No poll. I’m too lazy. But I will say that I’m looking for persons who’ve studied at least two languages in additional to that which they learned at their mothers’ knees, not necessarily persons who are currently fluent in multiple tongues. I make that distinction because, while I took 3 years of French in high school and 3 of Italian in college, I’d not say I’m fluent in either; it’s been far too long since I used them. I doubt I’m unique in this. But I want people like me to feel free to answer the question.
Doing so myself, by the way, I’ll say that Italian was much easier to learn than French, and not simply because the circumstances under which I studied the latter were far more conducive to learning. I just had an easier time wrapping my head and tongue around Italian.
For modern languages, I’ve studied French and German as an adult. I found French easier, but that’s probably because I took a lot of French when I was a kid.
For ancient languages, I’ve studied Latin, Ancient Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, Pali, and Hittite. Hittite was definitely the easiest-- it had the least morphology to learn. (Sanskrit was the hardest, because it had the most morphology.) Pali was also pretty easy, but that was because it was so close to Sanskrit, which I’d already learned.
The second language is always the hardest to get through, because it’s usually the first time you start wrapping your head around how language actually works.
I learned French first, and then Mandarin. French was obviously easier as it shares a lot with English and Mandarin doesn’t have a freaking alphabet. But the process of learning Chinese was easier than learning French.
Of all the languages I have studied, other than English and Spanish, which I came by organically, ‘at my mother’s knee’ as the OP put it, I’d say the easiest language to learn for me was German, then Japanese, then French, then Hebrew as the most difficult.
I had far easier time with my second language English than my third (Swedish) or fourth (German). Granted they start teaching it a lot more gradually since you start it on third grade here and the other two start on seventh and eight grade.
I’m not sure how much English being the easiest has to do with the inherent difficulties of the languages involved and how much it is about motivation and seeing and hearing that language in every-day life, though. They don’t use dubbing except for little kid’s stuff in Finland, so all Hollywood movies and TV is spoken in English. As I grew up I needed English for internet, computer games and fantasy/scifi games and novels so it was easy to keep on learning. On the other hand I’ve mostly forgotten what little Swedish and German I did learn.
Some few language things were easier to grasp when learning Swedish and German since they are related to English and I had already mastered the relevant bits when learning it but in general English was easiest from beginning to the end.
I was raised speaking Dutch and English, then learned French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian. Portuguese was easiest. Easy-peasy language! But I learned from Brazilian Portuguese, which is nice and simple and slow.
Though maybe German, because coming from Dutch it’s pretty simple? Hmm, now I’m not sure which was objectively easier…
If you don’t speak Dutch yet it’s got to be Portuguese, but if you do maybe German is actually easier but Portuguese just seemed easy because I already spoke French at that stage…? Uugh I don’t know!
Well, no, exactly. From studying Spanish, I got montana (enye), mountain. In Chinese, it was shAn. Cognates do mattah. And so do similar grammatical constructs.
I’ve studied Latin, Russian, Ancient Greek, and Spanish. I found Greek the easiest, though that might have been the circumstances (super intensive study).
I have studied Spanish, Russian and Japanese. I would have to say that Spanish seemed the easiest, with a pretty regular structure, and a modest number of cognates that helped. Russian also has a pretty regular structure, with a much smaller number of cognates, but I would not say that it is a difficult language, even with the different (Cyrillic) alphabet.
Japanese is not as hard as one might think (except for the writing part) but of the three it was definitely the most challenging.
Gaelic has a very different word order, a lot of sounds not shared by either French or English, different grammar, and some aspects that are really bizarre when first encountered (there are no distinct words for either “yes” or “no”, for example).
That said, I didn’t find Gaelic impossible and I enjoyed studying it. I wish I had been able to continue but, alas, it’s dying out so opportunity to use it/study it are rare.
French and German are my modern languages, and on top of that I have Latin, Greek, Occitan, Old English, Sanskrit, and a few medieval languages I don’t really count. I came to Sanskrit with years of experience in Indo-European inflected languages. I use untranslated Greek texts for my research, so it is not like this was in my distant past. I was shocked at how difficult Sanskrit is. I admit we also read texts that were beastly for trained Sanskritists, but man, it was no picnic.
I’ve studied German, Latin, Old English & Old Norse. Latin was the easiest by a long shot, even though English is a Germanic language. Modern English has so much French and Latin influence that the vocab is already familiar. Plus, Latin has clearer rules which makes it easier provided the writer wasn’t abbreviating everything (but that’s a problem with a lot of ancient writing.)
Aside from two years of Latin in HS, of which virtually nothing remains, I studied French in HS and since and German in college. Even though English is a Germanic language, I found French much easier. Thanks to William the Bastard and to those complicated German sentences in which the verbs pile up at the end.
My native tongue is Spanish. I learned German at age 5, but do not remember speaking, reading or writing it. My father stopped speaking to me in German after he divorced his second/German wife. At the time I was 8. At age 12 we moved to Canada where I had to learn French in school and obviously English. I was able to communicate pretty quickly in English, and French seemed familiar because of its similarities to Spanish, but I never became fluent in the language. Ironically so, being that I was born in Paris. Since I don’t remember learning German (I have forgotten all of it) I can’t really say if it was easier than English. I learn new words in English all the time; it’s never ending…
But I learned from Brazilian Portuguese, which is nice and simple and slow.