Dutch doesn’t seem easy to me. Hard to hear, hard to pronounce, and it is difficult to get the word order right. At least for me. (just had to throw in my two cents)
@mlee615
It’s not that people are saying that learning Dutch is easy in itself, or even that Dutch is especially simple. It’s just by comparison to other learning certain other languages (Navajo anyone ?) , as a native english speaker, it’s not quite so different / hard.
@mlee615
I totally agree with you. I think it should be put on the chart as one of the hardest languages
Japanese and Mandarin are easier for me than European languages. I like the sound better, I like the people better, and the characters are beautiful. I can’t get my mouth around European accents, and can’t roll an ‘r’ to save my life:)
english
THe easiest language is of course for everybody his\her own language
Fir me - Russian, for English people - English, for German people - German.
It is because our first language acquisition is a gradual and imperceptible process.
The second easiest language could be for you the language that is close to your own language.
For French people it is Italian and Spanish, for German is Dutch and Danish.
For Polish people Czech and Slovac.
For Russian people Ukrainian and Belorussian.
It’s more difficult to say about the English people because they have in the native language the basic words from German language family, but the most more difficult words they have from Latin and French.
And the third easiest language is doubtless for all now English because we meet this language everywhere - in the Internet, on TV etc and because we use it to some extend in our jobs and our purchases.
English is very difficult in spelling, but on the other hand it requires not so much knowledge to make up your own first phrases.
Russian, Belorussian, Polish
Easiest Germanic language = Afrikaans
Easiest Romance language = Spanish (or perhaps Italian?)
Easiest Slavic language = Croatian (or Bulgarian - if that would count as Slavic?)
Easiest Semitic language = Ivriit (i.e. Modern Hebrew)
Easiest non-Indo-European language = Indonesian
(Thus my 5 cents :-D)
Bulgarian’s totally Slavic : )
@Jay
I’d definetly rate Spanish as easier than Italian. Only slightly though. All them extra articles can get on a beginner’s nerve ;p
I’d definetly rate Modern Hebrew the same as you. According to Wikipedia there is a lot of support for the idea that it is more Indo-European (in this case slavic) than Semitic.
I want to know what is the easiest Sino-Tibetan language. I’m guessing Mandarin just because of the wealth of learning material.
What would be the easiest Altaic language? Turkish? It seems to me that the vocabulary would be the most similar to ours.
Really? (I don’t know much about it, but I seem to remember hearing it was really more of a hybrid between Slavic and Turkish - the same way that English is a kind of Germanic-Romance hybrid?)
@David
I believe Turkish is (relatively!) easy compared to other agglutinating languages (Finnish, Hungarian, etc?) I’ve always wanted to have a go at learning Turkish or Finnish, but there aren’t all that many good beginner resources out there.
(Mind you, if my life had taken a different turn when I was 26, I might have been with a Finnish woman - and by now complete with Anglo-Finnish kiddies, probably…)
@force_de_frappe
Indeed, there are lots of Turkish words in Bulgarian (and all the South Slavic / Ottoman Empire Balkans), though it’s not as extreme as the Norman French in English. So I’d say it’s still solidly a Slavic language, though being on the fringe geographically of that group it has lost a lot of grammatical features, and gained a lot of verb paradigms that make it a non-typical example of Slavic. I do agree that it would be the easiest one for an English speaker to start with.
@Jay - easiest pidgin English language = Australian:)~
@Julz
I don’t know why you think anyone has a problem with Australian English.
nah, I was just trying to crack a lame joke. I should drink more coffee to wake myself up first:)