What Are the Easiest Languages To Learn?

If you are thinking about learning a new language you will have probably heard it takes a lot of work and you will be wondering what the easiest ones to learn are.

Unfortunately it’s not as easy as just listing off some language and saying “these are the easy ones”. Basically all languages are about the same difficulty, what makes it easy or not …is you!

I will go through some things that can make a certain languages easier for you to learn compared to others.

The Language You Want To Learn Will Be The Easiest

It may sound stupid, but you have to ask yourself what language you want to learn, and whatever your answer is …that’s going to be the easiest.

This is simply because this is the language you clearly have an interest in and some sort of motivation towards.

Have you ever had to do something that you totally hate? Isn’t it really difficult! Painfully difficult! …now imagine I told you to learn a language you had no interest in, it’s not going to be a fun and you might actually have experienced this in school. Most kids are told “you are learning this language” and they have no idea why and have no interest in it which just makes it 10 times harder.

Just having an interest in a language will help massively, Even if it is a “difficult” language, having that desire to learn it will help you overcome a lot of the hurdles you will face.

Your Native Language Can Make Some Languages Easier 

It is a fact that some languages are more closely linked to others and this will help you when it comes to learning them.

If you look at English its roots can be traced back to a few different places, you can see it has some influence from Latin and there are a large number of words taken from French and other romance languages.

However, you can also see that English has a lot of influence from Germanic languages which can cause it to have similarities between languages like Dutch and the Scandinavian languages, which also have these same roots.

This means that any English speaker is probably going to find learning these sorts of languages easier. The barrier for entry is quite low as there are a lot of similarities, the alphabets are pretty much the same and there are a lot of cognates (words that look and mean the same thing).

If you then look at a very distance language to English, such as Arabic or Chinese …these will be a lot harder. The languages themselves are not any more difficult or complex, it’s just that we as English speakers, will not have anything we can recognise with those languages.

We would be learning one of these languages from absolute zero, where as a language like French, we already have a huge head start, even if we do not realise it.

It Depends On Your Past Experience

A lot of language learning comes down to the individual, meaning you. Your past experiences are going to make things harder or easier for you when it comes to languages.

If you already know another language then this is going to make a lot of things much easier. You already have experience of what it is like to learn a language, let alone the fact that your other language may be beneficial to the new one you are learning. 

Let’s say you know Chinese, then you are going to find learning Japanese much easier than someone who doesn’t know Chinese, simply as you have past experience with kanji.

(You can read more about – Why Do Some People Struggle To Learn New Languages, While Others Don’t?)

Your Ability To Notice Things Can Make Things Easier

A lot of language learning is about spotting patterns and while a lot of this is done subconsciously, you can also do it consciously.

Some of you will just naturally be better at spotting these patterns and some of you will just enjoy studying things like grammar, which is of course going to explicitly explain the patterns of the language. 

Some of this will also come down to your past experiences, which I’ve already mentioned. It makes sense that a French speaker is going to notice how Spanish works much faster than a Korean speaker will.

This is simply because French and Spanish are very similar and their conjugation and use of gender within the language are something that a French speaker is going to be able to both spot and understand instantly, where a Korean may take a while to notice how all this plays together as it is something they have never seen before in a language.

Things Are Easier If You Put More Effort In

People often look at languages and wonder if one will be harder than the other …but they don’t ask themselves how much effort they will put into learning the language, which can make a huge difference.

Let’s say I want to learn French, from the outside it looks fairly close to English, so it should be “easy”. So I start it and I do one 5 minute lesson on Duolingo a month, and that’s it. 

After a year, I will have studied a whole 60 minutes of French. If you ask me how my French is going, I’m probably going to tell you it’s quite difficult. 

Now let’s say I want to learn Thai, a very different language to English, I would need to learn the alphabet and start from zero, so it would seem quite “difficult”. I start learning all this and I spend 8 hour a day, 7 days a week. It’s like my full time job.

If you come back to in a year and ask how my Thai is …I will probably be speaking Thai, maybe not perfectly, but I will be doing pretty good.

This doesn’t mean Thai is easier than French in this example, it just means I put a lot more effort into Thai and this does make a huge difference.

(You can read more about – How Does The Difficulty Level Of A Language Impact Language Learning Fatigue?)

The Availability Of Resources Can Make Things Easier

If you want to know if a language is going to be easier or not, you need to look at what resources are available for you to learn with.

The more resources, the easier things will be.

If you look at languages like Spanish or Japanese, there is so much content available across every method of learning. There are hundreds of textbooks, courses and real life tutors and if you want to use the immersion method you pretty much have an unlimited supply of material you can watch and read.

If you then look at a language that is maybe not so popular, you will find there are maybe a handful of textbooks, and maybe not much material to immerse in.

This is going to make things much harder for you, regardless of how difficult the language is.

Conclusion

Hopefully now you can see that just saying “this language is easier to learn” makes no sense.

While some languages will be more similar to your own language, which can help, it is only part of the puzzle. Really you need to have an interest in the language and there needs to be plenty of resources, then finally, you need to put the effort in.

If you do the work, you can learn any language you want, regardless of how “difficult” everyone else says it is. If you want to learn it, just go for it, you can make it happen. 

(You can read more about – What Difficulties Will You Face When Learning A Language?)