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What are the easiest languages to learn? | ||
Tags: Easiness | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Bohy Newbie Australia Joined 6616 days ago 10 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English | Message 1 of 58 05 October 2012 at 12:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I know this question does not really have a straight forward answer, because so much depends on what your first language is and what aspect of language learning you find the easiest, but I am going to ask any way.
From a neutral beginning point, what do you think would be the easiest language to learn? The reason I am asking this is because, no matter what way I look at it, out of the language that I have looked into, it seems to me that Persian is considerably easier than other languages. I mean, there is no gender, there are no cases (?), conjugation is easy, and sentence structure is rather logical (ok, maybe I am biased because it is my native tongue, but I cannot see any objective measure that would make it a difficult language). The only difficulty I can imagine is spelling in Persian can be somewhat annoying with all the different letters which sound exactly the same. The only difficulty for an English speaker would be acquiring vocabulary and perhaps getting used to a couple of new consonants, and that is about it. So yes, are there any other languages that are equally straight forward? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5059 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes  Speaks: Russian* | Message 2 of 58 05 October 2012 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The closest to your mothertongue or to languages you know.
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| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6662 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 3 of 58 05 October 2012 at 12:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Toki pona?
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5535 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 58 05 October 2012 at 1:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For English speakers? Probably the following:
Lowland Scots. It's not exactly English, as you can see from this version of the 23rd Psalm (found here), but it's close:
For a less extreme example, mixed with standard English, see Robert Burns' classic poem To a Mouse. Esperanto. Nice and regular, and it has an interesting community. French, Spanish and other Romance languages. French looks hard at first, because the pronunciation is tricky. But it shares a truly enormous amount of vocabulary with English, and even a great number of idioms, because English is a Germanic language that was profoundly influenced by French. Spanish shares a little less with English, but the pronunciation and spelling are simpler. After that, the major European languages are the easiest. There's a list of language difficulty as rated by the US Foreign Service Institute that would give you a general idea.
In my very limited experience, if a language has no noun cases, it will generally have a huge list of prepositions that are almost as bad. Sure, Latin's ablative is annoying, but so is sorting out French's en versus dans, à versus de, and so on. If a language has very simple verb conjugations (like English, arguably), it will make up for it elsewhere: complicated modals, or phrasal verbs, or lots of idiomatic phrasings built out of small words. Highly analytic languages certainly look easier than highly fusional ones, but I think it's ultimately a matter of how much vocabulary and structure the language shares with one you already speak well. Edited by emk on 05 October 2012 at 1:28pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5265 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 5 of 58 05 October 2012 at 1:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The perspective of "it's easier to learn a language that's most closely related to your own", leaves out one very important human factor, passion. Language ratings as to difficulty are accurate for those who want to learn those languages, but if FSI says I can learn French in (say) nine months and I don't want to learn French, then it may as well be nine years. If I have a burning desire to learn Mandarin, it will be easier for me to learn than French regardless of the similarities to my native language or other languages I already know. If my hypothetical passion to learn French were the same as my hypothetical passion to learn Mandarin then of course French would be easier to learn because of its greater similarity.
A stark scientific analysis of languages doesn't account for the intangible. How much do you really want to learn language "x". That's what gets me through the rough spots. Edited by iguanamon on 05 October 2012 at 2:04pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5059 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 6 of 58 05 October 2012 at 2:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Japanese is the most difficult language for native English speakers according to FSI.
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| Bohy Newbie Australia Joined 6616 days ago 10 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English | Message 7 of 58 05 October 2012 at 2:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
Maybe I am not so conscious of these aspects of Persian, because I never had to learn it, but it does not seem to me that the lack of cases in Persian is made up for by bigger list of propositions. Those complications in the verbs do not appear in Persian as far as I can tell. I would actually be interested to know what particular difficulties any non-natives have faced in learning Persian. FSI ranks the language on the same level as Russian. Now I have never tried to learn Russian, but from what I have been hearing about the features of the language, it seems to be far more complicated to learn than Persian would be. I reckon I could teach you Persian grammar in a week. Then it is just vocab... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5059 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 8 of 58 05 October 2012 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
That's certainly an exaggeration. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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