What is the easiest language to learn?

[Wictorian]

What is the easiest language to learn? English? My native language is Turkish if that matters.

[mahyar]

well i'd say other middle eastern such as persian and arabic for you

BUT for a native english person i'd say german 

Edited April 28, 2021 by mahyar
grammer

[mahyar]

Just now, Benji said:

You don't happen to mean German? I, as a native speaker, say hard no as it is a rather precise and complex language.

brain fart sorry

as for the language its not a matter of complexity because persian (my native lang) is also very complex but not hard to learn

[Wictorian]

26 minutes ago, Benji said:

 

You don't happen to mean German? I, as a native speaker, say hard no as it is a rather precise and complex language.

Yeah I'm learning German and it's hard. I don't really think that similar languages are easier to learn because apparently English is germanic.

[Wictorian]

21 minutes ago, Grumpy Old Man said:

 

Yeah good point. It should be easy since apes can learn it.

[Wictorian]

33 minutes ago, mahyar said:

well i'd say other middle eastern such as persian and arabic for you

BUT for a native english person i'd say german 

Oh Arabic is really hard and I don't really think it is similar with Turkish. I am never going to learn Arabic. 

[Levent]

2 minutes ago, Wictorian said:

Yeah good point. It should be easy since apes can learn it.

Yeah its much harder than you are expecting. Took some classes in uni, dropped out after a week. Easiest language to learn is most you are subjected to. If you were in China, you would pick up Chinese faster than Arabic or English. Turkish has quite a bit of French words but other than that its quite difficult to learn if you dont have Latin language background.

[Wictorian]

31 minutes ago, Benji said:

I can't give you any pointers because that will depend on the language that you already speak because of the language families. English is a Germanic language, so there will be certain similarities to other languages like Plattdeutsch or even in certain aspects German. Since you're from Turkey (Turkish being a Turkic language), I'd say that Kazakh (besides the obviously Cyrillic alphabet) or Azerbaijani might be easier for you because there will be certain similarities to what you already speak. Let's say you're fluent in French, which is a Romance language. You'll find Latin, Italian and Spanish easier because of the similarities. But English is usually a good pointer because it's ubiquitous, and a factor to how fast and easy you can learn a language is how often you use it and how much you can integrate it into your everyday life. Not to mention that, in a lot of aspects, it is very simple.

You don't happen to mean German? I, as a native speaker, say hard no as it is a rather precise and complex language.

I find similar languages hard to learn because it is easier to mix things up actually. And you can understand almost all Turkic languages that I know of without really knowing them. I think what matters is the compexity and structure of the language, and how well it is engineered. English and German are similar. English is easy to learn, German isn't.

[mahyar]

Just now, Wictorian said:

Oh Arabic is really hard and I don't really think it is similar with Turkish. I am never going to learn Arabic. 

its not THAT hard i know that because we HAVE to learn arabic in school

turkish and arabic are not very similar but a turkish person will have it easier learning arabic but an english person will have a harder time

[whm1974]

4 minutes ago, Wictorian said:

Yeah good point. It should be easy since apes can learn it.

Well Humans are one of the Great Ape Species.

[Wictorian]

2 minutes ago, Levent said:

Yeah its much harder than you are expecting. Took some classes in uni, dropped out after a week. Easiest language to learn is most you are subjected to. If you were in China, you would pick up Chinese faster than Arabic or English. Turkish has quite a bit of French words but other than that its quite difficult to learn if you dont have Latin language background.

Also it doesn't have grammar. It is really ridiculous.

[Levent]

2 minutes ago, Wictorian said:

I find similar languages hard to learn because it is easier to mix things up actually. And you can understand almost all Turkic languages that I know of without really knowing them. I think what matters is the compexity and structure of the language, and how well it is engineered. English and German are similar. English is easy to learn, German isn't.

Again, you are wrong here. You can only understand Azeri. You wont understand anything if you were to hear Kazakh spoken.

[Wictorian]

2 minutes ago, Levent said:

Again, you are wrong here. You can only understand Azeri. You wont understand anything if you were to hear Kazakh spoken.

Tbh you can't really understand Azeri too. But you can somewhat understand many languages.

[Levent]

Just now, Wictorian said:

Tbh you can't really understand Azeri too. But you can somewhat understand many languages.

Yeah I misquoted you there. Basic communication does not require any vocal or written communication.

[Jtalk4456]

59 minutes ago, Wictorian said:

What is the easiest language to learn? English? My native language is Turkish if that matters.

english is one of the hardest to learn because every grammatical or spelling rule has an exception somewhere. Nothing is consistent. Also it's a merging of many other languages, so it's at minimum harder than those languages it came from by mixing

[Guest]

English is difficult because of its complicated orthography and pronunciation and various irregularities, but grammatically it's fairly simple. No complex system of verb conjugation or noun cases. Others are right that it definitely depends on the languages you know as languages more similar to your own will be easier to learn than ones that are vastly different. 

[tikker]

26 minutes ago, Jtalk4456 said:

english is one of the hardest to learn because every grammatical or spelling rule has an exception somewhere. Nothing is consistent. Also it's a merging of many other languages, so it's at minimum harder than those languages it came from by mixing

Reminds me of the joke that English has more exceptions than rules.

 

As others have touched on, it helps if you have a genuine use or interest in the language, for example, consuming content in that language, planning to move to that country, or to if you interact often with people speaking it. Pretty much anything will be hard and fade without practise, languages perhaps even more so. I, for example, haven't touched ancient Greek for years now and have all but forgotten it. It's not like it is new anymore, but it'll take a good amount of retraining if I want to get back into translating texts again.

[Radium_Angel]

Binary.

Only 10 characters 

[whm1974]

2 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

Binary.

Only 10 characters 

Binary only has two, 0 then 1.

[whm1974]

1 minute ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

That's what he said. 

No he said 10.

[Radium_Angel]

14 minutes ago, whm1974 said:

No he said 10.

which is "2" in binary....

[CommanderAlex]

9 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

which is "2" in binary....

Or hexadecimal!!!

3 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

You mean one of these?

e.g. verb "to be" (one of them, in pt-br)
 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Man I remember doing Spanish in HS and learning that...so many different ways. 

 

 

[XGoodGuyFitz]

4 hours ago, mahyar said:

well i'd say other middle eastern such as persian and arabic for you

BUT for a native english person i'd say german 

how difficult would it be to speak mandarin?

[Wictorian]

4 hours ago, XGoodGuyFitz said:

how difficult would it be to speak mandarin?

I don't know if it has a different symbol for every word but if it doesn't I guess not extremely difficult. I am actually interested in learning mandarin because as far as I know it is gender neutral and I don't really wanna learn a non-gender neutral language and there are not many of them.

[WereCatf]

10 hours ago, Jtalk4456 said:

english is one of the hardest to learn because every grammatical or spelling rule has an exception somewhere. Nothing is consistent.

Try learning Finnish. You'll very quickly find out that English ain't even remotely difficult compared to that.