Easiest language to learn

Easiest language

English– no cases, no gender, no word agreement, arguably no grammar. The language is everywhere and can be heard, absorbed and used anywhere.  Short words, verbs change only in the third person. Native speakers are very forgiving of mistakes as so many people speak it as a second language. This makes English the easiest foreign language to learn. No tutorials or tutors needed to get off the ground. Just start watching films and listing to music and step out your door and use it, it is in a word,  elementary.

Miscommunication can sometimes be harmlessly funny when language users approximate or literally translate something from their language, especially on a date.

Easy to learn

Italian – No cases, easy clear pronunciation, vocabulary of derivative of Latin, therefore the vocabulary has congruences throughout the Indo-European Latin influenced world.

Spanish – similar to Italian in that the grammar and pronunciation is easy, also ubiquitous, everywhere, but Spanish people talk fast and you can get lost when trying to understand.

German– logical grammar but does have cases and long words as word building is important.

French – sixteen tenses and some grammar twist and a specific pronunciation that makes it a little harder the Spanish.

Esperanto – Although I respect the people who created this, I do not consider this a living language and should not be considered when ranking the Easiest language to learn.

This is in contrast to the hardest language to learn

  • Some languages are just easy and some are hard to learn, that is a fact.

Languages are easy to or difficult dependent on one’s initial native language. However, they also have a range  of how hard they are, based on what the human brain can process. This means some are objectively more complex and others are more basic and go into the human brain easier. Therefore, despite the relative aspect of language learning people argue, we can objectively state which language can be learned without difficulty compared to ones that take more effort. This is the thesis of this post. That is that there is some objective measure that goes beyond your linguistic starting point.

All languages have their challenges but do not focus on the written script as much as the audible component of expression.

Languages have an absolute scale of tediousness depending on the complexities and expectations in:

  • Grammar – Grammar is a nothing more than a ritualistic method of word changing and order. It brings clarity to the sentence if you are a native speaker because you are used to hearing it this way. For example, Slavic languages function without articles while English sentences are sparse on cases.  It just so happens that because of the number of speakers native and nonnative using English to communicate, many of these grammar rituals have simply dropped off though linguistic evolution. Hence, English grammar is flexible, simple and in a word child’s play compared to case based Central and Eastern European languages. Asian languages are surprisingly elementary also in grammar.
  • Pronunciation – For similar reason to grammatical evolution, words in English are short. If you have the average number of letters of in the English language it is like 3.8.  That is a short language. English is a one or two-syllable language and if you can use a three syllable Latin based word than you are part of the intelligentsia.
  • Receptiveness of the languages speakers to communicate with foreigners – This is a overlook evaluation criteria. For example, Americans have little inhibition to talking to foreigners while Slavic people are reserved and tenuous just to get them to open up a bit. To demonstrate this point you could say, Americans talk and ramble and speak loud. Slavic people talk in cautious whispers. The sheer number of words a person trying to immerse themselves in the language is many times more for English than any other language, just based on the social customs of communication.
  • Media – Is the language used in films and music? If so there is a good chance that people can absorb the language through osmosis and have for years subconsciously. The average person as a twenty-five year old from any country has been exposed to about, well, twenty-five years of English regardless where they grew up.
  • Scales of difficulties listed by websites or even the government or respected educational organizations are not the end of discussion as many of these are based on outdated methods, written by academics not normal people learning, based on reading and writing rather than speaking (the method that was used in the first one million years of human evolution).
  • Script – People immediately conclude that when a language uses another alphabet it must be inaccessible to all those who are not language savvy. Many people are intimidated by Asian language scripts. They immediately declare with passion that Mandarin is the hardest language for example. This is not true. Writing was only accessible for the elite and educated for most of human existence. Communication was first gestures, tones and then vocalization for about thousands of years, therefore I would not put a high weight on written communication. Granted English is has complicated spelling, but who cares if you can speak it.

The language of friendship isn’t words but meanings. – Thoreau

Concluding remarks about second language challenges

Brain considerations – Neurobiologists are not studying Broca’s area the motor for speech and Wernicke’s area, the center for understanding or comprehension  with MRI and PET scans studying aphasia patients and the gyri and basal temporal cortex to understand the algorithm of language. They look at neural plasticity and how other areas of the brain can recruit neurons for language. We are all different in the way our brains can process language, based both on experience acquiring a language and our interaction in the world. However, I think there can be an objective measure of difficulty. Saying that I think that English is the easiest language in the world. This is considering all factors, including media, ease of communication and opportunity to speak with native speakers, grammar and word length and pronunciation.

I invite you to participate in the conversation by commenting on your experiences with languages. I am open to revising my position but at this juncture I am sticking to my thesis that English because of its universality and flexibility and tolerance that nonnative speakers show others, it is an easy to communicate.

Author: Mark Biernat

I live in with family between two worlds, US and Europe where I create tools for language learning. If you found my site you probability share my passion to be a life long learner. Please explore my site and comment.

128 thoughts on “Easiest language to learn”

  1. How did you come up with English as the easiest language to learn? Perhaps you’re a bit biased? An acquaintance of mine from Switzerland claims that English pronunciation is difficult since it’s not as clear cut as Spanish, for example. I’ve had other people say something similar. Regarding grammar, I’m a non-native and I keep getting confused on prepositions (only one preposition for in/on/at in my language).
    My native language is Indonesian, and I am more inclined to say that Indonesian is easier than English, but I may be a bit biased. Grammar is relatively simple. No tenses. There are quite a few affixes, but nothing tricky. Pronunciation is straightforward.

  2. English is a very difficult language – a terrible spelling system, lots of idioms, many exceptions and probably the largest vocabulary.
    However, the difficulty of learning obviously depends a lot of the languages you already know. If you know a language of the same family, it will be much easier.

    Why don’t you mention Esperanto? It is for most people easier than the languages you mentioned. Depending on the languages you know before – maybe by a factor of 8 or 10.

  3. Esperanto – I personally think Esperanto is a very good idea but too idealistic for practical consideration when looking at the easiest language to learn.

  4. English is the most difficult language in the world. Never learn it!

  5. I agree English is the easiest major language for the reasons you stated, no gender, the verb system which is the basis of most languages is easy as it doesn’t change much. The hard part of English is the large vocabulary, but that just requires a lot of memorization, and the spelling, but if you are mainly speaking that might not be as important. There are probably easier languages that aren’t spoken widely like Esperanto, and I also heard Indonesian was easy since there are no tenses.

  6. English isn’t all that easy due to all its split infinitives. They’re not too hard to meet when English is your first language, but looking up the difference between clean, clean up, get up, get down, take down, take off, take to, get with, get back, get down, and all the rest is extremely difficult.

    Articles as well can be a killer.

    Easiest language? Probably Ido or Lingua Franca Nova. They’re both constructed.

  7. English is very hard….especially when a non-native is reading with double word meanings ..like…..did u read….I’ve read…Did u polish the Polish furniture….that stuff is non-native

  8. I disagree that Esperanto is not a living language. From my experience, it is very much alive, vibrant and evolving. Oh, and did I mention it is easy?

    I have lived in France, Germany and China and I have learned all of the repsective languages successfully and to be honest, I would say that German was more difficult than the others. Chinese, although different to my native language, was not that difficult, although it did take some more effort to learn its writing system. I think the most difficult language I have had to learn, is Polish.

  9. To be honest, i think that speaking about difficulty of languages in the world, all languages should be analyzed. Those can maybe be the easiest languages of Europe (maybe). The indonesian friend could be an example. I study englis since 10 years…
    Precised that, maybe it’s easy to understand if they write. But the spoken english, i understand only if a teacher is speaking with me (after some lessons). When i learnt polish, i just needed little time to distinguish words, even grammar was very difficult. My mother tongue is Neo-Latin. If i see a movie in english without subtitles, i hear something like “hauuo sting shh aau”. With the respevt i have to this language, i didn’t want to be offensive. Many consonants are all togheter, almost not pronunced, and it’s impossible to distinguish them. The way to write it doesn’t help: “flower” = “flour” or not in pronunciation?

  10. However, i found the following comparament of many languages. They are not only european, but native American, African and Australian languages are missing:

    micheloud.com/FXM/LA/la/index.htm

    For neo-latin, i meant a romance language (italian).
    Saluti

  11. Lol, I take it that you have fluency in Spanish, French and German, then, since you classify them as “easy”. Frankly, these statements sound more like simply impressions of yours. Do you actually know these languages more profoudly? In reality, none of them qualify as “easy”, much less as “easy to learn”. Only english would qualify for such distinctions, in my opinion.

  12. English is probably the hardest to learn even thought english is my native language. Don’t give up! It will take time to learn but all people in America are bad at grammer and spelling especially. Even people 100 years old mis spell lots of words because so many words are not spelled like they sound to you. I think Spanish is the easiest because there is not very much to learn there are not as many words as in english. The good thing about english is no masculine or feminen words and you addresse old people and young the same.

  13. English, to me, has to be he easiest language to communicate, i’m not a native, but i can still say it’s so easy, it of course have some level of difficulty specially since it is not pronounced as its written, THAT is its diffculty, of course, but about having so many words. ok, it does and i agree it might have more than other languages like spanish , but then you need to be a professional writter to SAY this, since how many times i have read books and seen words i hardly ever use, and i wouldn’t think of using when i personally write a letter, i am saying this about spanish, about english i read as many books in english as in spanish, and also there i find words very rare to use, but actually very accure, and what i can conclude from this is that difficulty of a language shouldn’t be meassured by its vocabulary but by its grammar, and the english one is the simpliest, cos normally we need less than 1500 words to express ourselves with enough accurency, according to what i have heard, and i agree with this, not many of us are born to be Shakspares or Pablo Nerudas, right? but we all NEED the grammar to express ourselves in other languages.

  14. I reckon English is just as hard as any other language, it’s just that one gets immersed into the language much more often than into Swahili, for example. Many tv-programmes are either in American- or British English, and have subtitles in one’s mothertongue, making it easy to learn new words.

    Many universities offer stuff like biology, engineering etcetera in English, not in Chinese or Italian, nor in Bantu, nor in Hindi. Practically everyone with tv and internet should be able to learn English very fast, as it’s spoken and written nearly everywhere.

    Besides, English itself knows many accents and dialects. Who cares about what we call ‘steenkolen Engels’, English with an extreme Dutch accent? As you mentioned in the article, the English are happy enough you have taken the initiative to learn their language.

  15. Ilse, I think you make a good point, maybe English is not structurally the easiest language but when you consider ‘Practically everyone with tv and internet should be able to learn English very fast, as it’s spoken and written nearly everywhere.’ I agree. It is interesting that you mention Dutch, which I think you are, I think you know West Frisian is the closest relative to English.

  16. What makes a language easy to learn is availability. It will be hard for an English- American speaking person to learn Russian because no one really speaks it in America but Spanish maybe even French will be quite easy because of its wide use. Also, how closely its related to your own language. Since Spanish has borrowed several words from English and its no shortage of spanish speaking people in America than that should be the easiest and most useful language to learn. There’s no reason to learn a language just for the heck of it. It is useful for all Americans to learn Spanish, even Mandarin but French not so much. Most people who speak French in America also speak English so its almost useless.

  17. Neeka, Great point, however, I think there are some languages that are objectively more complex, because of the length of the words in the language, grammar, pronunciation etc. However, you are very right. If you know Polish then Russian is easier than if you are a native English speaker. If you need to learn a language you will learn it no matter how hard or easy people say that language is.

  18. Thanks for your comment. I have herd Malay is easy. I have to look into this if it is the easiest language to learn. I like English as the easiest because the whole world speaks it and so you can not help learning it, if you watch movies and have the interest. It just gets absorbed into your brain.

  19. i agree with the indon…

    i’m a chinese in malaysia,

    i can speak english , chinese(mandrin) and Malay fluently…

    among these three languages i have to admit that Malay is the easiest to learn…
    not as complicated as english…

  20. Sarita, Good point, The whole world speaks intermediate English, but once you get into a high level, native speaking idiomatic English, than English does get hard.

  21. English conversations can be held completely in idioms and these idioms are impossible to translate. English could be the hardest language to learn. But kudos for taking into mind our not caring about pronunciation. I have never heard that before.

  22. Malay/Indonesian is the easiest language to learn. It’s commonly overlooked because it’s not a European language or a “popular” Asian language but over 250 million people speak it througout Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and to a lesser extent southern Thailand, the Phillipines and Singapore.

    There are no tenses, it uses roman alphabet, and in daily informal speech, the root word of the verb can be used without any additions, meaning if it was translated into English it would sound like broken English.

    I’m a native English speaker but speak Malay/Indonesian fluently. I also speak Swedish and Mandarin to a lesser extent and Australian Sign Language.

  23. hey,
    just wanted to say that english IS easy..maybe not REALLY easy, but it is the easiest language, i think. I’m a native polish language speaker, and i learned english in a year. Now, i’m learning french and i have to say, that it is harder than english…a lot harder, especially the pronounciation.

  24. English is a unifying language, which means therefore it is easy. If it wasn’t easy, few would learn it (forced or not). I respect other languages, in fact i’m larning two, but if English didn’t exist, the world would be unified too a lesser extent.

  25. I’m a native English speaker who loves learning new languages. There is no way to say one language is harder or easier than another, it’s impossible to prove as everyone is different. The other day i was talking to a French teacher who claimed that Indonesian was the easiest language to learn and i said ‘yeh that may be right on paper, but actually speaking and communicating in the language is a whole other story’. I think people do forget this and that language is more than just a bunch of words. So, Indonesian grammar is easier than lets say Spanish but it doesnt make it any easier to understand when a native is speaking at speed with you.

    Thanks

  26. Of course ENGLISH is easiest language in the world!
    and if u try to learn another language learn Persian, Pashto or Italian yup Italian honey! 🙂

  27. All you people are stating that English is a difficult language, but it is one of the most common languages used, for eg. You have all written your comments in English, not in any other language.It is a common language because it is easy to learn worldwide!

  28. Hi there,
    I am Russian and from all foreign languages I have learnt (English, French, Spanish and German) English is the easiest one. Its pharasal verbs are nothing comparing to cases or verb endings like in german for example.
    Idioms must not be taken as an obstacle – one can easily communicate without them. I read lots of english books in original wording and no idioms spoiled the reading. Idioms must be just understood, if it is so – everything’s ok!
    Try to learn Russian or Polish and you’ll start value the relatively simple grammar of English. 😉
    And last thing – never give up! Thehe is no impossible language to learn!

  29. Several people have suggested that English is spoken so universally because it is easy to learn. Actually, the opposite cause and effect is true– English is so easy to learn because of it’s common use in absence of any universal language. Global commerce, media communications, politics etc. all share English as the the closest thing to a common global language. If you don’t believe this to be true, then feel free to watch your international news and films in Esperanto.

  30. ENGLISH is so bloody far the EASIEST learning languague, I am not native, SWEDISH, FARSI, are easier too, if you dont believe me try learn POLISH, RUSSIAN, or FINNISH you will notice how much bloody time it take you

  31. i actually think english spelling is very difficult. its very irregular and easy to get mixed up with other words. on the other hand, the verb and noun system is really easy. you allways add an “s” to form plurals etc. I am norwegian, and in norwegian its a quite different grammatical structure, but english was really easy to learn. it all made sence. examples:

    Car – Bil
    The car – Bilen
    The car`s (something belonging to the car) Bilens
    Cars – Biler(s)
    Bilene – The cars
    Bilenes The cars`s! (something belonging to the cars)

    this is how we bend masculine nouns! yet there are remaining feminine and neutral! this is where english is really easy, since it has no grammatical gender and for example no imperative mood (it remains the same as infinitive)

    To drive
    I drive
    I drove
    I have driven
    Imperative: drive!

    These are grammatical aspects of english i find really easy. though the irregular spelling remains as a great difficulty.

  32. I honestly think that Bahasa Melayu[Malaysian,Indonesian] is the easiest language to be learned. Honestly. Firstly, the reading/writing is easy as the letters are in Roman. no cases and no apostrophes here and there or no dots above below letters whatever. just plain abc until z. the pronunciation is also easy not like English. it’s like when you read Romaji in Japanese. Yep. it is that easy. so that makes speaking/listening easy too. the spelling of the noun (and verb) does not change either by gender (like Arabic) or by number (like Arabic, English). what’s great of all, it has no past/present/future tense! Seriously, i claim that it is the easiest language in the world.

    I’ve learned English since primary school, and did attend the Arabic class back in secondary school. so that’s how i come up with the comparisons above. to me, Arabic is indeed the toughest language to learn (i merely passed the exam). Right now in college I’m taking Mandarin. with all the characters and many ways on how to pronounce a single character, i now declare Mandarin [and other Chinese dialects] as the second toughest language. However, as Malaysian, i’m eager to learn the language as i watch lots of Chinese dramas (j-do and k-do too). Japanese i can see it’s like Bahasa. easy to pronounce and also easy grammar. the only difference is that it still has characters for reading/writing. Except for Kanji, Katakana and Hiragana are easier. so i say, Japanese is the easiest language that has special characters for it’s writings. Hehe.

  33. English looks easy to a native speaker of English — but the vocabulary is tricky. The grammar may be one of the simplest, but the vocabulary is hybrid, and subtle differences suggest that such words as forecast, predict, and prophecy must be remembered for exact use even though they would seem to be synonyms. Spelling is infamously difficult, and because many vowels merge into the schwa, the spoken word often gives little clue to the spelling. Correlative adjectives for many nouns make no sense; the adjective related to “dog” is “canine”.

    English has two tricky “th” sounds relatively scarce in the world, and those appear in some of the most common words in the language (the definite article and demonstrative pronouns. Most native English speakers will let a foreigner get away with “de” or “ze” for “”the”, but say “tree” for “three” and you might confuse someone.

    It’s likely the simplest language for someone who knows either German or Dutch and some Romance language. It’s easiest to get a superficial use from, but mastery is extremely difficult.

    1. @pbrower2a Bravo for your post. I teach English and it is the easiest language in the word and the hardest. I think the easiest to get to the intermediate level, like 1/2 the world speaks it, but has perhaps the most upward difficulty when you get to the highest levels of usage.

  34. No offense here ladies and gentlemens, I do love English…so much of it…. but for the matter of fact that most tourists whomever came to Malaysia is able to converse locally in Malay within a very short period of time (a week perhaps?), and went back to their country unable to remove their addiction to the word ‘lah’ in the ending of every word they uttered… Malay language is the ultimatum of easiest language in my experience. Backtrack in time where Mr Alphonso D. Albuquerque had to learn to converse in old Malay to speak to the Sultan of Malacca sometime in 1500, he learned it in a month through his subordinates. Then again, maybe I’m biased and wrong… Other comments appreciated. Thanks..

  35. I think this conversation would be easier, if we clearly defined what we were talking about.

    In other words, is a language ‘easy’ because you can be understood in it, at an intermediate level, of are you judging a language by how difficult it is to achieve native-like fluency.

    English is a very easy language to achieve intermediate level of fluency. Precisely because of 2 things, it’s wide availability…you most likely have a hollywood movie or two in your collection, access to internet pages, etc.

    And the other thing is the forgiveness of native speakers, who will understand you, even if you make near constant mistakes.

    Contrast that with Russian. After 7 years of learning Russian, I am still quite amazed at their inability to understand a conversation if even one mistake is introduced, they simply cannot continue.

  36. I think that English is one of the more difficult languages to lean. I graduated from high school at the beggining of June. We had many exchange students come to our school in my 4 years and i knew i few people who went to other countries as exchange students. Most of the students who came to our school from other countries know minimal english and had no idea what they were saying most of the year. A few students had studied english before they came to our school and at the end of the year still said it is the most difficult language to learn. I do agree with spanish as being on of the easiest because my friend spent a year as an exchange student and she she went to a pimerally spanish speaking country

  37. I think that English is one of the more difficult languages to lean. I graduated from high school at the beggining of June. We had many exchange students come to our school in my 4 years and i knew i few people who went to other countries as exchange students. Most of the students who came to our school from other countries know minimal english and had no idea what they were saying most of the year. A few students had studied english before they came to our school and at the end of the year still said it is the most difficult language to learn. I do agree with spanish as being on of the easiest because my friend spent a year as an exchange student and she went to a pimerally spanish speaking country without knowing a single word of spanish. About a third of the way through the year she was speaking spanish better then most the year four spanish students at our school.

  38. What makes a language easy to learn is exposure, need and is it similar to your own language. People all over the world are exposed to English through the media and due to greed of getting better paid jobs and for commuication they want to learn English.
    I had a Danish boy friend for a while and I used to think he was a genius because he spoke English so well. Then I went to Denmark and I heard just as much English spoken as Danish, infact he often used to phone me up and say did you see such a porgrame and I would think how come he is watching it if he is in Denmark, well he was because they get some of the English programmes and it is in English with subtitles. The only series that we get at the moment in a different language is Wallder and that in Swedish with English subtitles.
    I did a degree and a M.A and what was more difficult that doing the subject was writting it in English, because it is a very dyslexic language because it is so difficult to write and spell, with hard gramma. English pronouceation is easy because there are people all over the world who speak English as their first language and they have different ways of pronoucing the same word. I always tell people if they can learn this very difficult language then they can do a PHD, because I had to get someone to proof read my work and then someone else to proof read them after just incase they didn’t notice mistakes, which they did.

    I work in Tourism and the nationalities who speak English the best whose first language isn’t English are the Scandinavians who can even sound English and they are very polite too, then the Dutch but their give away is their strong accent followed by the Germans. The nationalites that never seem to master English are the Eastern Europeans and Russsians, they don’t even know where to put articles. It is very funny because they are the ones who try and make out their languages is so much harder, well if so why can they never master English well? I think it is just arrogants. I should know because I am dealing with people from all over the world in my job.

  39. It would be easier to take your assessment of English seriously if you hadn’t made so many mistakes. Here’s where you went wrong:

    English- no cases, no ender [should be endings], no word, [no comma here] agreement, arguably no grammar. Language is everywhere [yes, language is everywhere. You mean that *the* language is everywhere] and can be herd [heard], absorbed and used anywhere. Short words, verbs change only in the third person. Native speakers are very forgiving of mistakes as so meant [many] people speak it as a second Language [don’t capitalize]. This makes English the easiest foriegn [spelling: foreign] language to learn.

    1. Thanks Ellie for your input on Easiest language to learn, I need to proof read a little more this is my worst point when writing in English or the English language.

  40. I’d say Turkish is quite an easy language to learn because there are almost no irregularities!
    There is something called vowel harmony, consonant harmony and stuff which you have to learn before you can master the language, but they’re a piece of cake!
    There are many suffixes and stems though but they’re quite easy once you get the hang of them!

  41. I have to disagree with english being the easiest language to learn. It is confusing for a none native to learn to speak english with it having “silent” letters and two and three spellings for the same word but with a differnet meaning? I believe the Germanic languages are the most simple theres no riff raff if thats is how it si spelled that how you will prononuce it.

  42. I have learned English Hebrew Italian and Chinese. Of them all, Hebrew is the hardest, then Italian, then English, then Chinese, although in writing it is quite different. The Italian language, if spoken correctly and not like a lost foreigner with a dictionary, is extremely difficult due to the many grammar rules and the fact that there are very many exceptions to each of the rules that are difficult to learn and remember. If you just learn to get by, then yes Italian is easy. But in that case, most languages are as well.

  43. I know english, spanish, french, and turkish and trying to learn latin and mandarin and in my personal opinion I think that Turkish is one of the easiest languages in the world because of the simple vocabulary and sentence structure a big part of turkish is vowel harmony and adding suffixes apart from that and the challenging pronounciation I think Turkish has got to be the easiest language in the world.

  44. English is the easiest language in the world, no matter if you are arabian, japanese, brazilian or italian everybody speaks english as their second language, it’s everywhere, that makes it easy to learn

  45. Yes I agree English is easy to learn because of it’s availability but French is on that list too? I personally tried French classes in high school, needless to say I did pretty badly. Learning that language is torture- the pronunciations, blocked nose sounds you have to make, it proved quite difficult. I say this knowing that I speak five languages, including Japanese, which is pretty easy apart from the writing. Swahili is easy too, and very romantic!

  46. I am a native speaker of isiXhosa which is probably amongst the worlds most difficult.On paper it is easy to see why this is so following the previous posts here.It has thd funny nasal sounds that people say make french dificult,its got the gutteral sounds of dutch and german, its got the click sounds that make the khoisan languages dificult , its got a very complex grammar that allows it to express spiritual and philosophical things easy like many african languages thats why you will find that a xhosa sentence becomes a paragraph in english and even then its usualy a mis translation,it also tonal which make the chinese languages difficult and many other things which suposedly make a language dificult. Yet most xhosa people struggle with english ,im of a very small minority that grew up the xhosa way but has managed to be somewhat fluent in english.its rare for a xhosa to even reach and intermediate control of english.of all the languages i have had to learn afrikaans(south african dialect of dutch) was the easiest.But it is imposible to name a ultimate easy language because we find diferent things dificult many people put dutch amongst the challenging languages but i think its even more basic then english.I do not think you guys will come to a conclusion ever.

  47. Of course English is the easiest language according to an English speaking website. Our language is so unbelievably confusing that half of our citizens can not speak it properly. There, their, and they’re is just one example of how confusing our language can be to a beginner. At least other languages use different words to describe each meaning of 1 word. Take the word food for example. When put in a website for translation to spanish, 30 different words appear because they have different meanings. Get real, english speaking people have learned language so backward that we can not see a forward speaking language and that is why so few citizens of the U.S. speak any other language. Get ready folks, because the citizens of this country are in for a rude awakening when the entire phone pad is for language selection, not just 1 and 2.

  48. I am so glad that Aunt Meme finally brought to everyone’s attention that English solely appears as the easiest language to learn because so many people USE it. Actually in the US, citizens abuse the English language daily with their grammatical errors, mispronunciations & utilizing the wrong words.

    English isn’t the easiest language in the world to learn. Even native speakers confuse words that sound similar or have similar meanings.

  49. English is the easiest language to learn anywhere. I grew up and just knew it. I didn’t take any special clases like these other people. When I started school they just taught me how to speak it better and then how to spell properly. Gee, whats so hard. Listen to Mommy and you will master it. Whats wrong with the rest of the world, why didn’t your mom’s teach you English?

    Yes, I’m kidding.

    Are you kidding me, our language makes no sense to anybody but us. We do everything backwards and we put letters in we don’t use. Our vocabulary is so big we had to repeat sounds because we ran out of words. At 44 years old, with a college degree, I still misspell words. I’ll bet we are the biggest user of “spellcheck”. The rest of the world probably laughs because they can’t understand why we can’t friggen spell 🙂 Well, they laugh until they realize they have to learn this bizzare language to make any money, then we just say, it’s so easy. Thank god I learned it in diapers, because like most Americans I try to learn other languages, but have never really mastered one. If I had to learn English from another native language, I’d be play chess withed.

    I’m engaged to wonderful woman from Ukraine. She speaks Russian and English as well as her own Ukrainian. How she did that boggles my mind and everytime I do something manstupid, I have to remind her that, honey, you speak 3 languages, I can barely use my own. Yes you are smarter than me. I think she is starting to realize I’m just an idiot, but thats ok as long as loves me. I can run a business and somehow make a decent living during a recession and keep 30 people employed, but ask me to communicate with her mother in Ukrainian and holy gee wiz, I’m lost.

    Cute and smart, I like that about her 🙂

    Can you imagine trying to teacher her such things as “Whatever” or add the F word in the middle and even with her superb soviet education, she gives me the strangest puzzled look. I say things to my friends like, “Come on shortbus get a clue and stop being a retard”. I am speaking English, which she teaches as ESL by the way, and she still finds things we say so bizzare. I was thinking of letting her listen to some of the Ebonics spoken by our bothers of african descent, but I think she would just look at me and say “What the …, is that English?”. “Yo cuz youz hooptie is dope”. How about my favorite, “I Axed him to give me the s%&T” Talk about making a grown woman lose it. Not only have we (English speakers) completely bastardized basic human communication, but we decided that wasn’t good enough, we even bastardized it more and added slang that makes no sense. Growing up a surfer I’m still afraid to tell her about words like Gnarly, kewl, Wussup and duuude. Good thing she didn’t meet me when I was 22. Poor girl would have either given up right then, or be calling surfer terms with an eastern European accent (that could be kinda cute though).

    Just my humble opinion.

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