Does anyone know what language is considered the easiest for native english speakers to learn?

Answer 1

It depends on your ability to learn a language. For everyone saying spanish and french are so close to english actually german is closer as english is a germanic language NOT a romance language ( look it up, oh and i speak 6 languages and have a masters in linguistics so my answer is sound). Just because German would be the closest to english does not mean it is therefore the easiest as the grammar might be offputting to many people. In fact i found russian easier. So it really depends on you personally. A few things might contribute to the ease of a particular language such as, your exposure to it and your ability to retain large amounts of information and apply them. My suggestion is whatever the language you would like to learn just immerse yourself in it: Books, movies, videos etc. Now linguistically some languages are suppose to be easier to learn than others, for example spanish and french are considered categoy 1, german either a 2 or 3, russian a 4 and chinese, hungarian, finish and arabic 5.... but i found french harder than russian..so it really is up to you.

Answer 2

I don't know about Spanish, because I've never tried to learn it. However, I have learnt German - lots of words are similar, but there may be problems with the grammar and pronunciation.
And I don't agree with the guy who said that French is easiest to learn for an English speaker - actually it's the opposite. French pronunciation is so much different and the two languages come from gifferent languages families.

Answer 3

When I've studied Romance languages, it just seemed that there was a similarity between many of the words and ours, or at least that they were easy to figure out. Not so with German, although English is supposed to be a Germanic language. I'd think it would be much easier for a speaker of one Romance language to learn another one than to learn English, because the Romance languages are all quite similar to each other.

Answer 4

Any language is relatively easy to learn if you find yourself interested in the culture and the people that speak it.

A few options that I find pretty easy:

Spanish-- Pretty easy for beginners, gets a little tougher when you get to the subjunctive. One of the reasons this may be the easiest option, though is that in Spanish, the pronunciation rules are consistent and simple. If you see a letter, you pronounce it, and you pronounce it the same way every time.

French-- All of the Latin influence in English comes to us via French, so French is pretty easy to pick up. It might be a little harder than Spanish because the pronunciation rules are a bit different. But they're still more consistent than they are in English, where there are more exceptions than rules.

German-- Old English (think Beowulf; pre-Norman invasion, when the French invaded England infusing English with Latin via French) is very similar to the Germanic languages from the same time period, and most of the older words in English are very close to their German cognates (e.g., apple = apfel). The grammar construction in German is also more similar to English than the construction of Romance languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian--Romance in the sense of coming from Rome, not gushy lovey stuff). When it's spoken with the right accent and not yelled by some actor playing Hitler in a movie, German sounds really nice, too.

Dutch-- I haven't personally studied Dutch, but it's Germanic in most of the same ways that English is (only much closer to German than modern English is). The constructions are very similar, from what I understand, and many of the words are similar as well.

The best thing about learning languages, no matter which is your native language, is that once you've sort of trained your brain to think in a different language, other languages are pretty easy to pick up. And once you've gotten one language in a family, it's pretty easy to pick up related languages. After getting pretty good with Spanish and studying some French, I can read Italian and Portuguese (but not Romanian, the slavic influence still confuses me a lot).

Answer 5

Some linguists have organized a number of languages into "categories", supposedly based on how easy the languages are supposed to be to learn, I believe. The Category 1 (easiest) languages are: Dutch, French, Haitian Creole, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili and Swedish.

Personally, I think that you shouldn't only make your decision based on what's easy, but also on what language you really want to use to communicate with people. That will help you to be motivated to learn any language, even one that you find hard.

Answer 6

Spanish

Answer 7

Hello,
That would be Spanish,because it is similar to English. But learning any language takes time, motivation and also hard work

Good luck.

If you are interested in learning Spanish, here is a free website for you to try Spanish

www.byki.com

Good luck and God Bless

Answer 8

the easiest language to learn is always the one you have a use for (even better if you hear it every day).

when i moved in with my current partner i heard her speak on the phone to her family every day in welsh, and i also heard welsh radio programmes when she listened to them, and watched welsh tv with her some evenings.

it was quite easy for me to pick up welsh - since i was exposed to it every day - even though i didn't really need it (ann speaks perfect english).

when i was at college several of my friends spoke french - so i found french easy to learn.

the language which is easiest to learn is the one you have a use for.

Answer 9

I've heard Dutch is the closest relative of English. But I don't know whether it's useful or not.

Answer 10

Ebonics.

Next easiest would be french or spanish (these are really quite similar).