Easiest language to learn
The easiest language to learn
Easiest language
English- no cases, no ender, no word, agreement, arguably no grammar. Language is everywhere and can be herd, absorbed and used anywhere. Short words, verbs change only in the third person. Native speakers are very forgiving of mistakes as so meant people speak it as a second Language. This makes English the easiest foriegn language to learn.
Easy to learn
Italian-No cases, easy clear pronunciation, vocabulary of derivative of Latin, therefore the vocabulary has congruencies through out the Indo-European Latin influenced world.
Spanish - similar to Italian in that the grammar and pronunciation is easy, also ubiquitous, everywhere, but Spanish people talk fast and you can get lost when trying to understand.
German- logical grammar but does have cases and long words as word building is important.
French - sixteen tenses and some grammar twist and a specific pronunciation that makes it a little harder the Spanish.
Esperanto - Although I respect the people who created this, I do not consider this a living language and should not be considered when ranking the Easiest language to learn.
This is in contrast to the hardest language to learn
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September 16, 2007at 11:46 pm
How did you come up with English as the easiest language to learn? Perhaps you’re a bit biased? An acquaintance of mine from Switzerland claims that English pronunciation is difficult since it’s not as clear cut as Spanish, for example. I’ve had other people say something similar. Regarding grammar, I’m a non-native and I keep getting confused on prepositions (only one preposition for in/on/at in my language).
My native language is Indonesian, and I am more inclined to say that Indonesian is easier than English, but I may be a bit biased. Grammar is relatively simple. No tenses. There are quite a few affixes, but nothing tricky. Pronunciation is straightforward.
September 17, 2007at 4:53 am
English is a very difficult language - a terrible spelling system, lots of idioms, many exceptions and probably the largest vocabulary.
However, the difficulty of learning obviously depends a lot of the languages you already know. If you know a language of the same family, it will be much easier.
Why don’t you mention Esperanto? It is for most people easier than the languages you mentioned. Depending on the languages you know before - maybe by a factor of 8 or 10.
September 21, 2007at 4:04 pm
Esperanto - I personally think Esperanto is a very good idea but too idealistic for practical consideration when looking at the easiest language to learn.
October 2, 2007at 10:02 am
English is the most difficult language in the world. Never learn it!
November 22, 2007at 12:10 pm
I agree English is the easiest major language for the reasons you stated, no gender, the verb system which is the basis of most languages is easy as it doesn’t change much. The hard part of English is the large vocabulary, but that just requires a lot of memorization, and the spelling, but if you are mainly speaking that might not be as important. There are probably easier languages that aren’t spoken widely like Esperanto, and I also heard Indonesian was easy since there are no tenses.
December 9, 2007at 11:22 am
English isn’t all that easy due to all its split infinitives. They’re not too hard to pick up when English is your first language, but looking up the difference between clean, clean up, get up, get down, take down, take off, take to, get with, get back, get down, and all the rest is extremely difficult.
Articles as well can be a killer.
Easiest language? Probably Ido or Lingua Franca Nova. They’re both constructed.
January 14, 2008at 2:45 pm
English is very hard….especially when a non-native is reading with double word meanings ..like…..did u read….I’ve read…Did u polish the Polish furniture….that stuff is hard on non-native
February 21, 2008at 9:28 pm
I disagree that Esperanto is not a living language. From my experience, it is very much alive, vibrant and evolving. Oh, and did I mention it is easy?
I have lived in France, Germany and China and I have learned all of the repsective languages successfully and to be honest, I would say that German was more difficult than the others. Chinese, although different to my native language, was not that difficult, although it did take some more effort to learn its writing system. I think the most difficult language I have had to learn, is Polish.
March 6, 2008at 1:08 pm
To be honest, i think that speaking about difficulty of languages in the world, all languages should be analyzed. Those can maybe be the easiest languages of Europe (maybe). The indonesian friend could be an example. I study englis since 10 years…
Precised that, maybe it’s easy to understand if they write. But the spoken english, i understand only if a teacher is speaking with me (after some lessons). When i learnt polish, i just needed little time to distinguish words, even grammar was very difficult. My mother tongue is Neo-Latin. If i see a movie in english without subtitles, i hear something like “hauuo sting shh aau”. With the respevt i have to this language, i didn’t want to be offensive. Many consonants are all togheter, almost not pronunced, and it’s impossible to distinguish them. The way to write it doesn’t help: “flower” = “flour” or not in pronunciation?
March 7, 2008at 6:52 am
However, i found the following comparament of many languages. They are not only european, but native American, African and Australian languages are missing:
http://www.micheloud.com/FXM/LA/la/index.htm
For neo-latin, i meant a romance language (italian).
Saluti
April 8, 2008at 1:34 pm
Lol, I take it that you have fluency in Spanish, French and German, then, since you classify them as “easy”. Frankly, these statements sound more like simply impressions of yours. Do you actually know these languages more profoudly? In reality, none of them qualify as “easy”, much less as “easy to learn”. Only english would qualify for such distinctions, in my opinion.
April 8, 2008at 9:56 pm
English is probably the hardest to learn even thought english is my native language. Don’t give up! It will take time to learn but all people in America are bad at grammer and spelling especially. Even people 100 years old mis spell lots of words because so many words are not spelled like they sound to you. I think Spanish is the easiest because there is not very much to learn there are not as many words as in english. The good thing about english is no masculine or feminen words and you addresse old people and young the same.
April 21, 2008at 11:24 pm
English, to me, has to be he easiest language to communicate, i’m not a native, but i can still say it’s so easy, it of course have some level of difficulty specially since it is not pronounced as its written, THAT is its diffculty, of course, but about having so many words. ok, it does and i agree it might have more than other languages like spanish , but then you need to be a professional writter to SAY this, since how many times i have read books and seen words i hardly ever use, and i wouldn’t think of using when i personally write a letter, i am saying this about spanish, about english i read as many books in english as in spanish, and also there i find words very rare to use, but actually very accure, and what i can conclude from this is that difficulty of a language shouldn’t be meassured by its vocabulary but by its grammar, and the english one is the simpliest, cos normally we need less than 1500 words to express ourselves with enough accurency, according to what i have heard, and i agree with this, not many of us are born to be Shakspares or Pablo Nerudas, right? but we all NEED the grammar to express ourselves in other languages.
August 8, 2008at 1:26 pm
I reckon English is just as hard as any other language, it’s just that one gets immersed into the language much more often than into Swahili, for example. Many tv-programmes are either in American- or British English, and have subtitles in one’s mothertongue, making it easy to learn new words.
Many universities offer stuff like biology, engineering etcetera in English, not in Chinese or Italian, nor in Bantu, nor in Hindi. Practically everyone with tv and internet should be able to learn English very fast, as it’s spoken and written nearly everywhere.
Besides, English itself knows many accents and dialects. Who cares about what we call ’steenkolen Engels’, English with an extreme Dutch accent? As you mentioned in the article, the English are happy enough you have taken the initiative to learn their language.
August 9, 2008at 3:23 am
Ilse, I think you make a good point, maybe English is not structurally the easiest language but when you consider ‘Practically everyone with tv and internet should be able to learn English very fast, as it’s spoken and written nearly everywhere.’ I agree. It is interesting that you mention Dutch, which I think you are, I think you know West Frisian is the closest relative to English.
August 15, 2008at 8:41 pm
What makes a language easy to learn is availability. It will be hard for an English- American speaking person to learn Russian because no one really speaks it in America but Spanish maybe even French will be quite easy because of its wide use. Also, how closely its related to your own language. Since Spanish has borrowed several words from English and its no shortage of spanish speaking people in America than that should be the easiest and most useful language to learn. There’s no reason to learn a language just for the heck of it. It is useful for all Americans to learn Spanish, even Mandarin but French not so much. Most people who speak French in America also speak English so its almost useless.
August 16, 2008at 5:26 am
Neeka, Great point, however, I think there are some languages that are objectively more complex, because of the length of the words in the language, grammar, pronunciation etc. However, you are very right. If you know Polish then Russian is easier than if you are a native English speaker. If you need to learn a language you will learn it no matter how hard or easy people say that language is.
October 2, 2008at 12:04 pm
i agree with the indon…
i’m a chinese in malaysia,
i can speak english , chinese(mandrin) and Malay fluently…
among these three languages i have to admit that Malay is the easiest to learn…
not as complicated as english…
October 2, 2008at 12:15 pm
Thanks for your comment. I have herd Malay is easy. I have to look into this if it is the easiest language to learn. I like English as the easiest because the whole world speaks it and so you can not help learning it, if you watch movies and have the interest. It just gets absorbed into your brain.
October 5, 2008at 10:08 pm
English conversations can be held completely in idioms and these idioms are impossible to translate. English could be the hardest language to learn. But kudos for taking into mind our not caring about pronunciation. I have never heard that before.
October 6, 2008at 12:41 am
Sarita, Good point, The whole world speaks intermediate English, but once you get into a high level, native speaking idiomatic English, than English does get hard.
October 17, 2008at 12:26 pm
solo italiano
October 23, 2008at 8:12 am
Malay/Indonesian is the easiest language to learn. It’s commonly overlooked because it’s not a European language or a “popular” Asian language but over 250 million people speak it througout Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and to a lesser extent southern Thailand, the Phillipines and Singapore.
There are no tenses, it uses roman alphabet, and in daily informal speech, the root word of the verb can be used without any additions, meaning if it was translated into English it would sound like broken English.
I’m a native English speaker but speak Malay/Indonesian fluently. I also speak Swedish and Mandarin to a lesser extent and Australian Sign Language.
November 11, 2008at 5:09 am
hey,
just wanted to say that english IS easy..maybe not REALLY easy, but it is the easiest language, i think. I’m a native polish language speaker, and i learned english in a year. Now, i’m learning french and i have to say, that it is harder than english…a lot harder, especially the pronounciation.
November 21, 2008at 4:10 pm
English is a unifying language, which means therefore it is easy. If it wasn’t easy, few would learn it (forced or not). I respect other languages, in fact i’m larning two, but if English didn’t exist, the world would be unified too a lesser extent.