Don’t forget Frisian!
Malay and Indonesian have a very clear and simple structure. You can pick them up quite fast.
Italian is also a good one for learners.
Has the OP decided?
I don’t see why one would get hung up on this particular, purely formulaic aspect of the language. It’s not such a major obstacle toward comprehensibility.
Well, we all hated it those at school. Yes, you could learn to communicate without them, but you wouldn’t be speaking correctly. And what I was saying that Dutch is basically the same type of language, just with one significant obstacle removed.
As for Italian, it is easy to learn to understand and get by, because you can recognise or infer a lot of words. But to speak it correctly, mi spiace, NOT easy.
By the time I tried learning Irish Gaelic I’d been involved in the culture, specifically the music, for years and I was spending a lot of time at an Irish cultural center where there were native speakers and the language could be heard in causal background conversation. So I was already familiar with the sounds of the language, that helped considerably, as did being able to hear it spoken and try it out on the natives.
The grammar is, it is true, quite different.
The spelling is a mess. However, my language instruction heavily emphasized the spoken over the written word.
On the whole, I personally didn’t find it any harder than French… but then, as I said, I had frequent, at times daily, contact with the language and native speakers. In other words, much more exposed to the language than most people in North America attempting the language. If I hadn’t had that advantage yes, I would have found it extremely difficult. It’s an illustration of how interest and exposure makes a difference.
We all have to go through “communicating” before we get to “speaking correctly”.
Fact is, most people learning a language as an adult are never going to be truly fluent. So what? This isn’t an all or nothing thing. Learning enough of a language to reliably communicate is still an accomplishment, is useful, and should be applauded.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with striving to go beyond that.
What’s the real goal here? Learning enough to read or watch movies and enjoy them in the language? Learning enough to communicate basic needs if you travel to a different country? Complete fluency? All of those goals can be worthwhile.
Oh, I don’t mean to say that unless it’s 100% grammatically perfect, it’s pointless. But my own definition of having “learned” a language does go beyond being able to get by in a pidgin version.
From what I’ve heard from people who’ve tried, it’s often easier to learn another language once you’ve adapted to the mindset of communicating in different terms- once you’ve stretched those mental muscles, so to speak. To that end, I offer a suggestion: don’t start with a foreign language. Start with your local sign language. I picked up a few basics of ASL back in high school, and I can report that even just knowing the alphabet (26 single-hand signs that you can practice by running through the song) is amazingly useful. Need to communicate with someone but you’re at a rock concert/in church/robbing a bank and can’t attract guards? It’s there for you, if slow. You have to learn the signs, but you already know the words.
Barring an overriding interest in a specific culture, I’d say Spanish is the easiest, at least for a US resident. But it’s not easy, language learning as an adult is difficult no matter what.
Here are some criteria for “easy” language learning:
-same alphabet (this rules out Chinese, Russian, and many other languages based on other systems)
-straightforward spelling and pronunciation. This, IMO, rules out French. I’ve found the pronunciation and spelling to be insanely difficult.
-availability of learning tools such as books, websites, podcasts, tv shows, movies in or subtitled in the language, and other ways to practice. This rules out relatively obscure languages. The more common, the more likely you are to find materials to help.
-availability of fluent speakers to practice with
-base familiarity with some pieces of the language. Every native English speaker has words derived from Spanish, French, Italian, German, etc in their vocabulary.
Spanish, at least in the US, fulfills all these criteria. If you’re from the US, I’d bet you can already say hello, goodbye, yes, no and count to 5. You probably also know at least 5 other words. Even if you can’t recall them, a quick look will remind you and…that base level is done in 10 minutes. You’re vaguely familiar with the pronunciation (casa is…casa cah-sah, not kay-say), and the base pronunciation rules apply most of the time. You can easily find books at any level, and native speakers abound. I’m working on it myself and it’s hard, but easier than it could be.
A+ post.
If you live in the US, learn Spanish. It’s pretty much the only language you will find useful pretty much anywhere in the country. Learning a language can be difficult, but the best way to learn one is to pick one that you will actually use.
It’s like when people ask what the best exercise is. The answer is: the one that you will actually do!
Closest how? Maybe in grammar, but I had a Romanian coworker and when she was on the phone we couldn’t understand a word - this for a team where everybody else spoke two or three other Romance languages (Spanish and Catalan, with some people also speaking correct albeit foreign-accented French) and had at least one year of Latin.
Ehrm… in terms of “communicating in different terms”, the local Sign IS a foreign language. It’s not merely signed English, it has its own grammar, different words, etc. Finger-spelling is to speaking Sign what slowly spelling each word and then trying to figure out the pronunciation is to reading.
Closest to an ancestral language is usually a combination of fewest changes (in phonology, syntax, lexicon, and other grammatical stuff) combined with fewest innovations. For the Romance languages, I usually hear Sardinian or Sicilian or Rhaeto-Romansch as “closest,” but even then it’s frankly not that much closer to Latin than the big guys. All Romance languages have archaisms and all have innovations.
Yeah, I’m not asking about the general meaning of “close”, I’m asking about the specific case. Then again, perhaps by “the Romans”, Grestarian is speaking about 15th-century Byzantines rather than 5th-century Romans.
I would suggest Turkish. It has a very logical structure. Also Afrikaans.
Question to those who feel Spanish is useful in the US: why? Are there many people in the US that don’t speak English that you are going to speak Spanish with?
Chinese or Japanese would be vastly more marketable skill, as would be many less common languages.
I lived in Spain for a while but I was disappointed that I couldn’t really pick up the language just from being exposed to it, because the grammar is so different. Spanish leaves out pronouns so you never know who is doing something until you can conjugate verbs.
It’s not a matter of finding people who don’t speak any English at all, it’s being able to speak Spanish to other Spanish-speakers.
In large urban areas the number of people who have Spanish as their first language is high enough, even if still a minority, that any business that involves frequent contact with the general public will benefit from having Spanish speakers on staff.
So if enough people come to a country that country should start learning the language of those people? Strange.
No one is saying that. We are saying that if you want to learn another language in the US, Spanish has a lot going for it because so many people here speak it. Far, far more than any other language. Read the 1st sentence in the OP.
Not Spanish.
Those conjugations man!