but morphed into Spanish, French, Italian, etc. Nobody stood up and said, “Gosh this Latin is complicated, we need to drop a few declensions.” Instead, the simplification came about due to a number of factors, among them the simplification of the phonetic structure, which made some congugations more and more difficult to distinguish from one another, and possibly also the fact that in much of Western Europe, there were many non-native speakers running around, which tended to foster pidgins, or at least some of the characteristics of a pidgin in the existing language.

Interestingly, only the noun case structure seems to have simplified; from what little I know of Romance languages, their verb and tense structure today seems to be nearly as complex as they were back in the days of Latin, except perhaps French, in which many conjugations are different in writing only, but not in the spoken language.

8

Just to clarify my statement above, Malienation is correct in the sense that the literary latin of Cicero and Ovid was exactly that, a literary language. Classical-era Vulgar Latin may have been simpler in some ways but it was still a highly inflected language. At any rate, it didn’t die out because it was complicated, but simply evolved into other languages.

9

I agree with most of what you wrote. However, there are some words that are not pronounced the way they are written such as:

“fun-iki ふんいき 雰囲気” (atmosphere). It is generally pronounced “fu-in-ki フインキ”.

OR

“meiji めいじ　明治” (Meiji name) is pronounced like “me-eh-ji” メージ".

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Those are both instances of the sounds blending together when spoken. Fu-n-i-ki is pronounced like that. But when a native speaker says it correctly, the sounds merge to make it sound different than it really is. I’ve never heard it pronounced fu-i-n-ki personally. As for meiji, the i as well as the u are often used to extend the sound of the previous ‘vowel’. The ‘e’ in ‘me’ sounds similiar enough to ‘i’ that when you say them together it sounds like you’re extending the ‘e’ sound.

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I would go with Japanese. The reason that it is thought so difficult is that it is often taught very badly. In the very first class I had in Japanese- I said to the teachers I just wanted to learn how to talk. Teacher tried to teach me kanji. I went to a different school immediately.
It is difficult to learn to write. But learning how to speak and listen- to have a conversation is quite easy.

12

IMHO, Spanish is one of the easiest languages for a native English speaker, especially if you’re an American whose heard Spanish spoken your entire life.

On the other side of the spectrum…don’t study Bulgarian unless you’re…okay, I can’t think of anything. Just don’t study Bulgarian.

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Disclaimer: English is not my native language, Spanish is.

In college, we had to learn either French or German on our own but pass a test. The point is to be able to read literature related to your field in those languages (we also had to pass English, but as a regular language, not just “reading ability”). Since I already spoke Spanish and Catalan, another romance language which is geographically and linguistically midway to French, I figured that I’d get more of a benefit from taking lessons in German than in French; I was pretty much able to read scientific French already.

Three years of German lessons later, I took the French exam, which was a translation from French to Spanish and got 100%. I’ll never forget that comparison between the hydrogen bond and a petit chou (a line anybody knows just from watching Spanish comedies) jumping among clumps of flowers.

Both the German Institute and Berlitz were completely focused on the grammar, rather than on building vocabulary. “Oh, the grammar is so difficult!”, exercises on dativ and akusativ… for classes where everybody spoke at least Spanish, Catalan and English, everybody had between 1 and 3 years of Latin (which makes German cases a breeze, by comparison) and half had learned French before English.

Since German and English have tons of common roots, and many of the different words are Latin-related (often via French), I’m sure that an English speaker trying to learn German by immersion would have it easier than for a non-related language, same as I could probably get my Italian up to native level in a year of living in Italy. But I’m still amazed that anybody can learn any language to a semi-proficient level with methods like the ones those schools had!

14

Among Indo-European languages, at least, Irish Gaelic looks like the most difficult to learn. Nothing looks familiar, and the spellings of words give no clue to how they’re pronounced!

15

Hey!

Just like English!

d&r

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German is not too hard, on the words themselves. It’s use of masculine, feminine, and nuetral nouns is the hard part. You have to know the sex of all nouns to speak the language corrertly, and it’s hard to do. The sex of the noun modifies the verbs, and then when past perfect and the like are accounted for a verb may have 16 variations you need to know how to do. You’ll understand a native speaker that has the correct variences applied, but you’ll stumb through it until you have to speek German and hear it all the time. There are some languages that are worse for this type of thing. You will run into all sorts of dialects of German, that are hard to understand if you learned a different version, even for a German.

17

German definitely has the gender feature. There are rules, that give you a clue as to what gender a word belongs to, but there are numerous exceptions; plus many place names all rivers have genders. Usually, though, the rivers are all feminine except for the Rhine.

Interestingly, one of the exceptions you run into first when learning the language is Hand, or “hand”. Like the same word in Romance languages, it looks like it ought to be masculine, but is feminine.

18

Latin is very very complicated. German has a relatively complex grammar as well, and takes a long time for the sentence structure (past the very basic kind) to seem natural. A much much easier possibility is Dutch, which has many more English cognates, even, and the grammar has simplified greatly from German over the centuries so that’s more similar to English, as is the sentence structure. I don’t know enough about Frisian, but I suspect that Scribble might be close.

19

Dutch still has gender, but simplified to two. For inanimate objects, there is only the neuter and “common” gender, which combines masculine and feminine. It doesn’t have any more English cognates that German, IIRC, but does have a few more French and even English loanwords that make it seem more English-like. One drawback is the pronunciation, which is generally more difficult than German. Having studied German for years, at one point I took a two-credit self-study course in Dutch, and what I found hard about the pronunciation was that the “odd” sounds, from an English speaker’s perspective, seem to occur in almost every other word. In German they didn’t seem to come up as much. Another drawback is, who would you speak it to? Not many people outside of the Netherlands speak Dutch.

20

Dutch still has gender, but simplified to two. For inanimate objects, there is only the neuter and “common” gender, which combines masculine and feminine. It doesn’t have any more English cognates that German, IIRC, but does have a few more French and even English loanwords that make it seem more English-like. One drawback is the pronunciation, which is generally more difficult than German. Having studied German for years, at one point I took a two-credit self-study course in Dutch, and what I found hard about the pronunciation was that the “odd” sounds, from an English speaker’s perspective, seem to occur in almost every other word. In German they didn’t seem to come up as much. Another drawback is, who would you speak it to? Not many people outside of the Netherlands speak Dutch.