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What language did you find easiest? | ||
Tags: Easiness | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| ling Diglot Groupie Taiwan Joined 4585 days ago 61 posts - 94 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Indonesian, Thai | Message 17 of 66 03 February 2015 at 11:05am | IP Logged | |||||
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In order from easiest to hardest:
Indonesian Thai Chinese Spanish German/French 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lumisade Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 3584 days ago 3 posts - 6 votes Studies: Polish, German*, English Studies: French, Dutch, Norwegian, Esperanto | Message 18 of 66 03 February 2015 at 11:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For me it's Dutch. I speak German and English so I decided to start learning Dutch three
months ago. I didn't expect anything, I had no real goal I wanted to reach, I just wanted to see how far I come. Actually I only started because I wanted to take a Duolingo course and Dutch was the only language there I didn't know at all. So... now I'm quite far in the course (I take 1-2 lessons every day), I watch Dutch TV shows and read some websites in Dutch and I have to say that this is the most fun I ever had learning a language. The grammar is easier than German, I already understand quite a lot without looking up words. And of course the sound of the language is just very nice! I don't focus on Dutch 100%, but whenever I get a bit frustrated with my Norwegian, I go back to Dutch because I actually never get frustrated with Dutch. I feel I make progress every day and that's just a great feeling. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| RogerK Triglot Groupie Austria Joined 5074 days ago 92 posts - 181 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian Studies: Portuguese | Message 19 of 66 04 February 2015 at 12:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I must be a complete idiot. Am I the only one who doesn't find language learning EASY??? I would say some languages may be less difficult because of parallels or similarities to another language one may know. However you still have to recognise, know and then use the slight differences which exist between two similar languages. For example I understand quite a lot of Dutch because my German is quite good but if I were to actually learn or study it, I would need to learn the differences and not use a purely German word instead of the different Dutch word. And that would take time, I would make mistakes and stumble along the way. Therefore I would not say it were easy, perhaps much less difficult than it was to learn German.
It took me many years of listening, talking, reading and writing before I had 'mastered' English and I was born in Australia and brought up in a household in which only English was spoken. Was English EASY to learn? I dare say, "not". I envy all of you who find certain languages easy to learn. Unfortunately for me some are more difficult or less difficult. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 20 of 66 04 February 2015 at 12:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
Less difficult = easier More difficult = less easy Everything is relative. We're comparing languages to languages here. Learning a related language is easy when compared to learning an unrelated one. That doesn't say anything about how easy learning a related language is when compared to boiling an egg or learning to draw a stick figure. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| RogerK Triglot Groupie Austria Joined 5074 days ago 92 posts - 181 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian Studies: Portuguese | Message 21 of 66 04 February 2015 at 1:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
What I don't understand is how anyone can say learning language X is esay, relative or not. In my dictionary the definition of easy is: not difficult, done or obtained withour great effort. Difficult on the other hand is: needing much effort or skill, not easy, perplexing, troublesome. Speaking, writing, listening and understanding a foreign language requires much effort and is a skill to be proud of. There are false friends among languages which makes them troublesome and certainly not easy. So I stand by my point when comparing languages that one language may be less difficult than another but one will never be easy. Remember ease is without effort. I would like to meet the person who can learn any language without effort. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| solocricket Tetraglot Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3675 days ago 68 posts - 106 votes Speaks: English*, French, Italian, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Icelandic, Korean, Polish | Message 22 of 66 04 February 2015 at 1:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Spanish was easiest for me, since I already had French and I knew what I was doing. When
I started learning Spanish seriously, I could already get the gist of Spanish language articles. Progress seemed and still seems to be a matter of figuring things out rather than utter confusion. For languages like Polish and Icelandic, I expend a lot more effort in learning new grammar concepts and vocabulary. Spanish was and is, for me, simply a matter of putting the time in. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 23 of 66 04 February 2015 at 2:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't know about "without effort", but I know a lot of people who have learned languages "without toil". :) Anyway, I'd consider learning languages to be easy, though it sure takes a lot of time. Once I realized how to learn, or rather, how my brain picks up a language, I've found that by simply applying some techniques in a methodical fashion, my brain will acquire the language over (a long period of) time. And most of the language learning process, as I do it, consists of reading books with a popup dictionary and watching movies and TV series. I really don't find the process at all difficult or effortful, only time-consuming. I don't think that I could ever, given enough proper resources, fail to learn a language. Of course, in high school French I found it dificult and discouraging and toiled for years without results, but that's because I didn't know how to learn. As I see it, any language learning product that tells you you can "learn Spanish in three weeks" is cow dung, but when Assimil tells you you can learn Spanish "without toil", that's not untrue. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 24 of 66 04 February 2015 at 2:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
Without great effort, not without any effort. Think of physical activity. Would you call walking an easy exercise for a healthy person? (If not, why?) It's certainly not as effortless as lying on the sofa, but is it difficult? Or heck, anything we do takes at least some effort. We just don't tend to notice most of this effort unless we get some sort of health issue. And we already have tons of threads explaining that no language is a walk in the park. Edited by Serpent on 04 February 2015 at 2:42pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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