I'd like to know what is the easiest languages to learn for english speakers. Is more easy to learn Spanish or German or French or Chinise? I just kidding I think Chinise and Arabic languages are the hardest to learn Regardless where are your from! or What do you think ?
for example, for Spanish Speakers is easy to learn or understand portugues or italian beyond that sometimes I can understand to portugues speakers and I don't speak portugues
It’s a good question and one often debated. The American Defense Language Institute (DFI) in California has a Ranking System of 1-5, each number representing a category of difficulty in learning a language for native English speakers, 1 being the „easiest“ and 5 the most difficult. The categories rank hours needed to be invested to learn the language to fluency. But, these are all vague and rather meaningless phrases. What do you mean by „fluency“, for example? What do you mean by „difficulty?“ All this is hard to define. Linguists would probably say these phrases are linguistically meaningless and don’t mean anything. For all it’s worth, the DFI places all the Romance languages in category 1, along with Dutch and Afrikaans. German stands alone in category 2, and in the later categories, 3-5, fall all the rest of the world‘s languages. The Asian languages, like the various Chinese languages, Korean and Japanese are at the extreme end of the spectrum as the most difficult, with Arabic also ranking as highly difficult (Japanese is supposedly the most difficult of all).
It‘s difficult for everyone to learn a foreign language, as a general rule. But, I think Ellie gave the best answer. It all depends on your motivation. If you love a language and the culture and people out of which it arises, learning the language will be easy. It’s just due to self-motivation. If you don’t feel that way, it’s not likely you’re going to learn a particular foreign language at all. Learning German was easy for me. But, in spite of two years of high school Spanish, I don’t think I know a word of Spanish, so for me it’s a difficult language. So, the point is, it’s a highly individual matter. It’s like anything. If you love what you do or study, you’ll just be good at it and it will seem easy to you.
I remember reading somewhere that Norwegian and Swedish are the easiest for English-speakers to learn. Maybe the grammar is similar and a lot of similar words??
But I agree with Ellie - the more motivated you are to learn the language, the easier it will be.
With English you can turn to either Germanic languages or Romance languages and find plenty of connections that make learning a new language easier. I have heard from several sources that Dutch is the easiest language for an English speaker to acquire.
I do agree with Ellie above; interest and enthusiasm really make the difference
Because English absorbed many words from French, it has a lot of words with Latin roots. And so many words are similar to those languages that came from Latin.
I am learning Mandarin and I don't find it to be very difficult.
