.Hi everyone. I am a long time lurker here at SDMB, and I figured I should put up my first post. What foreign language is easiest to learn? Which is most similar and generally easier to learn?
Esperanto. It was designed that way.
Esperanto is indeed easy to learn. Also, I found Chinese to be exceptionally easy grammar-wise (it’s nearly impossible to screw it up once you learn the rules, very unlike English, which only pretends to have rules.) Of course, Chinese is very very difficult to learn how to write.
You can imagine why I averaged a D in that course. 
If you already know a Romance language like French, Spanish, Italian, or Romanian; or English, which is heavily influenced by French, you will likely find Interlingua very easy to learn.
Go ahead and look at the Interlingua web page at http://www.interlingua.com/. You’ll probably find that you can already read it without too much difficulty. Learning to write it yourself probably won’t take too much effort.
wow. you’re not kidding, I’ve let my Spanish lapse over the years and I could still understand most of that site. I’ve never heard of interlingua before, I assume it was created to provide a common tongue for all the romance lang. speakers.
On another note, I found that spoken dutch is fairly easy for english speakers, though looking at it written out makes it harder. I had a good friend from Saba(Dutch Island near st. maartin), and I could usually figure out what she was talking about.(knowing some VERY basic german doesn’t hurt)
Pig Latin? 
Hey, someone had to say it!
Seriously, though, I’d say Spanish. But I could never master it. It didn’t help, though, that the first time I’d ever had a Spanish class was in 8th grade, and for the next three years, my brain just sort of shut out a new language. It’s best to start learning a new language in elementary school.
I would tend to discount Esperanto and Interlingua because they are not true viable, “live” languages.
It’s tempting to say Spanish because there’s so much around that it seems one picks some of it up by osmosis. But maybe that’s just cause I live in California.
So, assuming the OP means easiest language to learn for native English speakers, I would say Dutch.
Dutch is a germanic language rather than a romantic one (like English) and it is closer to English in spelling, pronounciation and etymology than German is.
I find written Dutch easier than spoken Dutch… but only because you can take your time figuring the written words out. Just for fun, a few examples:
English Dutch
good goed
been ben
shoe schoen
son zoon
father vader (Star Wars ?!?)
was was
Monday Maandag
Unfortunately, it is next to worthless to learn Dutch because: A) Very few people in theworld speak Dutch. and B) Most of the people who ARE native Dutch speakers already have good English.
Oh well, c’est la vie…
Well, that was never a constraint imposed by the OP. Anyway, both Interlingua and Esperanto have large communities of speakers; Esperanto’s popularity is such that many children have learned it as their mother tongue. Publications are issued regularly in both languages. I’d hardly call them dead languages.
For that matter, any Germanic or Romance language is well-suited to English speakers. English may be ultimately Germanic in origin, but let’s not forget our “guests” the Normans and their lasting linguistic impact. Add to this the fact that the vast majority of English’s technical vocabulary is Latinate (arriving either through French or from Latin itself).
Going one step higher, any Indo-European language is likely to be easier for English speakers than a non-IE language. IE languages include most of those spoken in Europe (Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian being notable exceptions), Persian, Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, and several others. Once you start getting out of IE, all sorts of incredibly bizarre syntactic and morphological structures start to pop up – ergative or highly agglutinative languages, for example. You also have a greater chance of having to deal with unusual phonemic inventories and phonotactics, as well as vastly different writing systems.
I don’t know about that. I tried to learn French in college and found it basically impossible to learn to speak at all.(Of course being force to take a course I quickly became tired of and then having the rest shoved down my throat might make me biased.) I guess I have the same problem with French as English. It seems in both rules are the exception and exceptions are the rule. (Personally I perfered Latin since at least in that the rules made some sense.)
I speak some Japanese and find the pronunciation to be quite easy. The grammar doesn’t bother me as much as it does some people either. But I’m not even going to try and learn kanji (the main writing system) – hiragana and katakana are enough for me.
Chinese pronunciation is extremely difficult for most Westerners.
Possibly the easiest language to learn (so I’m told) is Indonesian. Pronunciation and grammar are relatively simple. And IIRC they mostly use the roman alphabet in written communication.
There is no one easiest language.
Everybody learns their first language in more or less the same time - studies of child language acquisition have shown this. Once you’ve learned one language, the ease of learning others is determined by how close they are to your native language, along with a lot of other factors like personal preference, natural aptitude, cultural influences, and so on.
Same applies to artificial languages like Esperanto - there are people whose first language is Esperanto, I’ve even met some (basically, boy Esperantist meets girl Esperantist at an international convention, love blossoms, Esperanto is the only language they have in common, so that’s what their children learn). There is no evidence (that I’m aware of) that Esperanto native speakers develop linguistically any differently from native speakers of any other language. Esperanto is based on highly simplified versions of grammatical concepts common to Western European languages, so it’s not going to pose any problems for people familiar with those concepts. For that matter, I’ve also heard that Chinese speakers find Esperanto easy to learn - this may just be anecdotal, or it may be that Chinese has some essential concepts in common with Esperanto (I wouldn’t know, I don’t speak Chinese).
This thread has been addressing the concept of the “superiority” of one language over another, it might be of interest. (Yes, I am shooting my mouth off in that one too…)
Malay (also called Indonesian) has very simple morphology, transparent syntax, and sounds that are familiar and easy to English speakers. It is now written in the Roman alphabet. Italian is even easier than Spanish, although as noted above Spanish tends to dominate the attention of Americans because of its big presence here.
I read in the paper today (London Metro) that there has been a study done recently on children learning languages and English took the longest to learn as a native language, by up to 3 years in comparison to some others. It didn’t mention which was easiest though.
The actual name of the language is Bhasa (Buh-hasa). There are two different dialects of Bhasa, Bhasa Indon and Bhasa Malay. There is no difference in the formal written version of the dialects but the accents are different enough to make it hard for native speakers to understand each other (like an American might have trouble understanding a very thick Scottish accent.)
I spent several months in Malaysia in six weeks stints over a few years and was able to communicate in Malay after a short time. As stated, the pronounciation is very easy and there aren’t many grammar rules. IANALinguist but I felt that Bhasa is a very rudimentary language. They also incorporated a lot of English words when they were colonized by the Brits and their language didn’t have the word.
I have read that the closest major language to English is Dutch and that the closest language of any sort to English is Frissian which I think is still spoken in parts of Holland but is probably a couple of generations away from death. As someone aptly stated, almost everyone who speaks Dutch, Frissian or Bhasa for that matter also speaks English.
Haj
Since this is largely a matter of opinion, I’ll move the thread to IMHO.
I remember hearing somewhere that supposedly Spanish is the easiest language for English speakers to learn. My Spanish is terrible, but I do think there’s a lot to this thought.
Although Dutch, German and Frisian are closely related to English, they are more closely related to the pre-1066 Old English, before the influence of the Normans (and the Romance languages.)
Having studies both French and German, I personally found French to be much easier, as its grammar structure is a little more familiar to English speakers. German is a language in which nouns decline - change their form depending on their function in the sentence (the nominative, accusative, dative and genetive.) Unless you have familiarity with other languages that do this (Slavic, other Germanic) then it’s a bit daunting at first to understand this principle, since our English-speaking brains haven’t really been wired to form sentences in this manner.
The Romance languages, on the other hand, don’t stack on endings at the ends of words and have a sentence structure much closer to English, making them easier to follow logically. French has a much more complex tense structure than Spanish (from my experience, at least…you can correct me on this) and the spelling is much more complicated than Spanish. French is loaded with silent letters, whereas Spanish has almost the same orthography as pronunciation. Also, except for the rolled “r” Spanish pretty much has the same sounds as English, whereas French contains the extra nasal vowels and throaty-“r”, and, like German, has the umlaut-u and umlaut-o sounds. Plus a smattering of other foreign sounds.
That’s why I would vote for Spanish as being easiest for a native English speaker.