By Ivy do Carmo
Have you always wanted to learn a second language but never started to do it because of the obstacles you would have to face? Maybe your stumbling block would not having enough free time, energy or even money to do it. Maybe you kept thinking that you would not be able to succeed because learning a new language is just too difficult.
Rest assured that we understand your worries. As a matter of fact, learning a language does require a great deal of effort and perseverance. However, different languages are in different levels of difficulty to master, if you consider some factors. Have you ever wondered which language would demand less time and effort in your particular case? In another words, what is the easiest language to learn?
Do not feel ashamed for wanting to make your life easier. The truth is that we are all very busy with our career, family, friends, personal projects, hobbies and life, in general. Therefore, there is no shame in looking for the easiest path to become bilingual. On the contrary, we praise you for wanting to learn a new language despite of everything else you’ve got going on in your life!
In order to help you, this article will explain what is the best language to learn for beginners and also, which one could be the hardest language to learn. However, if you are expecting a definitive answer that applies equally to people from all over the world, let me stop right here. It is impossible to affirm that a language is easier than another without taking into account a couple of factors. What are they?
- Your mother tongue and
- Your strengths when learning a new language.
How about we consider these two items in more details?
Your Mother Tongue
It is probably obvious to you that your mother tongue partially determines which will be the easiest language to learn in your personal case. For example, if you speak a Romance language like Spanish, it will be relatively easier for you to learn Portuguese or Italian, because they share the same Latin roots. On the other hand, if you speak English, it could be easier for you to learn Dutch, German or Afrikaans, because they are also West Germanic languages.
Have you ever notice that there are many similarities between languages that share the same root? They even have many cognates in common, which are words with the same origin or that are related or similar to each other. An example of that is the similarity between the English word is and the German word ist, or the Italian verb mangiare and the French verb manger.
Therefore, take into account your mother tongue and its roots when choosing the language you will try to learn. It will be easier if they share the same origin because when you look at a text in the language you do not yet understand, there will be some words that you will be able to recognize all the same, or at least have a vague idea of their meaning. They will stand out from the rest of the text and make you feel less like a fish out of the water. It will also give you more confidence to expand your vocabulary and keep up with your studies. Let’s now consider the second item that determines which language could be easier for you to learn.
Your Strengths When Learning a New Language
You are probably wondering what do your strengths have to do with the easiness in learning a language, but I will break it down for you. A language has basically two different aspects: its grammar and its sounds. Some languages have a pretty easy grammar whereas others have an uncomplicated system of sounds.
Of course that there are languages that are easy or difficult in both aspects, but the question is: what is more challenging to you? Learning the set of rules that constitute a language grammar or being able to pronounce strange sounds that do not exist in your mother tongue, which sometimes have to come out of your nose or your throat or that even require weird lips and mouths expressions?
Once you can determine which is your strength and which is your weakness, I mean, what will be easy and difficult for you when learning a new language, it will become clearer to you what will be the easiest language to learn.
Now that we have clarified that there are no definitive answers on the matter of what is the best language to learn for beginners, because it depends on what is the learner’s mother tongue and his strengths and weaknesses, let’s consider some practical examples of this second factor.
Languages with Simple Grammar Rules
Let’s begin by seeing which languages possess easy-to-comprehend grammar rules, even if their pronunciation is not that simple. If your strength is the system of sounds and your weakness is learning the grammar, the following languages could be good choices for you:
1) Esperanto. It is the widely-spoken artificial language in the world. We say “artificial” because it was invented in the late 19th century to become a universal second language, in order to encourage peace and international understanding. Because of that goal, Esperanto has a simple grammar, easy rules and a lot of words that resemble words from other languages. It was built to be simple and to be learned with minimum effort.
2) Mandarin Chinese. You did not see this one coming, right? Oriental languages are normally considered to be the most difficult ones because they are so different from the occidental languages. However, you would be surprised to see how simple the grammar of Mandarin Chinese is. Besides being a SVO language (its sentences have a “Subject-verb-object” structure), there are no inflections of verbs, nouns, pronouns and adjectives. Most words have just one meaning and even if you mix up the speech order, you will be understood. The grammar of Mandarin Chinese is a piece of cake; what makes it difficult is its system of sounds.
3) Malay. Spoken by around 300 million people, Malay also is an SVO language and its plainness lies in the fact that there are no plurals, grammatical gender or verb conjugation. Instead of them, they use adverbs or tense indicators. For example, the phrase “I eat” is said saya makan. If you want to put the verb in the past, you simply add a word after the verb to indicate it: saya makan sudah (“I eat already”, that is, “I ate”).
4) Afrikaans. It is one of the world’s youngest languages and it is spoken by around 8 million speakers in South Africa and Namibia. It is a West Germanic language and most of its vocabulary comes from Dutch, even though there are words borrowed from Portuguese and Malay. As a matter of fact, Afrikaans can be considered to be a simplification of Dutch, having a more regular morphology, grammar and spelling.
5) French. Did you know that up to a third of the English vocabulary has been influenced by French? Words like entrepreneur, brunette, chef, fiancé, toilette, menu, cliché and bouquet come from French. It is also easy for English speakers to understand a lot of French written words, because of their similarity to English. Some are written exactly the same way, like information, table, attention and comfortable. Other are very similar, such as télévision (television), hôpital (hospital) and forêt (forest).
6) Haitian Creole. If you speak French, learning Haitian Creole will be easy. Being a French-based pidgin, the two languages have many words in common. Some similar words in these two languages are aktivite / activité (activity), aprè / après (after), onz / onze (eleven) and refòm / réforme (reform).
7) Tagalog. If you speak Spanish, it will be easier for you to learn Tagalog. Because of three centuries of Spanish presence in the Philippines, many words are identical or similar between these two languages. A few examples of identical words are enero (January), abril (April), edad (age) and libre (free). Some similar words between Tagalog and Spanish are abenida / avenida (avenue), asul / azul (blue), barko / barco (boat) and trabaho / trabajo (work).
Languages With a Simple Phonology
What if you have no problem with learning more complex grammar, but you struggle with complicated system of sounds? It can be quite challenging to pronounce sounds that do not exist in your mother tongue. If you want to learn a language with an easy pronunciation, these may be good choices for you:
8) Spanish. Do you know what orthographic depth is? It is a measurement of how easy it is to predict the pronunciation of a word based on its writing. When the pronunciation of the Spanish words are quite similar to their writing, we say that the language has a shallow orthography, which is the case of Spanish. Although you will have to learn how to conjugate verbs, the fact that the conjugated endings are normally the same and that you pronounce the words the way they are written makes Spanish an easy enough language to learn.
9) Italian. Of course it is easier to learn Italian if you already speak another Romance language, such as Spanish, French or Portuguese. Check out the verb “sing” in these four languages, as an example of the similarity between them: cantare, cantar, chanter, cantar. However, even if you don’t speak any Romance language, Italian is easy to pronounce because it also has a shallow orthography and therefore it is easy to predict how an Italian word is pronounced based on its writing. Another factor that makes this language an easy one to learn is that English has many Italian borrowed words in its vocabulary and another words that are very similar to Italian ones.
10) Japanese. This may also come as a surprise to you. However, even though Japanese has a complicated writing system, its pronunciation is unexpectedly simple and definitely easier than Chinese, for example. We can say that, with Japanese, what you see is what you get. Obviously, there are some words that can be a little tricky to pronounce, but overall, the fact that Japanese doesn’t have many sound variations makes it also an orthographically shallow language.
In a nutshell, we have established in this article that a language will be easy for you to learn according to your mother tongue and to your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to learning grammar rules and the language’s system of sounds.
Regardless of which language you choose to study, let us help you get the perfect pronunciation and improve your listening skills! Subscribe to get our free language learning guide for more tips like this.
