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The Easiest Language for English Speaker | ||
Tags: Difficulty | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| brian91 Senior Member Ireland Joined 5446 days ago 335 posts - 437 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 1 of 39 03 March 2010 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Does anybody know what the easiest language for a native English speaker is? I remember seeing a list of
categories created by the US government. Each language was placed in a category, depending on how difficult they were. I cannot find it now, but it was very interesting. Is it perhaps Afrikaans... or Dutch? Perhaps French or Spanish? I'm sure Esperanto would be easier than any, but I mean natural languages. Not that Esperanto isn't cool. Thanks in advance, Brian, 18 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| GREGORG4000 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5525 days ago 307 posts - 479 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish Studies: Japanese, Korean, Amharic, French | Message 2 of 39 03 March 2010 at 4:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would say German, actually. Because of the combination of lotsa resources and similarity to English. Dutch/Afrikaans are even closer, but has less resources. Frisian and Scots even more so, but seem to have very few resources.
edit: actually there seem to be more Dutch resources than I thought, so maybe Dutch or a Dutch-German tie. Edited by GREGORG4000 on 03 March 2010 at 4:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Walshy Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6944 days ago 335 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German | Message 3 of 39 03 March 2010 at 4:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Materials and difficulty wise, Spanish.
On purely linguistic merit, maybe Indonesian. Edited by Walshy on 03 March 2010 at 4:16pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5383 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 4 of 39 03 March 2010 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would go with Scandinavian languages or Dutch. With Spanish and French as close seconds. While Dutch implies Afrikaans, resources would be a lot harder to find and using it will be much harder.
From French and English, I found Norwegian simpler than Spanish. Out of those languages, the easiest will end up being the one you can most frequently practice and be exposed to. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7158 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 39 03 March 2010 at 4:31pm | IP Logged | ||
That rather famous list is here: http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/learningExpectation s.html I could make a case that Scots is the easiest language for a native speaker of English to learn yet that depends on if we consider Scots to be a language rather than an English dialect. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6274 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 6 of 39 03 March 2010 at 4:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Scots, if treated as a language in its owm right and not an English dialect. If not, then perhaps Afrikaans.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5868 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 8 of 39 03 March 2010 at 6:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think Dutch is easiest. I lived in Germany and tried to learn German without much success. I lived in The Netherlands and succeeded in speaking Dutch, albeit not well as yet. The differences for me are:
1. Dutch is closer to English. 2. Dutch is much more regular. 3. Dutch is easier to learn. 4. I find Dutch easier to pronounce. But I think that the most important factor in "how easy" a learner finds a language to be is how interesting the learner finds the language to be. I personally find The Netherlands, Flanders, Dutch-speaking people, Dutch history and geography, Dutch attitudes and ideas, etc. to be fascinating. That makes most of my learning seem more like an enjoyable hobby than like work. So I think that among several languages that might be relatively easy for English speakers to learn, the specific one that is easiest will be the one with which the learner is the most fascinated and intrigued. As to availability of Dutch resources, I find there is now a huge amount, much more than I can use and absorb. That being said, I feel that the Dutch government and the Dutch public broadcasters, including RNW, are far behind in providing parallel audio and text, and other language learning material. Other countries do it, but for some reason unknown to me, the Dutch have not, despite encouragement to do so. I don't believe many Dutch speakers and their governments think there is as much interest in learning Dutch as there is. They rely on relatively high-priced private language schools and miss easy opportunities to significantly assist people wanting to learn Dutch. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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