“English and Spanish is the easiest language, I don’t know how people finds them hard. For me Russian and Chinese are tongue twister. Hired some Chinese writing tutor almost six months ago but still couldn’t spell it properly.
https://plus.google.com/108183226179691657670/”
Remind me not to pay for the C2 English course you are selling. That is unless that link is totally unrelated to your post.
Doing it all by your-self Russian is definitely the hardest for me. With Latin in my back-pack French, Italian and German were pieces of cake - and knowing Italian and French Spanish comes easily. If you were in the country (Russia for me) it would be so much easier, however, sitting here all by myself listening, repeating and reading there’s a long way to go! Yet it is a lot of fun!
Vietnemese fascinates me. It is totally rough and beautiful sounding at the same time. Difficult to explain. I much prefer the sound of it to that of Chinese. Will learn one day.
I’d agree with your assesment on English and Spanish. I communicate with beginners in English on a daily basis, and I can tell that a small vocabulary can get you really far since the grammar needed for a simple conversation is really noncomplex.
I started learning Spanish a couple weeks ago and I can already ask questions to my professor entirely in spanish, and understand her response. I am expecting that my accent in Spanish will be better than mine in French by the end of this year, although my vocabulary and grammar knowledge will remain really limited.
I have never studied Spanish before, however, I can understand at least 50% of what is being said/written, this is because Portuguese/Spanish are very similar. Whereas English, I have some difficulties, mainly because the sentence structure is a bit different from Portuguese. So, I think the more the languages are similar to each other the more it’s easy to learn that language.
@ djvlbass
Who are these beginners that you communicate with? Are they genuinely beginners in the same way that you would be a beginner if you started learning Vietnamese, or are they people who have never really tried talking English but have had a massive amount of expose to English and a large passive knowledge?
I think the easiness of English is often exaggerated. For sure it is easier than most languages, and probably all of the main world languages, but not nearly as easy as some people say. I think a lot of people think English is a lot easier than it is because they get a lot of expose to it over a long period of time without really trying to learn it, and then when they try to learn it, they find it easy. In Austria, I often get given completely absurd stories about how people learned English. Things like this:
“I didn’t know any English until I was 16 and then I learned all my English at the two week summer camp. It was hard to speak when I first arrived, but by the end, I found it difficult to switch back to German.”
@Colin
I am mostly speaking about the low wage immigrant workers in my area. They generally don’t have the funds or time to study English, but they tend to communicate with their customer at least somewhat effectively.
I can remember speaking to one foreign student, from Vietnam as a matter of fact, who said that he crammed English for a year before coming to the US and taking the TOEFL. Maybe he had years of English classes behind him, but that story and yours at least indicates that English is helluva an easy language to activate. I know a guy from the Republic of Congo, and his English is on near native level after a couple years, despite never having a real education at home.
Iri’s phrase of ‘English is an easy language to speak badly’ is pretty accurate, in my opinon. Yesterday in my economics class I was sitting next to a girl from Lebanon. When she speaks, she has an accent but her grammar seems to me mostly solid. I read her notes while she was writing them, and she did not add the ‘s’ for any verb’s third person plural form.
To be fair, getting verb conjugation is a pretty basic mistake. Personally, I wouldn’t call her grammar “solid” but we all have different definitions of solid.
There are a LOT of indoeuropean speakers that reach an advanced level of English in relatively short time but I don’t know many people that speak nearly as well as a native. I.E, it’s darn hard to speak well. In my life I’ve met one non-native speaker that speaks better English than me, an Indian guy that was so erudite and well-spoken that me made me seem like a blubbering, slobbering orangutan.
@narzipan
I can read books with basic understanding of subject. I do not understand a lot of words and I use dictionary when it’s needed.
Since the first day of my studies I was reading Graded Readers WITHOUT understanding anything. I just tried to get used to the language and stuff. Right now I study German 4-5 weeks, it is going even better. Everyday I listen to music, watch movies and try to read “Harry Potter” in German even if I don’t understand deeper meaning of sentences. German is with me almost whole time even when I am not studying with a course book. I am just trying to live the language, but I do really need soembody that I can practice conversations with, because my oral skills are the weakest and not because of pronounciation (that is ok) but because of my sentence making.
Well firstly we must think at the fact that there can’t be such a thing like ‘‘the hardest language’’ because there are several criteria for which we can analyse a language and there is no language which is the toughest in all of them.
I believe that it would’ve been better if you asked ‘‘which is the most difficult language to learn for you’’.
@MADARA
If you haven’t seen the title says “What language is the hardest FOR YOU”
I know that we can’t call one language “the hardest” that’s why I clearly wrote in the first post that I want to know what language is the hardest for YOU as people on this forum or site or whatever.
Maybe I should write in the title “to learn” but I think most people understand what I mean 
@lestry: I can’t really say that you’re wrong but one can interpret what I was saying .People tend to ignore the implicit meaning sometimes ( I also do that ) .
Minion language
@MADARA
It’s ok, I understand what you mean.
German, in my case, because as an American making previous studies only of Spanish and French, German is the language with the most fluctuations in every sentence. People say that English has much in common with German, but in reality if I want to speak in a way that gives pleasure to the natives, my brain simply must do new things.