What is the easiest language to learn?

[Helpful Tech Witch]

11 hours 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.

hm... ive found german to make more sense than english (seems to have less exceptions to rules)

[Wictorian]

1 minute ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

hm... ive found german to make more sense than english (seems to have less exceptions to rules)

What is your native language?

[Helpful Tech Witch]

Just now, Wictorian said:

What is your native language?

english. As someone going into highschool i can positivly say that the rules only take effect half the time.

Which may be why english is my least favourite class.... but thats unrelated.

[Vishera]

Despite English being part of the Germanic languages,a lot of it is originated from Latin:

Latin = Lingua | English = Language

Latin = Populus | English = People

Latin = Libertatem | English = Liberty

Latin = Virus | English = Virus 

Etc.

 

Anyway,Latin languages are easier for me to speak.

German is very difficult for me to learn 

[Laborant]

Leaving apart the completely different writing scheme, I have found Japanese fairly straight forward to learn. To my knowledge, Japanese even shares some grammatical traits with Turkish (so that some linguists tried to find any reason why the grammatical rules are that similar - I do not know Turkish tho).

I have learned Japanese for about 4-5 years before going for a vacation lasting roughly a month. But - as it is with every language, you will forget it whenever you don't use it frequently enough. 

 

Spoken Japanese is not that difficult. Written? Well, that's another story

 

A difficulty in Japanese tho is not really the language itself, but the embedded culture, the many levels of respect built into it and to not greet a professor the same way as you'd greet an employee at a fast food chain.

 

German - my main language - might be quite difficult, especially because of the different cases (yes, yes... 4 cases is less harsh than the 14(?) in Finnish) changing pronouns in a weird way. (The Kitchen: "Die Küche" -> In the kitchen: "In der Küche" ("die" is generally the female "the" and "der" is the male "the" - to a learner this might appear like word "Küche" changes its gender).

English on the other hand appears to me like being complete gibberish with the rules being defined by a drunk maniac. But I start to get comfortable with English, as I use it on a daily basis. (But most of my communication peers are also not native speakers - but Czech, Turkish, Italian and sometimes even French people talk English. Therefore; I do not have anyone correcting me.)

[Wictorian]

Just now, HelpfulTechWizard said:

english. As someone going into highschool i can positivly say that the rules only take effect half the time.

Which may be why english is my least favourite class.... but thats unrelated.

Yeah others have stated that German is easy to learn for one whom native language is English. But I don't really think you can compare it with English because you didn't really learn English. Yes maybe it makes more sense, 

 

7 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Despite English being part of the Germanic languages,a lot of it is originated from Latin:

Latin = Lingua | English = Language

Latin = Populus | English = People

Latin = Libertatem | English = Liberty

Latin = Virus | English = Virus 

Etc.

 

Anyway,Latin languages are easier for me to speak.

German is very difficult for me to learn 

 

7 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Despite English being part of the Germanic languages,a lot of it is originated from Latin:

Latin = Lingua | English = Language

Latin = Populus | English = People

Latin = Libertatem | English = Liberty

Latin = Virus | English = Virus 

Etc.

 

Anyway,Latin languages are easier for me to speak.

German is very difficult for me to learn 

Part of many languages originated from latin.

[Wictorian]

12 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. Also it's a merging of many other languages, so it's at minimum harder than those languages it came from by mixing

It doesn't really matter. Maybe it is somewhat hard to speak English 100% correctly, most people don't anyways. English is very easy at a beginner level. Also it is gender neutral. You wouldn't realise how easy English is to learn if it is your native language.

[Wictorian]

12 hours ago, Kylan275 said:

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. 

Perhaps as you stated grammar and system of vern conjunction and noun cases are big factors on how easy it is to learn a language. I think English is objectively one of the easiest languages to learn if not the easiest. I think English is very easy to learn if you know the latin alphabet. Also yeah some words are hard to spell, for instance psychologist is hard to spell for me.

[Wictorian]

11 hours ago, tikker said:

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.

Yeah I was really interested in English and it helped a lot. But really where does English have exceptions? 

[Spindel]

As a swede I say norwegian.

[Wictorian]

4 minutes ago, Spindel said:

As a swede I say norwegian.

Well what about Swedish? Actually I'm very interested in Sweden and Swedish but I really hate non gender neutral languages...

[it_dont_work]

1 hour ago, Vishera said:

Despite English being part of the Germanic languages,a lot of it is originated from Latin:

Latin = Lingua | English = Language

Latin = Populus | English = People

Latin = Libertatem | English = Liberty

Latin = Virus | English = Virus 

Etc.

 

Anyway,Latin languages are easier for me to speak.

German is very difficult for me to learn 

Words aren't really at the core of a language in this sense. Latin sentence structure is quite different to english which follows mostly a germanic sentence structure and grammatical structures 

 

just word order, english is rigidly subject-verb-object, where latin is subject-object-verb some of the time. Atleast classical latin its been a while since I last studied latin 

[Spindel]

19 minutes ago, Wictorian said:

Well what about Swedish? Actually I'm very interested in Sweden and Swedish but I really hate non gender neutral languages...

I have a hard time saying if it is easy or hard.

 

We have somethings that might be hard for people learning the language.

 

Most obvious in spoken language is that for some words the "melody" (in lack of the prober word to describe this) of a word changes it's meaning. The differences are very subtle but to a native speaker distinct. 

 

An example: 

Tomten = the gnome (or leprechaun or what ever small fairy tale/folke lore creature living on a farm)

Tomten = a small plot of land/property

 

Another example:

Malen = the moth or the cat fish (same word meaning depends on context)

Malen = ground (as the ground wheat or ground coffey beans)

 

An example with "newer" words:

Banan = banana

Banan = the trajectory or the track etc

 

All of the examples are very subtle melody changes when pronounced that changes the meaning quiet a lot. But still subtle enough that most non native speakers get them wrong all the time both when they talk and when they listen to someone else speak.

 

But just reading I would doubt that swedish is much harder to learn than german or english (if we look away from the fact that popular culture is saturated by english and thus this might be easier to learn just by the amount of exposure you get to that language). 

 

Also for the love of god english speakers on the internet do not substitute ÅÄÖ with AAO when trying to pronounce swedish words. You will get closer (but still not quiet there) sound wise if you thing Å = AA, Ä = AE, Ö = OE   

[Eigenvektor]

9 hours ago, whm1974 said:

No he said 10.

As the joke goes: There's 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.

[Radium_Angel]

4 hours ago, WereCatf said:

Try learning Finnish.

That's a piece of cake. Just put a bunch of marbles in your mouth and take LSD. 

 

Many years ago I had a lawyer client, and one day she was on the phone talking with her husband in a language I couldn't pin down.

I enjoy trying to figure out what people speak that's non-english, so I listened in. I hear touches of German, some Dutch, maybe a bit of French, but every time I thought I"d had it figured out, it'd change.

 

I asked her when she got off the phone what she was speaking, because I heard touches of all kinds of languages.

 

Afrikaans. Made total sense then. 

[tikker]

3 hours ago, Wictorian said:

Yeah I was really interested in English and it helped a lot. But really where does English have exceptions? 

It's been long since I've had actual classes in English, so most of my knowledge is now based on feel rather than knowing the detailed rules behind it. A couple things I think make English hard are word order, irregular plural forms   and verbs, the infamous "whom" (just for fun) and just tons of grammar rules and of course the whole British vs American English. One of the reasons English is relatively easy to pick up is because it is everywhere and practically impossible to avoid nowadays, so you get lots of exposure. I remember the actual grammar and such not being much fun in school at the time though.

[Jtalk4456]

4 hours ago, Wictorian said:

It doesn't really matter. Maybe it is somewhat hard to speak English 100% correctly, most people don't anyways. English is very easy at a beginner level. Also it is gender neutral. You wouldn't realise how easy English is to learn if it is your native language.

As a native speaker I know first hand that there's parts of english I still don't fully comprehend and it has been well known as the hardest language due to exceptions. I very easily realize because I am a native speaker. 

 

4 hours ago, Wictorian said:

Yeah I was really interested in English and it helped a lot. But really where does English have exceptions? 

The better question is where doesn't it.
https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/vs/a-vs-an-basic-rules-and-exceptions.html
We can't even be consistent with plurals, let alone i before e

[sub68]

16 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

Binary.

Only 10 characters 

01101111 01110111 01101111 00001010

[Radium_Angel]

2 minutes ago, sub68 said:

01101111 01110111 01101111 00001010

01000001 01110111 00100000 01100011 00100111 01101101 01101111 01101110 00101100 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01100010 01100001 01100100 00100001 00001010 00001010

[tikker]

5 hours ago, Wictorian said:

but I really hate non gender neutral languages...

Might I ask as to why you hate them?

[sub68]

3 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

01000001 01110111 00100000 01100011 00100111 01101101 01101111 01101110 00101100 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01100010 01100001 01100100 00100001 00001010 00001010

01101001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01100010 01100001 01100100 00100000 01001001 00100000 01101010 01110101 01110011 01110100 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100100 00100000 01101111 01110111 01101111 00100000 01100011 01100001 01110101 01110011 01100101 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101101 01100101 01101101 01100101 00101110 00001010 01000010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01001001 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01100110 01101001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110110 01101001 01100100 01100101 01101111 00101110

[sub68]

Any programing language.

Why cause it can be easily translated by different people in different countries.

BAAM

[XGoodGuyFitz]

2 minutes ago, sub68 said:

Any programing language.

Why cause it can be easily translated by different people in different countries.

BAAM

This is big brain. 

[XGoodGuyFitz]

Just now, Benji said:

Wrong, because they're commonly illogical and sometimes give you illogical error messages that you just don't have with real languages, and people can think, meaning such things are not an issue with spoken languages. SDKs don't think and thus just give you generic error messages which may be hard to look behind should you have forgotten a simple sign.

In my opinion they're not easier at all.

yea the one he put previously translated into The brown  jumped over 13

[sub68]

1 minute ago, Benji said:

In my opinion they're not easier at all.

*laughs in python*

Ok, its frustrating if you don't know how to spell but since people program all over the world I beg to differ

1 minute ago, XGoodGuyFitz said:

This is big brain. 

I know and that's why I said it.