in your opinion, what is the easiest/hardest language to learn?

Question

other than chinese

Answer 1

The hardest language to learn has to be Sentinelese, one of the languages spoken on the Andaman Islands. Nothing but a few words have ever been published on Sentinelese. No one, not even Indian government officials, can go to Sentinel Island because they will meet with violence on the part of the Sentinelese people. The Indian government lets them be and they don't leave their island. Therefore, Sentinelese is the hardest language to learn because it is IMPOSSIBLE to learn. The easiest language to learn is the language that is most closely related to whatever is your native language.

EDIT after reading the following answer: DutchGirl forgets that the entire field of Second Language Acquisition (as a science) is a subfield of Linguistics. Study after study has shown that the easiest languages for one to acquire are those languages that are most closely related to the person's native language. The reason for this is simple: grammatical structures, grammatical morphemes, and sound systems are usually quite similar. Take the English AUX structure, for example. It is virtually identical to the AUX in all the other Germanic languages, the only variation is ordering. It all depends on how you TEACH the second language. I have found that students who are taught the similarities in the Germanic languages first (rather than the differences as most German teachers do), including Grimm's Law, the AUX structure, etc. find Dutch, German, and the other Germanic languages to be quite easy to learn. Unfortunately, like DutchGirl I imagine, German instruction, even at the university level, tends to take the "German is very different from English" approach, thereby prejudicing students from the beginning. German teachers tend to leave the relationship tricks for the advanced students rather than teaching them from day one.

Answer 2

There's actually a much more scientific answer to this question than the above guesses. There's a table developed by a guy who specializes in second language acquisition. (Might've been Krashen. I'd have to look it up again It shows how long it would take an 'average' learner to learn a variety of languages. This table shows Dutch and Italian as being in the easiest group. If I remember correctly, Chinese was amongst those in the fourth and hardest group.

PS: English is actually a very difficult language to learn, Americans just say it's easy because it's the only language they know usually. This is a ridiculous myth.

As for Dutch and German, they are very different in difficulty. German is far more complicate,d primarily because of its case system and stricter rules on sentence composition, as well as having a vocabulary that is further from English, and three articles instead of two (as in Dutch). Hungarian is also very difficult to learn by the way.

Answer 3

I recommend Korean as it is much, much easier to write. More, the alphabet is phonetic and you can learn how to pronounce any written character in a very short time because there are only 14 written symbols to learn. Learning hiragana and katakana takes longer though that isn't really a daunting task; what is extremely difficult is the kanji. Pronunciation of Korean will be slightly harder for those from a Spanish background but in comparison with the ease in using the Korean han-geul alphabet, that seems minor. Korean and Japanese grammar are similar -- a toss-up. Regarding which language is more important globally, neither is anywhere near a lingua franca, obviously, but both have millions of speakers overseas. Koreans perhaps even more than Japan. But Korean has an interesting future in becoming -- after the eventual unification of North and South (but don't hold your breath on that) -- the middle nation between China and Japan. As such, its importance after unification will skyrocket politically and culturally. From the business perspective neither Japanese or Korean is important outside their countries; English is used overseas. Though I respect Japanese culture very much, I think Korean culture (as I have come to understand it in the South) is quite a bit deeper and wider. The Korean national dynamic is also far more complex (and interesting?) than that of Japan because of the division between North and South; at this time North Korea is almost hermically sealed shut but in the future it is bound to open up. At that point a knowledge of Korean could possibly open doors for Westerners to accomplish some significant service. None of this is to say anything negative against Japan, just that I think Korea has a brighter and more dynamic future.

Answer 4

In my own opinion, english is the easiest language to learn... Coz i've been learning it for almost 16 years. And it's our second language here. THe most difficult language maybe is German or Hungarian! Good day. Buenos dias.

Answer 5

Easiest to me is/was German. Hardest other than Chinese would be Arabic and Russian.

Answer 6

Hardest: any Oriental language involving too many characters or really any language with a non-standard (Latin) alphabet. This includes Arabic, all Oriental languages, any middle eastern language, russian, etc.
Easiest: Norwegian (for me): has same sentence structure, easily followable grammatical rules. Really any language that shares a common alphabet is a lot easier to learn.

Answer 7

The easiest I think would be English, and the hardest I have ever come in contact with is Thai

Answer 8

At my age, I'm still in School, but for our Foreign language, I'd have to say German is the hardest, and Spanish is the Easiest!!

Answer 9

For an American, probably Dutch or German, easiest, and IMO, Chinese is the hardest.

Answer 10

The easy is the one you want to learn. English is the easiest one for me and Spanish the harder, because of the male and female meaning. In English you say "noon", in Spanish " las doce del medio dia". All dose learn English courses they just teach you a lesson to watch your pocket.