No one has plugged Danish! The grammar couldn’t be easier, the vocabulary has plenty of similarities to English–once you get the tricky pronunciation down, you’re on your way. Also, you get the free bonuses of being able to figure out Norwegian, Swedish, and on a good day, some German!
Pig Latin. Itsway easyway.
fandango, can you actually speak these languages and be understood by one who speaks them natively? I find that the accent would be the most troublesome, even if you’ve mastered the grammar and vocabulary.
Okay, I don’t want to turn this into a debate, but I’ve got to protest against those recommending German on the basis that it is “similar to English.” Sure, some very basic vocabulary words are similar to English–Daoloth listed a few above. But there are many, many, many that are nowhere near cognate to Modern English. A small sampling:
Rock - skirt
Speck - bacon
Speisekarte - menu (lit. “food card”)
Ewigskeit - eternity
fahren - to drive/ride
abdrehen - to turn off (a device with a knob)
wohnen - to reside
bleiben - to remain/stay
sterben - to die
wissen - to know
Any of these look familiar? Not unless you know Old English (and even then, only fahren and wissen have an OE cognate among this group, I believe). Consider this sentence from www.berlin030.de , a Berlin weekly:
Extra dazu wurde zur Lovestern-Galaktika-Party in den Messehallen am Funkturm eine Halle eingerichtet, die sich ganz diesem Thema widmet.
(Online at http://www.berlin030.de/mode/fructis.shtml )
See any words you recognize besides “Party”? And I’ve just mentioned vocab–don’t get me started on the grammar. I can manage a very basic conversation in German after 2 years of study and being a semifinalist in a National German Competition in high school. But I can’t make heads or tails of this sentence without a dictionary and a lot of patience. (Can’t really understand it anyway–something about a styling product that will be used at some party or competition or something. Babelfish wasn’t much help.) Granted, this is from a cultural newspaper, but it doesn’t look like there’s much slang in it.
Spanish, on the other hand, I only studied in junior high school, but I can eke out meaning from this Spanish-language newspaper, at http://edicion.yucatan.com.mx/noticias/portada.asp. See if you can follow (for those who don’t know Spanish) :
- ISLAMABAD, Paquistán, 6 de julio (Por Dexter Filkins, de The New York Times).— Veterano integrante del gobierno afgano fue asesinado hoy por sicarios que lo esperaban afuera de su oficina en Kabul, en lo que representa el ataque político más reciente contra el gobierno respaldado por Estados Unidos. *
My rough translation, w/o a dictionary: A veteran/old integrante of the Afghani gov’t was assassinated today by sicarios who were waiting for him outside of his office in Kabil, which represents the most recent political ataque (attack?) against the respaldado government by the U.S. (Words I don’t know are in bold.)
We have a whole lot of Latin cognates in English, and Spanish borrows a lot of words from Latin and (often) English. I’d wager that the average native English speaker should recognize enough words in the Spanish news clipping to at least get a basic idea of what it’s about.
End of rant: Spanish may or may not be relatively easy for English speakers, but German is not as easy a transition as people are making it out to be. Sorry for long-windedness.
I agree with genie. Not counting Esperanto I have found Norwegian to be the easiest language I have tried to learn. Both Bokmål and Nynorks are quite easy. (Bokmål is practically the same as Danish, but I haven’t studied Danish per se). I strongly suspect that my mostly frustrated efforts to learn Icelandic made my study of Norwegian a lot easier.
integrante- one that is part of, member.
ataque- you are correct, it is attack
sicario- mercenary
respaldado- backed by
Speaking of newspapers, try making sense of a typical american sports page. I, not a sports fan but with a passable grasp of english, have trouble. My friend from Persia (he won’t call is Iraq) speaks english at least as well as I do, but say’s he gets “Lost in a sea of metaphors”. 
Hiya, Mehrdad.
Peace,
mangeorge
Of the four languages I have studied, Spanish, Hebrew, Latin, and German. Spanish was the easiest due to its regularity and its few false cognates. Hebrew I had the most trouble with primarily because of the roots. Learning a new alphabet is a breeze. On the easy list where is Romanian? It is the oft forgotten Romance language. I have never studied it, but it is related so it couldn’t be that wacky, could it?
Most of the people I know are routinely bilingual and know the French language quite well, especially when angry . . . . 
I’ve never given that much thought. I took a look at a Romanian news website. I could get the gist of some of the headlines and some of the articles but there are definitely more differences than say Spanish and Portuguese. It would be like French which is not as similar to other Romance languages.
Well, I just started trying to self-teach myself Romanian yesterday, so I’ll let you know in a few months. I hear that the grammar is close to Latin, but having never studied Latin that won’t help me much.
And I thought German was fairly easy, though I have a pretty good memory and fast recall for things like adjective endings that seem to make it painful for a lot of people.
In one of his short stories Hemmingway comments that a person can learn reasonably good Italian in two weeks, but requires ten years or so to speak correct grammatical Italian. Having been here for almost 15 years, I agree with Ernest. I would add another ten years to understand beaurocratic Italian.
Italian themselves study the language in school for something like ten years.
When you say Scots, you mean their English dialect? Pronouncing the gh’s and all that? Are there any deeper differences from Standard English?
For those who are curious about what Frisian looks like, I can offer a couple of folk sayings (as best I can remember). The first alludes to the close relationship of Frisian and English:
Butter, brea and griene tjiis is goede English and goede Friese.
The second is something that a midieval folk hero used to go about saying, just before clobbering someone who answered to this description:
Butter brea and griene tjiss, hwa that niet zegge kan is gheene opruichte Fries. (Butter bread and green cheese, whoever cannot say that is no upright Friese.)
If you factor out exposure and things like that, I am sure that there are simpler languages out there. I’ve always heard, but have no personal experience to substantiate, that Malay is a very easy language to learn. Thai is not difficult if you can hear and pronounce the tones and you don’t worry about the entirely different alphabet. Chinese languages may fall into the same group.
Spanish seems the easiest to me and I’ve heard from various sources that Italian is even easier, at least to learn to speak. But every language seems to have at least one drawback. For me with Spanish, Italian and Portugese it’s that the native speakers seem to go at 120 miles an hour. In German I struggle with the prepositions and remembering all of the precise vocabulary. Dutch seems doable except for the occasional really long word that might tie your tongue into a knot. Thai has the alphabet thing (44 consonants and twenty vowels with five tones, anyone?) plus the tones which can change word meaning. Net, it really goes back to inspiration and dedication to learn any language. It’s tougher as you get older, but you’ve always got to remember that most languages you’ll encounter already have millions of people who speak them, from the dumbest to the brightest citizens. If they can do it…
gobierno respaldado por los Estados Unidos means “the government backed by the United States.” Public, your translation makes it look like the U.S. is doing the attacking, whereas it is actually doing the supporting, which is the opposite. So, you see, getting the general gist may still lead to very incorrect interpretations which may hinge on just a tiny misunderstanding.
Huh, “whereas”? Why did I use the word whereas there? Guess I should work on tackling English first.
Hey, joyofdiscord, you fooled me.
Which brings me to;
“whereas it is actually doing the supporting, which is the opposite.”
Now that certainally isn’t always true. 
BTW; the PBS program I referred to above was The Story of English, narrated by Robert Mac Neil. Interesting program, but not really germain to the OP.
Peace,
mangeorge
I agree fully that Danish and Norwegian are easy. Get past adjective inflections, and you’ve won half the battle. Swedish is tricky to pronounce, but it’s no harder grammatically than Norwegian.
German is hard. The cognates are misleading, sentences tend to run like marathons and the words tend to become mountain ranges. Noun gender is not as hard as Mark Twain’d lead you to think - most of the time, the words themselves will provide little clues to their gender. But a lot of ‘little’ words have no direct English translation - I’m still unsure about mal and doch, and those are fairly important little words.
Luckily, Germans speak at a civilized pace. German sounds very dignified at times and the precise vocabulary lends itself to very clear communication - for example, they have three words for ‘realize’, each of which has its own use and to mix them up would change the meaning of the sentence completely. Once you get past the tricky sounds, the pronunciation conforms to the written form almost exactly. German is used a lot in central Europe - if you speak both English and German, you can get along rather well in places like Slovakia and Poland. There are oodles of German speakers in the former USSR.
German is also a very good thing to know if you’re chatting up the fairer side of Germany in a bar :).
Anyone interested in learning a language should read The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker. It’s an excellent book, but more specifically it also explains why learning a language as an infant child (0-5 years of age) and trying to learn one in your adult years are two completely different things.
Language schools and purveyors of tapes, learn-at-home courses etc. often run lines like, “Anyone can learn a language - why, you did it yourself when you were just a child!”, or they say their look-hear-repeat method (or whatever) is just the same as the way we learn languages ‘naturally’. This kind of promotional material is dreck, and should be disregarded. In fact, if a company offers this kind of sales crap, they don’t know what they’re talking about and you’d be advised to buy your course/tuition/tapes from somewhere else.
May I also suggest you don’t try learning a language for the purposes of visiting a foreign country and getting more out of the trip (another annoying piece of sales spiel). (1) Unless you intend to spend a great deal of time in that country or in places where the language is spoken, the effort required to learn will not be worth it. (2) Outside of full-time study, the only language worth learning is one you expect to use (to some extent) for the rest of your life, otherwise you’ll forget whatever you bother to learn. (3) You can enjoy a visit to almost any holiday destination in the world without knowing anything but English. I’m not saying that’s a right thing or a good thing, but it is true.
Pbbbt! Mutations ain’t no big deal. All Celtic languages have them and in Welsh they can often be ignored or forgotten and have no change in syntactic meaning (especially the aspirate mutations).
For a truly tough language, there’s Cantonese with 7 different tones or look for a highly agglutinative language like Dene–one 12-syllable word can be translated to a whole paragraph in English.