Take your pick. Spanish is one of the most popular languages in the world, and it's the official language of 20 countries. While it's not in the same immediate family as English, the usefulness, practicing opportunities, and similarities make it an easy language to learn. Today, there's a massive economic and population rise of Hispanic communities. From Spanish movies and TV shows to business opportunities, this language is taking the world by a storm.
Italian is another Latin language that fits into a similar box as Spanish. However, there are fewer opportunities to practice given that there are fewer people that are native speakers available. A fun and fulfilling way to learn Italian is through food.
With Italy's cuisine becoming a staple food in our cultures, you can find new opportunities to use the language nearly every day!
Portuguese has become an increasingly important language to learn with the rise of Brazil's economy. Jobs and new opportunities are flocking to this country of South America, along with Portuguese learners. If you know a little bit of Spanish, Portuguese is one of the easiest languages to pick up.
They're so similar that native Portuguese speakers can often understand Spanish speakers without having learned Spanish at all. Oh, the language of love. French is in the Romance language family, but it's not as easy as Spanish or Italian. There are 17 verb forms, compared to the 12 that English has, and gendered nouns. It also gets trickier when you throw silent pronunciation and accents to the table.
With that said, French culture is abundant wherever you go around the world. You can watch popular French movies and TV shows online, find native French speakers, and plenty of job opportunities in France. Believe it or not, Romanian is also a Romance language. Fewer people know this because Romania as a country is not as widely known as Spain, Brazil, or France. If you're not sure which one to choose Duolingo offers 40 languages from around the world!
And what counts as easy when it comes to languages, anyway? In this post, we'll share some ideas about what makes a language easy or hard for different people to learn, so you can decide which language to study next! We're apt to transfer from our first language to the new language -- that can include vocabulary and grammar like saying your new Spanish words in the order you'd say them in English. But we transfer other properties, too, like sounds for spoken languages , handshapes and movements for signed languages , rules about politeness, and concepts and meanings what counts as a "cup" versus a "glass" or "mug"?
Transfer can be helpful if the properties are the same across the languages, but can present a challenge if they differ.
Depending on when and how you learned your languages, your brain might treat your second language as a sort of template for all other languages. If you're learning a third or fourth language, you might actually be more likely to transfer properties of your second language rather than your first!
I confess: I hate learning grammar. My mother tongue has some difficult sounds like interdental th , some phrasal verbs that admittedly make no sense and a spelling system that makes even less sense. With the wealth of English language media on just YouTube and Wikipedia alone, you hardly need to look anywhere else. Some of the languages with the fewest speech sounds are the most remote and grammatically complex. Others entirely lack tenses or cases or inflections of any kind and are riddled with guttural sounds nearly impossible for speakers of most languages to pronounce.
More than anything, it depends on your mother tongue and the languages you already know. And you also must take into account the sociological and international significance of a language: How much media is available in the language, and how many other speakers are there for you to reasonably practice with? The easiest language for a native Spanish speaker to learn will be totally different than the easiest language for a native Vietnamese speaker, and it can even differ vastly between two native English speakers from the same region but who have different learning styles.
With the resources and some of the examples given in this post, you should be able to get started identifying your low-hanging linguistic fruits. What do you find challenging about learning a language?
Is it the new sounds, the grammar rules, finding chances to practice or something else? Jakob is a full-time traveler, obsessive language learner, and dedicated language teacher. He writes about language, travel and the many places they meet on the road at his blog Globalect.
If you dig the idea of learning on your own time from the comfort of your smart device with real-life authentic language content, you'll love using FluentU. With FluentU, you'll learn real languages—as they're spoken by native speakers.
FluentU has a wide variety of videos as you can see here:. FluentU App Browse Screen. The Esperanto community is huge, and active all over the world. I found it a very fulfilling language to learn. It will open up a worldwide community of Esperanto speakers, and expose you to the language-learning process so that your next language will be noticeably easier to learn.
For English speakers, she argues that Afrikaans may be one of the easiest languages. Its simple grammar and similarity to Dutch mean that English speakers can easily grasp the basics. Like myself and many other polyglots, Judith ranks Esperanto as the easiest language to learn for the most number of people worldwide. I took a look on the Fi3M forum and other language-learning websites to find out what language learners like you think.
Here are a few of their responses:. Fun-loving Irish guy, full-time globe trotter and international bestselling author. Benny believes the best approach to language learning is to speak from day one. THIS is how I learn a language in 3 months.
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