I want to learn a foreign language, but I don’t want to have to work to hard. What’s the easiest foreign language to learn for a native English speaker?
P.S. - I know some people say German because it’s structured very logically (apparently) but I tried learning German at school and hated it, so that’s out.
That depends where you live. If you live near in the UK or in Canada, French may be easy due to easy exposure. Same with Spanish if you live in a lot of the US.
I’m afraid you’re out of luck.
The easiest way to learn a language is through complete immersion. This is only feasible if you are interested in the culture attached to the language. So my answer is that the easiest language to learn is the one you’re most interested in. Sure, Dutch is more similar to English than Korean, but if you’re a huge K-pop fan and you yawn any time someone mentions the Netherlands, I say go with Korean.
Roald Dahl made it sound like Swahili was pretty easy to pick up.
Learning a language is hard.
If you have no real reason to pick a specific language, and just want to learn whatever’s easiest, I suspect you will be bored and frustrated within weeks when you find even the easiest language is pretty tough.
I don’t mean to sound patronizing, and of course it is often worth the effort. But ISTM there’s a common meme at the moment that if you’re smart enough, and use this or that new learning method, you can nail a language in months. But this is very far from typical, particularly for people trying to study without exposure to native speakers.
I learned Thai with very little in the way of formal training or textbooks, just by conversing with natives. Some of my “teachers” were bilingual, but most were not. It was a fun challenge. Very early in this experiment I learned the word for “quickly”: I indicated (perhaps with signs) that I was very hungry and could deduce the reply “(name) goes get rice quickly.” Ordering food when pointing wasn’t an option was difficult – I learned the names of a few simple dishes, which I rapidly got tired of! The lexicon and grammar of Thai are so simple that progress becomes very quick once you learn a few patterns. Textbook (or bilingual informant) was needed for prepositions and abstract words. Eventually I became very conversant. I can read Thai now, but not write it.
I wonder if other languages can be learned this way. It’s easy, of course, for two-year olds, but I was in my thrities when I tried my experiment.
If you live in the U.S., and you don’t want to travel, then Spanish is the easiest language to learn, because it’s an Indo-European language like English, and you should have no problem finding Spanish speakers to practice on.
If you live in England, and you don’t like German, then French is probably your best choice, for much the same reasons.
If you want somebody to look up to: apparently, Mark Zuckerberg can do a 30-minute Q&A session in Mandarin, having started to learn the language in 2010.
Oh, I just read that he’s not that good, after all.
Bahasa Indonesia is pretty easy, since it was standardized in the 1940’s with Indonesian independence. There’s no genders and no tenses, and relatively few phonemes, making pronunciation simple. It’s the fourth-most spoken language in the world. It’s written in Latin script (like English). And, like in lots of places, Indonesian people go NUTS when white folks try to speak their language - in a good way. Plus, visiting Indonesia (and Malaysia) is awesome.
Indo-European spans quite a large variety of modern and historical languages. Let’s go down the tree a bit…
German is often encouraged as an ‘easy’ language because linguists trace the roots of English back to Low German (coastal, rather than mountain; my linguistics prof was sorely unamused when I sarcastically suggested it was a social class indicator). But you say that wasn’t appealing.
English, particularly American English, borrows a lot of terms from Greek and Latin, particularly among the sciences and such terms that flow from technology into common usage. This tends to lead people to believe it’s easy (easier?) to learn Romance languages since the roots of certain terms can be analogized to American English terms. [Romance languages are not about love and sex, they’re about having a grammatical structure influenced by the Romans – who spoke Latin – during the times when the Empire stretched all the way to the west coast. You can therefore guess that languages like Spanish, Portuguese, and French, have similar grammatical structures. Many people seem surprised to learn that the language closest to what the Romans spoke is found in Romania. The fact that it was a soviet satellite for most of our (the SDMB Denizens’) memorable years tends to throw people off. On the other hand, you might also find it interesting that Russian itself is a Romance language – prescriptively nudged in that direction by Orthodox priests (Saint Cyril is associated with the Cyrillic alphabet, which is often stereotyped as Russian writing).] German and English are not considered Romance languages because our grammatical structure is different. (The most common and blatant feature being the indication of the actor [speaker/listener/other/others] via the use of suffixes.)
And, of course, The Church was also encouraging colonialism throughout South and Central America and with the domination came language instruction (so the heathens could be given proper Christian indoctrination in the official Church language – Latin), which is why most of those countries speak some variant of a Portu/Spanish base with local terms and concepts added in.
But the key question for your learning was in Jragon’s response: Where you live is the key to what relatively local languages you should study. While Jovan is correct in noting that immersion is the most effective method*, second best would be having a large number of native speakers close to you so that you can practice and get pointers in terms of real-world usage. That could be French speakers in Louisiana or New York, or Spanish speakers in Arizona or Texas, or Japanese speakers in San Francisco or Denver, or Portuguese speakers in Brazil, or…
–G!
*This is true regardless of age, but tends to be attributed to kids who are just learning to speak because they tend not to have a language that they can fall back on for expressing or understanding concepts. The Military’s Monterrey Language Institute relies on this method; immerse language-learners in a world that requires them to speak language X and no other in order to accomplish daily functions, and the students will pick up that language rapidly.
I don’t know if this is an easy language to learn or not, but I would say that relatively few phonemes is not necessarily a good thing. It can mean a language where there are significantly more homonyms, which can make comprehension more difficult.
If he started in 2010 then he’s been at it 4 years, so if he’s speaking at the level of a 7 year old, well… he got there 3 years sooner.
Honestly, why would anyone expect full fluency? And why should that be the benchmark? There’s a huge distance between “know nothing about the language” and “speaks like a well-educated native”.
My French was pretty broken when I went to France after 5 years of language study but I was able to communicate, which arguably is the most important point of language study. And the French were thrilled I was making the attempt. Likewise, the Chinese audience was thrilled Zuckerberg was making the effort of speaking their own language even if his efforts were far from perfect. We should stop dissing people who’s second language skills are less than perfect and applaud their effort instead, and encourage them to keep studying.
That said - the easiest language to learn is the one you are either 1) hearing on a regular basis in daily life or 2) have some interest in due to culture or proximity. In a sense, the leap from English to, say, German or French or Spanish isn’t that far, which makes them “easy” (not really - there’s still a lot of work involved) but if you are immersed in, say, traditional Irish culture you might pick up Gaelic without too much heart ache, or if you convert to Islam you might have a greater than average motivation to learn Arabic. Neither of those languages are “easy” for an English speaker to pick up, but when motivated it is entirely possible to acquire the language.
So, OP - what are you interested in? What foreign languages are common where you are, or that you hear regularly?
Araminty nailed it! Behasa Indonesian is the simplest language to take up, and will serve you well in Indonesia, and very well in Malaysia too!
Romanized, easy to learn and useful in two countries that are both awesome to visit, what’s not to love?
Esperanto was designed to be as easy as possible to learn. Don’t know if it’s even easier to learn than Bahasa Indonesian, but I suppose it could be. (Bahasa sounds cooler, though.)
German is not too hard, but it does have three genders which most of the time are NOT discernible from the word.
As others have said, Spanish is probably your best bet. Only two genders, which you can usually tell from the word, the spelling is straight-forward, and if you live in the US you will have more than ample opportunity to hear it and practice it. Italian and Portuguese are probably similarly easy, but you hear them far less often. French spelling is completely non-intuitive and my impression is that it has many more grammatical irregularities than Spanish does.
Interesting and good to know.
I can’t speak Italian reasonably well, but didn’t find it easy to learn at all because of all the verb forms you have to memorize. There’s other tricky stuff too. It is pretty phonetic, though, which really helps the pronunciation. And, of course, it’s pretty.
If the genders and the declinations of articles are what you feel is holding you back with German, try Dutch. It’s similar to German but with only two genders and you don’t have the change the articles. In fact, some Germans have told me they feel Dutch is a kind “children’s German”.
Swahili has a gorgeous grammatical structure… unfortunately it has like 14 genders (it’s been a decade since I studied it…), and there isn’t a strictly logical way to figure out what gender a word should take. So there is a lot of memorizing, in Swahili.
It does have the gorgeous grammar and purely phonetic spelling, though, which is great.
Hm, Dutch people are fond of telling each other that Dutch is so hard to learn. (It was easy enough for me to learn as a toddler but I guess that doesn’t prove anything.)
But if simplicity is what you’re after, try Afrikaans, which is basically Dutch with radically simplified grammar.
If your main concern is ease of learning, then there’s only one choice: Esperanto. All other languages have difficult areas, so if it’s not going to be Esperanto, choose a language that you’re going to get some use out of to offset the effort to learn it.
I don’t think ANYONE learns Irish Gaelic without significant heartache. The combination of pronunciation, spelling, and grammar makes it very difficult for English speakers.
The easiest languages to learn are the ones with similar sounds, similar writing systems, similar grammars, and similar lexica. That pretty much limits them to Western Germanic (German, Dutch) and the Big Three Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish).
For French, German, Italian, and Spanish, it helps that there are tons and tons of resources out there. Good points have been made about Bahasa and Swahili and access to native speakers, but at the end of the day the answer is probably going to be French (if you’re mostly planning to read) or Spanish (if you’re mostly planning to speak).