easiest language to learn?

Nothing is hard if you have motivation.
I live in Germany.
Of course the German language is not easy.
I appeal to you to read Mark Twain's essay about German language.
Good luck

wow, a good read but Twain sure makes it seem like a bitch of a language to learn... damn.. I am required to learn a language for my degree and I don't want to do Spanish. I'll think about it some more I guess

It's easiest to learn a language with a similar if not identical alphabet to what you currently use. So, if you know English, then French (for example), is easier than Japanese. After having said that, I'd say to go for something which (I'm assuming English is your first language) English is based on. Lots of languages fit the bill, some more than others. But the main ones are German, French and Latin. Latin is tough because of a lot of different cases.

I've taken both French and Spanish, plus I had Hebrew for religious instruction. Hebrew was the hardest by far. Between Spanish and French it was kind of six of one, half a dozen of the other. Spanish was easier to pronounce (except for the rolling r, which I've never mastered), but it had a lot of verb tenses. French had more exceptions to its rules and was more difficult to spell.

I took four years of latin in high school. This makes me pretty good at crossword puzzles and plant names, thousands of which I memorized decades later.

I enjoyed german the semester I took it at university, and only stopped because I was always late for class, having to run, literally, across campus to get there and had enough on my plate already.

I only studied spanish a bit on my own, and forget most of that at this point, but wish I had perservered.

Studied italian in my middle age, loved every second of it. I wouldn't say it was easy - it gets complicated. But I didn't get that far in german or spanish, so can't make a comparison.

On french, I'd die happy if I could just figure out how to pronounce it.

It sounds a lot like "trench" only with an f in front.

Glad I could help.







( :wink: sorry, I couldn't resist!)

I took French in high school (mandatory then, 5 years) and in university (2 years, but it was literature), German for one semester in university (was doing well but had a horrible teacher), Italian for a couple of years, Spanish for a couple, then Greek when I was there for 2 months.

In Spanish you pronounce every letter, so no surprises there (unlike the silent 's' at the end of French words). You also don't need pronouns much because the verb conjugations indicate this (although so do French and Italian, so go figure), Greek was relatively easy, too.

I'd say any of those Romance languages would be a good bet. I heard Hungarian was the toughest. If you don't want Spanish, maybe Italian? It's pretty close to Spanish in many ways.

All three have the same format for verb conjugation, and all three have the same irregular verbs, so once you learn one, it's just memorization of the others.

I think I am going to stick with German. Thanks for the replies everyone

Jawohl, mach das!!

If languages were converted to objects, French would be a Steinway, Spanish a brass band, and German a rusty machete.

, and English?....

Don't listen to gustav, there is always WD-40

I decided to learn French instead.

The easiest language
I would say Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia), simply because most foreign learners recognise words derived from Portuguese, Dutch, English, Hindi, Arabic, Chinese and so on. Its spelling is phonetic and there are no complicated tenses as in Western European languages, you just add "telah/sudah" for past/perfect tenses, "sedang" for the continuous, and "akan" for the future. It would be an ideal world language, though I always wonder what happened to Esperanto...
I've studied quite a few languages, and they all have their peculiarities. It's almost impossible to master English idiom and literary references in one lifetime, French is spoken at breakneck speed, German and Dutch are too guttural, and Portuguese and Russian so sensual you fail to grasp their meaning. Anglo-Norman was a beautiful language that has vanished into thin air. The ugliest language by far is BritneySpeak, you know, it's like, gee I dunno.

Re: easiest language to learn?


I took German for 5 years from grades 8-12.

German spelling is fairly regular, much more so than English is so it's easy in this regard.

English has fairly regular rules for forming the plurals of nouns while German has no hard and fast rules and you will need to memorize each noun's plural with its singular form. Your teacher may not require you to do this and will expect you to learn the plurals pretty much by osmosis. This is bad. Memorize the plurals with their singulars.

German nouns have 3 possible genders whereas humans and animals in English have their natural male or female gender and everything else is neuter (it). English has only 1 definite article that is used for nominative, accusative and dative cases for all genders whereas German has a separate article for each gender in each case. Your teacher will require you to memorize the nominative article for every noun, but I would advise you to learn each article in each case as you learn the nouns themselves. Otherwise you will end up memorizing everything all over again as you learn how to use the different cases.

German adjectives have endings depending on the gender and case of the noun they modify. Your teacher will require you to memorize the endings as they are covered in class, but it is better to memorize them as you learn the adjectives. You will likely learn some adjectives as vocabulary words without actually learning the endings which means you will learn these adjectives without actually learning how to use them. You will learn how to use expressions such as "The car is red" but until you learn the endings you won't know how to use expressions such as "I own a red car" or "A red car is parked in my parking space". Furthermore, the English equivalent of a, an, my, your, his, her etcetera are treated like adjectives and have endings but the endings for these indefinite articles and possessive adjectives are not the same as for other adjectives.

How well you learn German verb tenses will depend greatly on how well you have been taught English verb tenses. German verb tenses generally have English style forms. In English you say: I play, I played, I have played. In German you say Ich spiele, Ich spielte, Ich habe gespielt. You can use any English tense in both speaking and writing, but German has tenses for writing that are not used in speaking and tenses for speaking that aren't used in writing. This distinction of writing and speaking is more important in German than the progression of tenses is in English. German tenses don't express definite times the way English tenses do and you will have to a sentence's context to determine exactly when the verb's action takes place. But at any rate what you need to do to start with is to memorize each verb's infinitive, past tense form and past participle at the same time. Otherwise you will end up having to memorize different forms of vocabulary words that you have already memorized.

i and a group of older students - we were all in our early to mid twenties - needed a second foreign language (took english since public school) to graduate from an accelerated two-year (commercial) high school program .
the teaching staff decided that spanish would be the best choice .
i found spanish relatively easy to learn .
while i have had little need to use spanish , it has helped me when on vacation in some european and south-american countries .

we had a great spanish language teacher who had been an instructor in the german language for spanish officers at one time . he told us that the spanish officers told him that the german language sounded like a hundred dogs barking :wink: (he said that the spanish kept praising the german language until some evening when they all had had too much wine ... and the truth came out ) .
hbg