Language: What is the easiest Language to learn?

Factual Questions
41

As always it comes to personal experience.

I took two years of German in high school and learned a LOT. Maybe I had an awesome teacher, or maybe German was super easy. When I got stationed in Germany, I had no real problem communicating other than the words I simply didn’t know (meaning I had most of the grammar down pat).

But still… I took a year of French and a year of Spanish in high school too (crappy high school; I transferred from a better district where I’d already fullfilled my requisits). Didn’t learn squat. In French, maybe “baguette” and probably not spelt correctly; in Spanish, cerveza and baño which go hand-in-hand, but not much else. Probably the teaching. And me with language-learning experience.

But I know Spanish now. I lived in a Spanish-speaking country for a year, and married one of their gals, and am about to live there for another year (good industry I’m in). And you know what? Maybe it’s the teacher, and maybe it’s living there, and maybe it’s not having a friggin’ choice. But if I think of it logically, and try to be completely neutral, I’d say Spanish is by far the easiest.

The “way it flows” is super-similar to English. The only real challenge is learning how their verbs work. This may be the same in other languages. (really, read the entire link).

Okay, once you have the verbs, remember that languages are word-for-word translations, and practice a little, then speaking Spanish and English is just the same.

German, though, I just “got.” Not a lot of my classmates and fellow soldiers did, though. It’s kind of like reading Shakespeare or talking Yoda. Not hard at all if you’re open minded and remember, as always, that languages just aren’t about substituting one word for another. Verbs, as in Spanish are trickier than in English. Spanish verbs and tenses and usages are more similar, though. Also German has a lot of cases that aren’t used in English all that much any more, especially the genetive (yeah, we have it, but it’s rare). This and other cases change noun forms a lot. One thing about German that’s closer than English is their seperable verbs, that Spanish doesn’t use. I think in English we call them adverbs or something. It’s probably easier for an English speaker to adapt to than a Spanish speaker, though. Things like, “put on the coffee.” In this case the entire verb is “put on” rather than just put. In German it’s the same idea, but not in Spanish – they’d just say “put the coffee,” which seems easier on the surface, but isn’t nearly as descriptive in my English-oriented mind. Works well enough for them, though, I guess.
So… let’s talk usefulness. If you’re in the USA, Spanish wins hands-down. Okay, disclaim this and that and that. I’ll still utter Spanish.

42

The mutually intelligible part I can understand; Brittany was populated by Britons escaping the anglo saxons. But it was so long ago that I wondered if the languages had drifted so far apart as to be unintelligible. Plus, its closest British equivelent is supposedly Cornish and not Welsh, so its suprising (to me anyway) the Bretons and Welsh can converse (unless Cornish and Welsh arent that different).

Thanks for the link; answered my question.

43

Spanish is a reasonable answer as some have suggested here, but I’d go for Italian as the easiest to learn from a standing start. It is very regular and is consistently pronounced as it is spelt.

44

So is Spanish.

45

So I’ve just completed a linguistics degree and I ought to have some insight on this question, but maybe not.

Anyway here goes. In my opinion there are too many factors involved to give a simple blanket statement on the matter. Two key things that haven’t really been mentioned are desire and opportunity. In other words, how much do you want to learn this language and how much chance will you have to speak it and hear it spoken. Related to this is how useful you will find the language, it may influence how much you want to learn it.

Desire to learn the language should not be discounted as a factor in the ease of learnign the language. Certainly it is not the only thing that determines the difficulty of learning a language, but it can have an effect on how fast and well you will learn the language.

In terms of opportunity and usefulness, for most Americans Spanish is the language that is the easiest to practice because of the large Spanish speaking population. In other places (and certain regions of the US) another language might be easier simply because you will use it more.

The above factors are things that really don’t speak to the structures of the specific languages and have more to do with the physical circumstances and mental state of the person learning the language. There are factors that have to do with facts about a specific language.

In theory all languages are equally easy to learn. What tends to make the difference in difficulty (besides desire and opportunity) is what language(s) you happen to know when you begin to learn the new language. I’m not sure how much of a difference this really makes if you keep an open and inquisitive mind while learning a new language, but I have noticed that I picked up things more quickly when learning an indoeuropean than a non-indoeuropean language.

As many of you know, English is an Indoeuropean language of the Germanic subbranch. It comes from a branch of the Germanic family that places it most closely with Dutch, Frisian, and Saxon. However, it also had extensive contact with the Vikings, bringing in influence from the Norse of various varieties. Furthermore, as many of you know, it had a massive infusion of Romance influence from the Norman French-speaking invadors from the 11th century on. Additionally, many Latin and other Romance words came into the language over time, many more than in German. I’ve heard, though I can’t remember where, that if yo ucont the words in English you come up with more non-Germanic words than Germanic words, but the most commonly used words are almost all of Germanic origins.

There are several things about a language that have an effect on the ease of learning it.

  1. What phonemes does it have and how is it spoken (i.e. are all the sounds fully pronounced or are they slurred, how fast is the typical pronunciation). If you have a hard time hearing what the words are, then you’ll have a hard time learning the language. People from different language backgrounds have a different set of basic sounds in their heads and they will often mishear a sound because of the difference.

  2. What’s the Syntax like? In other words, is the grammar similar or not? A grammar that is more similar should be easier to learn (though sometimes the similarity in grammar can be misleading and you may find a language with an entirely different grammar easier).

  3. Vocabulary. I can speak from experience when I say that it is much easier (0r at least quicker) to learn a language that has lots of cognates (that is, words that sound the same or similar and have the same or similar meanings). This can have its pitfalls, like when you use a false cognate, that is a word that sounds similar to a word in your language but has a significantly different meaning.

Applying these to English, I would say you’d have the best luck with Dutch, Saxon or Frisian in terms of sounds, though there may be aspects of other languages that make them easier. As mentioned above, Spanish is relatively simple in terms of pronunciation and spelling and Dutch and Frisian can be a wierd sound-wise (I speak from very limited experience here).

In terms of Syntax, I’m not sure, English tends to rely on word order a lot more than its Romance and Germanic cousins (I believe). It is a Subject-Verb-Object language, which is similar to these cousins (but since many of them rely more on conjugations and grammatical case, this may not help so much).

In terms of Vocabulary, I think it’s sort of a toss-up between the Romance languages and the Germanic languages. No doubt someone could make a case for one or the other, but I don’t have enough pratical experience to tell which is more helpful. Bear in mind that the Germanic languages are more likely to give you help with the simple and common words. In theory, the Romance language whose vocabulary best corresponds with English ought to be French, but I have no cite.

Anyway, I have to be going now. I hope this was helpful.

46

German native speaker here. German would seem to be easy, until you start tangling with the nasty grammar, and you have to declinate the undefined article and an adjective into the neuter Accusative case, and you’re trying to figure out “Acusative? Why? Oh, I see, it’s a direct object, but then this part must be in the Dative because it has something to do with a location. And when in the heck do I get to start using my mad Genetive skills? Oh screw it!”

Here is an example:

Er fliegt mit einem deutschen Reisepass. (Dative, masculine)
Er fliegt ein deutsches Flugzeug. (Accusative, neuter)
Er fliegt mit einer deutschen Reisegellschaft. (Dative, feminine)
Er fährt einen deutschen Bus. (Accusative, masculine)

Then you have to know how to conjugate tons of irregular verbs like “sind” (even in Plusquamperfekt or Perfekt Konjunktiv I) :

Plusquamperfekt:
ich war geworden
du warst geworden
er/sie/ist war geworden
wir waren geworden
ihr wart geworden
sie waren geworden

Perfekt Konjunktiv I:
ich sei gewesen
du seiest gewesen
er/sie/es sei gewesen
wir seien gewesen
ihr seiet gewesen
sie seien gewesen

Not to forget the “Höflichkeitsform” (Sie waren geworden; Sie seien gewesen) plus the fact that you have to capitalize every darn noun when you are writing!

I think only Latin grammar is more complicated. At least we Germans got rid of the Ablative and Locative. :smiley:

47

But the beauty of Latin, with all those word endings, is that the order of the words really doesn’t matter. Since you conjugate verbs AND decline nouns (and tyheir adjective) the endings tell you what action they are associated with.

48

German is almost like that. One of the other things people sometimes have trouble with is the “seperable verb”. Basically a verb like “auspacken” (unpack) can be split, and the prefix “aus” can be placed all the way at the end of the sentence. Since German can tend to have a lot of run-on sentences you can end up with something like:

“Ich packe mein Koffer, der gestern erst ankam, und eine braune Ledertasche enthält, blah blah blah blah blah blah, aber blah blah blah blah blah blah, mit blah blah blah blah blah blah, dann blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, auf dem Bett aus.”

By the time you’ve reached the end of the sentence you’ve completely forgotten what the verb is supposed to be, and that aus just kind of jumps up at you and bites you in the rear. :smiley:

There is a wonderful essay by Mark Twain (in “A Tramp Abroad”) called The Awful German Language, which anyone wanting to learn German should read first.

49

Another horror of German I seem to have repressed are all the “Fragenwörter” you can make from the simple little word “wo” (where). English can do similiar things with “wherefore”, “wherewith”, “whereto”, etc., but German just goes nuts here. My wife is Brazilian, and when she was learning German her thought processes were something like this:

“OK, “womit” is “com que”, but so is “wobei”, so which one do I use? And which one is “de onde”: is that “woher” or “wohin”? And what the $#%^&# is the difference between “worauf” and “woraus” again? AAAARRRRGGGHHHHH!!!”

:smiley:

50

I took both Spanish and Mandarin Chinese in high school and neither one of them seemed particularly difficult. Spanish is easy to pronounce but the verb conjugations are ridiculous. Chinese was harder to learn to pronounce but not too bad once you got passed the whole tonal thing. Not having an alphabet sucked too but you get used to it.

I’d probably have to vote for Klingon.

51

English is in the Germanic language family, which places it closer to German than French. But because of the multitude of French-origin loanwords in English, I think French is probably easier because of the vocabulary. The tense system of French is much more complicated than those of English and German, but the case system is essentially nonexistant in French, as in English, and the gender system of French is somewhat simpler than that of German.

I’m surprised that the USDL considers Spanish easier than French, unless they’re factoring in the fact that easy access to Spanish language media might speed the learning of that language.

52

I’m not surprised since spanish is much more regular, and, contrarily to french (and english) is essentially always pronounced in the same way it’s written.

53

For all that I can see, Italian and Spanish are pretty well equal in ease of spelling, ease of pronunciation, English cognate recognition, and verbal complexity. It’s a tossup. But as an Italian-American, whose first foreign language ever learned was Italian (and it was easy indeed), it annoys me that Italian almost always gets ignored in favor of Spanish in these kinds of discussions. (Thanks for being the first to promote Italian here, AndrewT!) You should definitely learn Italian if you like music and the arts.

54

French spelling actually isn’t that difficult, especially when compared to English. It may not have a one-to-one sound-letter correspondence, but someone who’s reasonably familiar with the language can, with very few exceptions, pronounce a word they’ve never seen before correctly on the first try.

55

Try most of the modern Slavic languages, which still have six cases in regular use (seven if you count the archaic vocative case). Interestingly, the thing that’s helped me the most in learning Russian is the two years of Latin I took in high school. There’s not much direct correspondences, but having the Latin declensions and conjugations pounded into my head prepared me for the Russian case system.

Now if you want really complex grammar, try Church Slavonic, which seems to have retained almost as much of the old Indo-European grammatical system as Sanskrit did. Not only do you have the seven Slavic cases, but you have hideously complex mixed declensions, even more hideously complex compound conjugations, weird consonant mutations (much more than in modern Russian), and have to deal with declensions and conjugations in the dual number as well. Here’s an example: the complete conjugation of the verb “to be” (the rest of that site has some incomplete grammatical tables).

56

I get the feeling that people who say Spanish is easier haven’t actually learned the damn thing. I have.

And Spanish 101 is fairly easy. And the next phase. But then we hit the verbs. And the irregular verbs:

presente (present)
pretérito imperfecto (past progressive)
pretérito indefinido (simple past)
futuro (future)
condicional (conditional)
pretérito perfecto (present perfect)
pretérito pluscuamperfecto (past perfect)
pretérito anterior (past perfect)
futuro anterior
condicional anterior (conditional perfect)
presente del subjuntivo (present subjunctive)
imperfecto del subjuntivo (imperfect subjunctive)
perfecto del subjuntivo (present perfect subjunctive)
pluscuamperfecto del subjuntivo (past perfect subjunctive)

x six ‘persons’ - yo, tu, el/ella, nosotros, vosotros, ellos/ellas
= 84 forms for each verb.

‘To be’ is either ‘ser’ or ‘estar’, depending on context. Both are of course irregular, meaning there are 168 forms to learn. GRanted, there are common auxiliary verbs which are the same, no matter what the base is. But still.

The subjunctive mood is a bitch. Not only used when there are two subjects in the same sentence (e.g. I want you to open the window - Quiero que abras la ventana) but also after certain adverbs. Maybe/perhaps can roughly be translated as a lo mejor/quizas. After quizas one must use subjunctive.

It made my head hurt. It still does, just trying to sort it out for this post.

57

Let’s think out of the box and not forget America’s fourth popular language - ASL - American Sign Language. I don’t know it myself, and I certainly don’t think it would be the easiest to learn, but is it a candidate for hardest?

From this site

58

People come up with Spanish, I think, because Italian is rarely taught in high school in the US. But I’d agree that it’s probably a toss up between Spanish and Italian.

For those picking German, it’s important not to just count up the cognates. You need to note that many of the German/English cognates are the “little words” that are used very commonly, but don’t add a lot of information. The English/Romance cognates are more often the “big words” that contain the bulk of the information.

It might also depend on the type of conversation you were having. If you were talking about household types of discussion, German might be easier, while for political discussions a Romance language might be easier.

59

As I’ve always said, the difference between English spelling and French spelling is that French is consistently misspelled, while English is inconsistently misspelled… :slight_smile:

60

What you’re talking about here is not French spelling but French pronunciation. French spelling is more difficult than Spanish spelling because in French, the same sound may be spelled a few different ways. In Spanish, if you hear a word there’s usually only one way it can be spelled.