Easiest language to learn? {for an English speaker}

[yBeayf]

Uh huh. Speaking of which…

My political beliefs have nothing to do with the fact that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

[Valteron]

@John DiFool

I remember my sister and I giggling like crazy when we saw all the street signs in Germany which said “einfahrt”…

“Fahrt” comes from “fahren”= to travel. A “Fahrt” is a trip.

The Ascension of Christ into Heaven is “Christis Himmelfahrt”. Can’t you just see JC blessing his disciples, and then cutting a huge one that propels him straight into the air?!!!

[Dr.Rieux]

In my experience:
Latin is a breeze compared to Classical Greek.
Latin grammar is a breeze compared to trying to read classical Latin poetry–I’m looking at you, Vergil!

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@Valteron

I cannot speak for Japanese (I am surprised to learn it is considerd easy, but I defer to those who know).

But my mother tongue is French, with English a close second, and German is a language in which I acquired some fluency as an adult. I love all three languages so please, do not be insulted by anything I have to say.

The OP was originally asking what would be easiest for an Anglophone to learn, so I will confine myself to that.

Do not jump to the conclusion that German is easier than French for an Anglophone because English is a “Germanic” language. That can be very misleading. Here’s why.

1. Similarity of vocabulary. It is true that many English words are from the German. It is obviously easier for an Anglo to guess the meaning of “Haus” or “Hand” (all German nouns take a capital) than “maison” or “main”. But remember that English is nearly a Romance language when you consider all the Latinate words it contains. And the more educated a person is in English, the greater the proportion of Latinate vocabulary.

If you saw a building called “Rathaus” in Germany would you know what it is?

No, not if I was totally ignorant of German, but then…

If you saw a building called “Édifice municipal” in France would you know what it is?

…yes, if I read it, but possibly not if I heard someone say it, if I were totally ignorant of French

Which word is easier for you, as an Anglo, to understand: “gouvernement” or “Regierung”?

Or would you correctly guess that the German verb “enliefern” means to deliver goods? When you think about it the German word is obviously related to the English “deliver” but would you have guessed it easily? Or would the French verb “livrer” have been easier to guess?

Probably neither one.

2. Spelling: German is actually much easier to spell. Spanish is really, really easy, German is very easy. English spelling, as you know, is a bloody mess. Anglophones are the only people I know of who use a Latin alphabet but still have to make their kids take spelling several hours a week for eight years to produce students who can just barely spell when they get to high school.

You can bet that Spanish and German kids don’t need to waste all that time.

What about French spelling? It is not as regular as Spanish and German, but it is a lot more regular than anglophones imagine. What you have to realize is that it has its own rules different from English. It does contain a lot of silent letters, but they tend to be silent in a consistent manner. For example, I know that “mot” is pronounced “MOE”, and “note” is pronounced “NUT”. Why? Because the final “t” in a French word is always silent unless it is followed by a vowel. So once you learen the different rules, French is easier to read and write than you imagine. But NOT as easy as German.

3. Grammar structure: I honestly believe French grammar is simpler. German is an ancient language formed at the same time as Latin and ancient Greek.

But what about all those tenses? Like English, German has only two non-compound tenses.

French is a relatively recent language, like English, formed only about 1000-1200 years ago.

AS is German. Present day Germans would have a hard time understanding their ancestors from 1000 years ago.

German has a structure like Latin. Instead of masculine and feminine nouns, it has masculine, feminine and neuter. So you have three forms of the adjective to learn.

But what makes German a real challenge is that it has declensions like Latin.
The noun declensions of Old German were much hairer than the ones of today; they were like Icelandic today. Modern German does have declensions for articles and adjectives, but on the nouns themselves you have only the genitive singular masculine/neuter, and the plural dative which is easy because you merely have to add an -n if the word doesn’t already end in one.

Let me give you an anglo-friendly example. In English, you say “Who saw you?”, but “Whom did you see?” In other words, when “who” is the object of the verb, you change the ending by adding “m”.

In German, you have to learn to modify the article and the adjective before each noun (but not the noun)depending on its function in the sentence.

“der guter Mann” = the good man came into the room (subject)
“den guten Mann” = I saw the good man (direct object)
“dem gutem Mann” = I gave it to the good man (indirect object).

German has four cases in the singular and four cases in the plural, and different endings for masculine, feminine and neuter.

So that is a huge compluication that does not exist in French.

Cases are a complication indeed, but they’re not that hard to remember.

So my conslusion? They are both wonderful languages that are a lot of fun to learn, and a lot of fun to speak. But don’t jump to conclusions about German being simple for an anglophone.

You make some good points, but as a native English speaker I did find German easier to learn than French. I admit that I may not be a fair judge, because I had only two years of high-school and college French, compared against a major in German literature and linguistics, but German just seemed more natural to me. (Disclaimer: I did spend my junior year in Gottingen).

French spelling may be easy, and the silent letters consistently silent, but you left unmentioned the pronunciation. It can be very hard for English speakers to learn to hear and say the differences among various nasal endings like -un, -ain and -in. Though you’re certainly right about French being easier to come up to speed in reading, and as you pointed out, the more educated an English speaker is, the more French words they can already figure out.

[ouryL]

Sign language?

[Giles]

@Spectre of Pithecanthropus

You make some good points, but as a native English speaker I did find German easier to learn than French. I admit that I may not be a fair judge, because I had only two years of high-school and college French, compared against a major in German literature and linguistics, but German just seemed more natural to me.

I learned both French and German at high school, though neither to a particularly advanced level. I find it easiier to read and write French, and to hear and speak German. That’s because German is pronounced as it is written, and generally wreitten like it’s pronounced. With French, the relationship between speech and writing is far more distant: in many ways, it’sworse than Engish, even though English is far more irregular. With German, the sounds that an English speaker has most difficulty with are “ö” and “ü”, and possibly “ch”, though the latter is found in Scottish words like “loch”. With French, pretty well all the vowels are hard for English-speakers.

[Sleel]

I speak Japanese and I used to be able to speak Spanish. (A holiday in Spain last year revealed that while I can understand a good deal of it, I can’t say anything without getting everything all mangled. Imagine Spanish vocabulary with Japanese word order and occasional particles, but with proper Spanish pronunciation including lisps because my first teacher was from Madrid.) Spanish was, by far, the easier language to learn. There is a LOT of shared vocabulary from Latin that gives you a hand up. The conjugations sucked, but a lot of them aren’t used all that often so you can get by with the handful that are until you become more fluent.

Aunt Flow, I don’t know why you think Japanese is easy, because more than one polyglot has said that Japanese was the hardest language to wrap their minds around. Yes, the grammar is pretty regular, but it’s very unlike that of most other languages in the world. There are a lot of other complexities too. I mean, there’s a whole other set of vocabulary and some tweaks in grammar for different registers, you have to think in a completely different way from English to make sure that the order comes out right (like with relative constructions) and the vocabulary has basically no similarity to any other language apart from some Chinese which was inevitably imported along with the writing system. It’s certainly not impossible to speak it well, but it’s not that easy either.

You might have a false sense of confidence since a lot of Japanese speakers will say that your Japanese is good even when you speak only a little. Wait until they start getting pissy with you because you, “aren’t supposed to be able to understand that,” and saying things like, “only Japanese can appreciate ____,” when you make a comment on some relatively complicated topic. The worst is the blank stare and a deliberate change of subject when you venture into forbidden territories of proficiency.

The writing is actually worse than Chinese. There are usually one, or at most two readings for characters in Chinese. In Japanese there can be several, some of which are used in only a handful of words, or even only once in combination with a certain other kanji. The syllabic writing systems are of very limited use, and are used mostly in children’s literature, although the occasional serious literary work has been written in hiragana or katakana. If you’re used to reading manga, you’ll see them a lot, but you won’t find much furigana in books without pictures that are written for adults. Learning kanji helps your vocabulary an awful lot though since you can sometimes guess at words you need but haven’t studied yet by combining kanji that have related meanings, kind of like compound root words in English.

[matt_mcl]

@Shagnasty

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

Actually, part of the usefulness of Esperanto is that you’ll probably find at least a few speakers in any large city you happen to end up in, pretty much anywhere. With the Internet it’s terribly easy to find opportunities to use Esperanto while travelling.

Another point is that having learned Esperanto makes it [easier to learn other languages.](Propaedeutic value of Esperanto)

[matt_mcl]

@Shagnasty

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

Actually, part of the usefulness of Esperanto is that you’ll probably find at least a few speakers in any large city you happen to end up in, pretty much anywhere. With the Internet it’s terribly easy to find opportunities to use Esperanto while travelling.

Another point is that having learned Esperanto makes it easier to learn other languages.

[drillrod]

The US Government’s lead agency on the teaching of foreign languages is the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC). According to them:

Languages are categorized from I (easiest) to IV (hardest), based on the difficulty native speakers of American English may have in learning a foreign language.

The languages currently eligible for this program are:

Category I: English, French, Italian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (European), and Spanish
Category II: German, Romanian (DLPT III)
Category III: Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Persian-Farsi, Polish, Russian, Serbian/Croatian, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese
Category IV: Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean

cite

[drillrod]

I just realized. Other languages, in fact nearly all languages, are also rated under this system. The link I quoted from is just for courses currently eligible for academic credit due to instruction at DLI. I’ll see if I can find the whole list.

[JThunder]

Pig Latin is fairly easy to learn.

[TokyoBayer]

@Aunt Flow

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.

Do you speak either language or are you simple talking shit? I’ve lived in Japan or 18 years and speak it pretty much as well as any Westerner that I know, and I’m learning Chinese now. Unless you can come back really quick and give a better explanation, I’m going to write this one off.
Quick: what is the Japanese “alphabet” called? What percent of writing is used for this?
Next, please, please, please, please, please tell us one more time that Chinese words don’t have more one syllable. Also, at the same time, tell us the Chinese words for the following: (but keep them all within one syllable)
Chinese
Japanese
beer
student

[drillrod]

Having trouble locating the source document, but here’s a link to a more complete list

[Reloy3]

My understanding from my undergrad Linguistics course, generally Africaans (a form of Dutch spoken in South Africa) is considered the easiest language for an English speaker to learn, and Navajo is considered the most difficult.

[Clothahump]

I’ll vote for Bahasa Indonesia.

I lived in Jakarta in the early 1980s. I took a 6 week crash course in conversational Indonesian and after that, the only issue I had was vocabulary. After another month or two, even that wasn’t much of an issue.