Easiest language to learn.

In My Humble Opinion
41

Not the country as a whole, no, but if you have a concentration of people speaking a certain language it can be advantageous for a business owner to have staff who can speak that language to encourage that part of the customer base to do business with the company. If you want to learn a foreign language and you happen to live near people who speak a particular foreign language their proximity means you have an additional resource for learning that language.

We have people from all over the world coming to the US. We do business all over the world. I got one of my first jobs because I could communicate in French (I lived near Canada, so French was a fairly common language there). If I lived in a Chinatown and/or desired to do business with China I might consider one of the varieties of Chinese (see Mark Zuckerberg - also, if I recall correctly, his in-laws speak Mandarin so there’s an additional reason for him). If I lived in southern Texas Spanish would definitely be useful even if not required. If I had some reason to do business with Bulgaria taking some lessons in that language might make a lot of sense.

But if you just want to learn an additional language and don’t have a strong preference, Spanish is one of the mostly commonly spoken languages in the US after English, there is a lot of Spanish media available, you are more likely to find a Spanish speaker than someone who speaks, say, Finnish or Swahili, and it’s frequently offered as a language course in many, many places. Thus, there are a lot of resources and opportunities for someone to use their Spanish.

But hey, I took on Irish Gaelic because I wanted to, not because it was useful. Some people learn Klingon, of all things. There’s a world-wide Esperanto community.

If you have a particular motivation for a language, no matter how obscure, go for it. If you don’t have a preference and live in the US Spanish is a good place to start.

42

While I don’t speak Romanian, I’m not sure that what I’ve bolded is true at all.

Romanian has been heavily influenced by Slavic languages and Turkish and borrowed extensively from these languages. These make it notably divergent from what the Romans spoke. As a native French speaker, I’m always baffled by the way I can sort of understand 25% of what I read in Romanian and have absolutely no clue as to what the rest means.

Now, this is getting weird.

Could you please elaborate on this because, at face value, it is completely wrong. Russian is a typical Slavic language and has no particular link with Romance languages, apart from the fact that they both dervide from Proto-Indo-European. Russian is a satem language whereas Romance languages are centum and that’s arguably the biggest split among Indo-European languages.

43

Oh, and to go back to the OP: I’d suggest Swedish.

Many words share the same roots as their English equivalent and the grammar is easier than German, Dutch or even English (extremely basic conjugation, and almost no declensions)

44

Makes me think what a comparative breeze English must be to learn (spelling issues VERY much aside). Compared to most of the other major languages one might consider learning, how nice it is that English has:

  • NO gendered nouns
  • only one definite article, for singular and plural, no matter the case
  • only two forms of the indefinite article, based on a pretty easy to learn rule
  • verbs that conjugate far less than most European languages
  • hardly any umlauts, accents, or other alphabet marks
  • adjectives that never change

On the downside, I’ve heard that English has a larger vocabulary than most languages, and as mentioned, our spelling system is absolutely terrible and non-intuitive. Still, I would love it if another major world language had all the benefits listed above!

45

Yeah but all that doesn’t tell the whole story, as based on that list, Mandarin Chinese should be a piece of piss:

  • It also has no gendered nouns
  • No definite article
  • No indefinite article
  • No verb conjugation, period
  • Basically no plurals (there are a few nouns you can pluralize e.g. “friends”, but even for these it’s optional; “Yesterday I make many friend” is valid).
  • It also has adjectives that never change
  • Simple number system (e.g. 13 is “ten three”, 30 is “three ten”, no exceptions).
  • Simple days of the week, months etc (Monday is “week 1”, February is “2 month”).

…yet is very difficult for English speakers to learn, even if we’re just talking about the spoken language.

46

Yes. English is not an easy language to learn. Usually, easy languages are ones that are very similar to your mother tongue. If you speak Spanish, then Portuguese is very easy. If you know Dutch, then German would be easier. No one in this thread has suggested Korean, but if this were a Japanese-language board it would easily be the obvious choice.

English suffers from its rather complex pedigree in that it doesn’t have any really close relatives. Germanic languages are sort of close, but not in any way like the Scandinavian languages are to each other, for instance. Pronunciation is not so easy. While verb conjugations are relatively simple, verb tenses aren’t. (I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d make a mistake in this post…) Concepts like phrasal verbs cause learners much pain.

There’s a lot more, but it mostly boils down to a relative abundance of idiosyncrasies.

47

I call BULLSHIT on both of those claims. Got cite?

48

Sure, but you’re ignoring the very obvious difficulties of Chinese over English - tones and the writing system. I feel confident that someone starting from the vantage point of a language that is neither related to Chinese or English would find English much easier to learn.

I read once that English is an easy language to learn poorly, but a hard language to learn well. That makes sense to me. For the reasons listed above lots of people could fairly easily learn enough English to make themselves understood; but mastering all the idiosyncrasies and irregularities of the language would make it a very hard language to become super literate in.

49

I know a guy from China who has been in the US for 20 years and became a US citizen. He speaks and writes English well enough to have a meaningful conversation with pretty much anyone here - but his grammar is atrocious and hasn’t gotten any better in all the years that I’ve known him. He still doesn’t understand the grammatical distinctions between singular and plural nouns (which iirc isn’t done in Chinese). He seems to understand the semantic concept of singular and plural, but can’t express it in English with any consistency. He is constantly talking about taking all of his child to the schools to get diploma and wondering who he should vote for Presidents.

50

Also, the word order is virtually identical. I read that it was all those Vikings in England who started making English speakers use Norse word order as opposed to the original German/Dutch word order. Virtually none of that German where the hell do I put the verb crap.

51

Foreign Service Institute rankings of foreign languages in order of difficulty for English speakers to pick up:

Having studied Hebrew as a child (two different writing systems, confusing cognates, frigging thing is written backwards) all else looks easy to me.

52

Maybe, maybe not. But word order only becomes important when you lose inflections. Inflections, eg declensions of nouns, tell you who is the subject and who is the object of the sentence, for instance. Nouns like “king” would take on different endings depending if it was the subject or the object. By keeping a standard word order (subj-verb-obj), we know which is which without needing declensions.

53
  • Horrible phonetics. It’s like there isn’t a single word that everybody will say the same way.
  • “The spelling thing” means that it’s actually two separate languages, for learning purposes; three if you take into account the variant spellings. You can’t figure out how to spell something based on how it’s pronounced, but you also can’t figure out how to pronounce it based on how it’s written - congratulations, it makes French easy!
  • No impersonal form. The existing impersonal structures are divided between “unknown to large amount of users” (the passive voice), “not evidently impersonal and often leading to misunderstandings” (the impersonal you) and “unclear” (the “someone”-type orders, which are also unclear in other languages).
  • Phrasal verbs. While they’re actually a cross between a collocation and what in other languages would have been a new verb formed by the “central” verb plus some added-on particle, they’re a serious bitch.
  • Countables vs uncountables. No, damnit, you don’t fucking create “one equipment”, it’s “one piece of equipment”! froths at the mouth
  • The custom of writing accents doesn’t really help people understand how does that person pronounce unless they are already familiar with the pronunciation represented, and it makes reading a lot harder than using standard spellings throughout. Note that most people will encounter it when they’re already pretty advanced: you’re at a point at which in other languages you’d be reading as quickly and widely as in your own language, but in English suddenly this new barrier comes out of nowhere and sets your reading back several years.

Like every language, it’s easy once and if you know it. From the outside looking in, and in the immortal words of Jackie Chan, “I hate English!”

54

I’m painfully aware of the difficult aspects of the language (and alluded to such), but I was just listing the aspects of Chinese that are easier than other languages, the same as you did for English.
I’m not as confident as you regarding which would be the easier language to learn. Chinese as a spoken language makes a lot of sense and is internally consistent in many ways that English is not.

I’m finding Chinese difficult to learn, but then I’d had zero exposure to it prior to being here. I didn’t even know ni hao. Many people who start trying to learn english from such a standing start later in life also struggle.

The written form is indeed tough to learn though, no argument on that. They teach pinyin (the phonetic form) alongside hanzi in schools now, and I could easily see in the long term the phonetic form being preferred. It’s already how most people input data into computers.

55

The fact that there’s a lot of English everywhere also helps in learning it. What doesn’t help is that there’s not a single version of English. Here in Holland we have BBC1 and BBC2 on cable and in schools they teach British English, but most mass media English is the American variety. To add insult to injury, sometimes the British is closer to Dutch and sometimes the American.

As someone who can spell English, it’s hard to truly fathom how terrible English spelling really is. You can learn Spanish spelling in a few hours. French spelling may be insane, but there’s a method to the madness. But it takes a decade to learn how to spell English, one word at a time. And there are many, many words. More than any other language has, unless I’m mistaken.

56

I came here to post this. I read the thread title and thought, “Oh wow! Something I know about! For once, I will have something meaningful to contribute!” Alas, you have stolen my thunder.

OP, go by those rankings, they will not lead you astray. Personally, I would choose Spanish because you’ll most likely use it.

57

My poor kid is learning to read and despite studying four other languages myself, not including college-level English classes, I never realized before how awful English is. A conversation tonight was like “That word is ‘took.’ I know I told you ‘oo’ is pronounced ‘oooooooo’ almost all the time, but this is one of those times it’s not.” Every day it’s a new lesson in “Hey, that thing I told you yesterday? Here’s where it DOESN’T apply. Look at that silent W. That C sounds like an S. E a the end of a word makes the long vowel sound, but not that in THAT word.”

I mostly say “English sucks. You’re doing fine. You’ll get it eventually and even adults have to use the dictionary to get spelling and pronunciation sometimes.” She finds that fascinating, that adults still have the same basic problems she does.

58

Those may be difficulties of English, but most of them also aren’t as common or fundamental as the things I listed. The areas I pointed out where English is comparatively easy - articles, adjectives, most common verb conjugations - are used in virtually every sentence.

I’m not claiming English is Esperanto, and I’m also not claiming that it’s necessarily an easier language overall than Spanish - I don’t know; maybe the amount of English vocabulary and the horrible spelling system make it net more difficult. But it’s also true that in many of its basic features English is more simple than most European languages.

If I want to say “the red dog” in German I have to figure out if it should be der/die/das/den/dem/des rot/rote/roter/roten/rotem/rotes Hund. A German just has to learn “the red dog.” (Though yes, he has to learn how to spell it.)

There’s an interesting article on this here.

59

I suggest Spanish, for the reasons mentioned above: spelling and pronunciation are (mostly) intuitive for an English speaker (after learning a few rules, of course). Far fewer exceptions to the rules than other Romance languages.

I’ve learned a smattering of Spanish, French, and Italian. Spanish and Italian are pretty similar in difficulty and reasons for difficulty, but Spanish wins due to its prevalence here in the US. I found French considerably more difficult, with far more exceptions to every rule of thumb.

English and Spanish share a lot of words and roots of words, especially the more complicated words. The short simple ones are the ones that are most different and which you need to focus on.

All Romance languages have more complex verb conjugations than English, but they’re still a lot like English, just more cases. For example, in English, we have:

to speak (infinitive)
I speak, you speak, we speak, they speak
he, she, or it speaks

Two categories for most verbs. In Spanish, there are 6 categories:

hablar (infinitive)
yo hablo (I speak)
tu hablas (you speak [informal])
usted habla (you speak [formal])
nosotros hablamos (we speak)
ellos hablan (they speak)

Furthermore, there are three versions of the suffixes, usually depending on whether the infinitive ends in ar, er, or or. So, a bit of memorization, which seems like a lot at first but comes fairly naturally after a while (e.g., after one year of high-school level study).

Learning a new language isn’t easy. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are much easier languages to learn, but there are few you’d get as much use from as Spanish.

One of the first things we learn when we learn a foreign language is how little we understand our own grammar: we speak by instinct and don’t know the rules we’re following. So, part of it is learning stuff like the names of verb tenses. Fortunately, the tenses in conversational Spanish (and most Romance languages, as far as I can tell) have a lot in common with English, so you don’t have to relearn how to think, you can mostly just translate.

60

The biggest problem with English is the vast number of exceptions for every rule, thanks to its being an amalgamation of other languages (mostly, Romance and Germanic). Another tricky part is how subtle rearrangements of common words that are grammatically nearly equivalent suggest different shades of meaning that aren’t dependent on the grammatical distinction. I wish I could come up with examples, but I can’t – I just remember discussions on a number of these.