Easiest Language To Learn For English Speakers (2023)

FAQs

Easiest Language To Learn For English Speakers? ›

Dutch, Frisian, and German stand as the nearest kin to English, with Frisian holding the strongest resemblance. The syntax, lexicon, and phonetics of both Frisian and English demonstrate their shared lineage.

Dutch, Frisian, and German stand as the nearest kin to English, with Frisian holding the strongest resemblance. The syntax, lexicon, and phonetics of both Frisian and English demonstrate their shared lineage.

French might be the number one obvious choice. English is a Germanic language with huge numbers of Romance loanwords, most of them from French. Spanish is, well, a Romance language to begin with. If you already know English and Spanish, you'll go into French basically knowing every other word.

Since Korean is an East-Asian language, people tend to associate the difficulty with Chinese or Japanese. But, Korean is much easier to learn than other East-Asian languages. Unlike Chinese, Korean is not a tonal language. This means, that regardless of your accent or pronunciation, one tone equals one meaning.

Mandarin Chinese

Interestingly, the hardest language to learn is also the most widely spoken native language in the world. Mandarin Chinese is challenging for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the writing system is extremely difficult for English speakers (and anyone else) accustomed to the Latin alphabet.

Overall, Spanish might be easier than German at the beginning stages, but the two tend to even out in difficulty once learners get to the more advanced stages. German has more complicated grammar rules that need to be mastered early on, but once learners get familiar with them, they find that they're pretty consistent.

If ease and speed is your goal, however, Spanish, French and Portuguese are the best languages to learn because they share the same alphabet and structures as the English language.

Toki pona is probably the simplest language in the world to learn. Its name derives from the English word “talk” and the Esperanto word “bona”, meaning good, so it literally translates to the language of good.

“The easiest to teach is the Londoner accent, or Standard British. I really love teaching more complicated ones like French or Australian, which are hard because most people tend to lean toward British sounds or Irish sounds when trying to master a new accent,” Sammi says.

What's the easiest language for a baby to learn? ›

Despite its prevalence, English is a hard language to learn due to its complex grammar rules, pronunciation variations, and vast vocabulary. English grammar is riddled with exceptions and irregularities, making it difficult to master.

How long does it take to learn Korean fluently? It will take about 1200 hours to reach a high intermediate level. You'll need additional practice, so you may want to double that number to 2400 hours to get towards fluency. That would be about 23 hours of study per week for two years.

1. Chinese — 1.3 Billion Native Speakers. Numbers vary widely — Ethnologue puts the number of native speakers at 1.3 billion native speakers, roughly 900 million of whom speak Mandarin — but there's no doubt it's the most spoken language in the world.

The FSI study states that it takes 24-30 weeks, which is about 600-750 class hours. This estimate is for native English speakers to achieve conversational fluency in Spanish. So, “how long does it take to learn Spanish language”- it should take around 24 weeks as per FSI estimates i.e. 600-750 class hours.

English is by far the most powerful language. It is the dominant language of three G7 nations (USA, UK and Canada), and British legacy has given it a global footprint. It is the world's lingua franca. Mandarin, which ranks second, is only half as potent.

English is a Germanic language and it has more words in common with German than Latin. Although it has been influenced by French language a lot, but the number of words and the grammar is still more German than Latin.

“Lexical similarities” means how many words are identical (or nearly identical) between two languages. For Spanish and French, their lexical similarity is about 75%. In comparison, Spanish and English have a lexical similarity of only 30-50%, and French and English of only 40-50%.

The least similar language to English is also the least similar to every other language. Basque language has about a half dozen dialects and is a language isolate. It belongs to no language family. The English language is part of the Germanic language branch of the Indo-European languages.

For the basics, we are a branch of Germanic, like Dutch (another cousin); Anglo-Saxon is a Germanic language, which means that our basics are closer to German than to Spanish (a Latinate language, not Germanic).