I have long been interested in this question. I would like to know what language is best given to people who teach English. Which language is most similar to English?
I’ve heard that Frisian is particularly closely related, but I doubt that anybody will ever consider teaching it just because of that.
More info here: Anglo-Frisian languages - Wikipedia
Thanks for the information. It was very interesting to read. What about the more common languages such as French, Italian or German? Which of these languages are the easiest to teach people who speak English?
I think English is the easiest language to teach to a non-english speaker, especially to a person who speaks an european language (french, italian, spanish, german, dutch, etc.), as English has lots of latin root words (that helps, for example, italian, french, spanish, portuguese) and is an anglo-saxon language yet (that helps, for example, german and dutch people). Moreover, his grammar is semplified, by comparison with the other native european languages.
Coming to your question, I knew that dutch is a half way between german and english… perhaps it would be dutch.
I wonder if someone who knows English and Frisian could just pick up Dutch naturally?
Probably a speaker of Frisian or Dutch is able to pick up the other language by osmosis, while I highly doubt it’s the case with Frisian<->English.
However, relation isn’t everything… I can still “think” in Spanish way easier than in German despite that German is related to both Swedish and English, and that I have spent several hundreds of hours (~400) on German this year (while only a third of it on Spanish).
There are many factors involved… morphology, grammar, how the languages “works”, the amount of international vocabulary, if it “clicks”…
Thank you for your answer. And so I realized that if my native language is Russian (Ukrainian), then for me it makes no difference what language to learn after English. Сemsal, in your profile, I read that your native language Italian. Was it easy to learn English? Is it knowledge of Italian helped you ?
will72694, I think no. Because when the Arabs hear Ukrainian, they think that it is Polish. But in fact, the Ukrainians are not so easy to learn Polish.
I found Korean easier than Russian because of my Japanese and Chinese. Why did the Russians make their language so complicated? Was it deliberate? Something to do during the cold winter?
Russian is difficult not to foreigners only, but for natives too. No, we don’t have problems with speaking Russian, but writing – it is awful. Natives rather often mis-spell when they write… Fortunately, I have so-called “spelling sense”, so I usually spell words correct, although I do a lot of mistakes with all these commas! I can write “the opening” comma, but forget to write “the closing” comma… For all my compositions I usually had “5/4/5” (spelling - 5, punctuation - 4, content - 5; “5” is the excellent mark in Russia). As I see, other languages do not put so many commas in their sentences!
Cakyra, your comment amount is 666 ! Be careful 
Put down another one ! You are write about commas, but we also often use “-” and “:” and I never exectly know which of them I shold use.
German uses more commas than English. I call the unnecessary commas that German students put into their English writing “the German comma”.
Doubtless Rasana has noticed “the English comma” cropping up in my Russian writing!
Ok, ok, Taras Next one :)))
but we also often use “-” and “:” and I never exectly know which of them I shold use.
Oh, yes. “–” is my favourite punctuation mark :)) I put it everywhere. There is a rule that “–” can be placed everywhere, if it is “author’s punctuation”. So, I put it everywhere and call it my author’s mark, but my teacher did never agree with meShe said that I am not Leo Tolstoy to put “author’s punctuation”. Yesterday I created some new content for Russian library, and used one “:”. It seems I used it the first time for last several years. I just remembered one rule and convinced myself to use “:”. Although I wanted to put another one “–” of “author’s punctuation” :)))
Helen,
yes. It seems I always remove commas at English-speakers’ writings in structures “A, B, and C”, and you and other English tutors always put a comma at my writings in “A, B and C” :))
Ah, that one’s called the Oxford comma and is probably not correct (opinions differ). See Serial comma - Wikipedia
Lenka, I don’t think Italian is the best language to learn easily English, because the grammar structure is complex, as in French or in German. Recently I’ve downloaded a podcast which explained that english speaker people are not so good at learning language, maybe because grammar is harder in other european languages.
In Italian for example you have to remember a lot of rules and exception to simply make plurals, while in English you often add an -s or -es at the end of the word (as an Italian this rules and exception are natural for me, but to learn it I don’t think would be simple). Also in German you have a difficult way to make plurals, but I know that in Spanish you can do it in almost the same way as English…
Maybe Spanish could be the easiest language to teach to a english native speaker. What do you think?
I’m a bit skeptical to all this “language A is easier/harder than language B because…”. Plurals, strong verb forms, inflections and so on is really not that big an issue. It just takes time to get the hang of it. Every language has its peculiarities. All the time I hear people say that “Chinese is so easy because you don’t have to conjugate verbs or learn plurals”. Fair enough, but there is still so much that seems ungraspable.
Another thing I just noted in the original post: “what language is best given to people who teach English” - shouldn’t it be “learn” here? Why would any language at all be given to people who teach English? Am I missing something?
I suppose Lenka wanted to know Who is the easiest to teach from the point of English tutors. As jeff_lindgvist described, every language has its peculiarities, so we cannot reach a definite conclusion about the relative difficulties of different languages. I suppose that German people can learn the English language easier than Japanese people, and the easiest to teach.
Another thing I just noted in the original post: “what language is best given to people who teach English” - shouldn’t it be “learn” here?
Jeff, you know that both “to teach” and “to learn” are translated as “учить” into Russian. That’s why Russian speakers quite often at the beginning mix up “to teach” and “to learn”…
I’m a bit skeptical to all this “language A is easier/harder than language B because…”
I agree with you. In my opinion all children have approximately the same abilities. And almost every 4-year-old child can speak his mother tongue quite well. That’s why, I think, all languages have approximately the same difficulty. Yes, one aspect could be harder, but another aspect could be easier.
typo … “I suppose Lenka wanted to know who is the easiest to teach”
Ah, that one’s called the Oxford comma and is probably not correct (opinions differ). See Serial comma - Wikipedia
Thank you, Helen, for the link. Very interesting
“The United States Government Printing Office’s Style Manual
<…>
* “horses, mules, and cattle; but horses and mules and cattle””
In Russian it is “horses, mules and cattle; but horses, and mules, and cattle”! ha-ha :))) Where US English has a comma, we don’t, but where we have a comma, they don’t