First off, I can only speak English. I did take a bit of Spanish, but I did not enough to carry on actual conversations in real life situations. Anyhow, I am wishing to learn something new, to broaden my horizon so to speak, and I figured I’d start off with learning a new language. So my question is this…
…what is an easy language to learn?
Should I go with Spanish, since I already know the basics, or should I go with something else? What do you guys think would be an easy one to learn for starters?
Well, my personal opinion is that no foreign language is easy to learn. However, some language are easier than others to learn–it’s a matter of degree of difficulty.
Think of the places you’d most like to go where you would need to learn the language. Being motivated will help you the most because as Monty says, no language is truly easy if you really want to be fluent.
I’d say, for English speakers, easiest to hardest:
Spanish
German
Italian
Dutch
French
Portuguese
Everything else
Very subjective of course. But these use the Roman alphabet and the grammar isn’t too radical for a native English speaker (like, say, Finnish or Welsh). Plenty of study material available, your grammar intuition will help you a bit in German and Dutch, while the Romance languages have plenty of cognates with English words.
I say continue with Spanish, just because it will probably be the most useful to you in the future (unlike, say, French- unless, of course, you’re planning on moving to Quebec, France, or a sall town where the girls are old school romantics). But if you really want to learn a language, any language, classes or tapes just can’t compare to immersing yourself in a community where you’re forced to speak it.
Esperanto is easy, as noted. As a native English speaker, I’m finding German surprisingly easy. Never caught on to Spanish. Most difficult languages for native English speakers to learn would probably be Finnish, Welsh, Mandarin, Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Manx, and other obscure and/or foreign alphabet languages.
Actually, foreign alphabet isn’t really that hard. You learn the alphabet, then you just get going on it like any other language. The alphabet is the easy part - like any other language, grammer and syntax is the most difficult things to learn.
Athena, who used to know both ancient and modern Greek.
I speak both and they are similar. The main difference is that Portuguese grammar is more complicated. There are far more exceptions to the rule than there would be in Spanish.
As I discovered learning ASL this year, most people already know a lot of signs, but just don’t realize it. Natural signs are fun that way. It is fairly easy to learn, and, to me anyway, has been more useful in every day life than the five years of spanish I took. Of course, since I spent the year working with a three year old that didn’t speak, I’m biased.
In my considered opinion, Italian is marginally easier than Spanish, but they pretty much share the bottom rung of difficulty. Next in ease after them is Malay (also known as Indonesian). It’s fun. Go for it.
My $.02; by far, the most fun and painless way to learn a foreign language is to fall head over heels for someone who doesn’t speak your native language at all. (wistful grin…)
Barring that, where do you live? If you’re near any major metro area in the U.S., there should be a fair number of opportunities for Spanish immersion: radio, TV, newspapers. Heck, to watch Spanish soaps, you don’t even need to speak the language to know what’s going on!
But I wouldn’t call it an easy language to learn. (Of course, that might just have been me) but when I was trying to learn it, the grammar didn’t map easily with English grammar. Unlike Spanish, where for the most part I could translate word by word, with ASL it was translating idea by idea and that was very hard.
I may be biased, but I find Russian grammer much easier than any of the Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, French, etc.). No articles, for one thing.
The pronunciation rules of Portuguese are also more complicated, which is what annoyed me most about it. But, since I speak a language with almost no pronunciation rules at all, I guess I shouldn’t complain.
Since I speak Spanish, I am probably biased, but to me Standard Italian is a very regular and basic language to grasp on to…but no one speaks that other than in the RAI studios I think. Portuguese is easy to very read if you can figure out Spanish, but its still hard to pronounce and understand at times. Written French is ealso asy to learn, spoken French is a whole other beast. German lives up to Mark Twain’s every description, while Russian is surprisingly not that hard. I studied it for 2 years, and struggled with the cases.
A year ago I met a Bulgarian online, and found we could converse very roughly based on a mixture of my caseless Russian, Romance vocabulary (many words in Bulgarian are identical to Spanish or French cognates), and what she calls “Bulgish”.
So strangely after trying all these other languages, and not even knowing a thing about Bulgaria, I know can claim limited fluency in Bulgarian.The only really hard part is its verb tenses. Theres a tense I have named the “taurofaecal tense”. It descibes an action related to the speaker by a third party, who wishes to convey his doubt on the veracity of the original account when retelling it to you’. In other words, picture a sneering Dennis Miller and you get the inent of that tense.
Every language has its hang ups.
But, I have often heard from a very neutral perspective, say if you were an alien and had to pick one human language to figure out, it would be Mandarin Chinese.
Another thing is that what’s the norm in Spanish is wrong in Portuguese and viceversa. Just when you think the two are similar, the exceptions are different!
Luckily, I mostly emphasized learning the differences since I knew how to work with the similarities.
I’m going to hammer learning Dutch (but in a nice way!).
Having spent many holidays in the Netherlands, I can assure you of the following:
it is a really pleasant place to visit, with excellent culture, food and ease of travel (‘cyclist’s heaven’ )
they all (yes, I mean all) speak English.
(I did once meet an elderly man who apparently didn’t. But he didn’t say much in Dutch anyway.)
Dutch pronounciation is tricky, especially for an Englishman. (A Scotsman has a chance, because of words like loch.)
I have baffled an entire family of well-educated natives with my pronounciation of the town Scheveningen (it is also a chess variation).
Looks easy, huh? Well perhaps Coldfire can show you phonetically - because I can’t!
there are only a few other countries that use Dutch. South Africa has Afrikaans, which is from the Dutch settlers.
(It was weird to see two chess players conversing in Dutch - Afrikaans, because they kept looking puzzled, then suddenly comprehending each other.)
So visit the Netherlands, but don’t bother with the language.
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