GIVE ANSWERS - English

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What is the easiest language (in your opinion)?


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AussieInBg profile picture AussieInBgJune 2021

The easiest language in my subjective opinion is Australian English smile.gif Then again, any language is relatively easy when your brain is still in childhood and is continuing to be highly plastic and easily adaptable.

Of the European languages.. it depends on at what level you are learning it to. Objectively, I would say that English up to a level of A2/B1 is the easiest to learn for both being productive and also accuracy+fluency when using it. Nouns in English very rarely have gender (masculine/feminine/neuter), singular/plural forms are pretty much standard in both spelling and pronunciation (just add ”s”/”es” to the end, pronunciation of the ”s” depending on whether the proceeding consonant sound in the word is sounded or not), verbs are easy to conjugate (apart from ”to be” or ”to have”, the 3rd person singular is the only one to change by adding a ”s” or ”es” according to simple rules). There are however some problems with consonant and vowel pronunciation, elocution of words (joining words together when you speak) and articles (-,a/an/the). At a basic ”university” level, at B2/C1,

English generally becomes much more complicated and harder to learn for non-native speakers. British English is much more difficult than American English at B2/C1 because there are a much wider range of grammatical constructions being used at that level, a more substantial divide between formal and informal usage, higher levels of collocation (putting combinations of words together, such as adjective + noun) and the general and greater ”expectation” in British English of expressing subtle differences in meaning than in American English.

For myself learning other languages, all were relatively hard at the start to get communicative up to a level of A2. The main languages I’ve been learning have been French, Russian, Bulgarian and German with relatively limited and less serious attempts at 3 more. Surprisingly, the easiest one after getting past A2 is Russian, but it was the one requiring the most effort to break out of A2.

will_stewa profile picture will_stewaJune 2021
English, Spanish, French and Portuguese Share abot 20,000-30,000 words and they are the most in print. German and Italian to a lessor degree. Learning any of these offers a lot of help from speakers of those languages even if they don’t speak what you are speaking simply from the shared vocabulary. Of the English variants, I suspect American English is the hardest because the slang evolves so rapidly. English and Coal Camp (Mountain speak) are my first languages to me they are very easy. My time at teaching English as a second language taught me that it is quite hard for non native speakers especially those with another character set.
  • AussieInBg profile picture AussieInBgJune 2021
    These Western Romance/Germanic/Mixed languages for sure have a lot of similar vocabulary. French and Italian for sure have more shared vocabulary and French and English, for example. However, it gets that vocabulary to a recognition level. There’s much more to learning vocabulary than just the word form - that’s about 20% of the job. The next step is using this vocabulary productively and accurately. Usage, pronunciation, word patterns such as which prepositions you use with it, how it collocates with other words, plural forms and, in the case of German, changes in word form with changes in noun case all come into picture, not to mention that many words are false friends to some degree.

    Slang in British English evolves just as rapidly, if not more so than American English. American slang usually invokes a direct correspondence to the literal thing that is being colloquialised. British slang on the other hand often involves word jokes and plays on words which don’t have a direct literal reference to the thing being referred to - and can therefore be harder to remember by association.

    For second language speakers of English, problems with the English alphabet usually are the result of being taught English mixing in a lot of translation with their native tongue. The effort of learning monolingually with a Latin alphabet has not been done at beginner or elementary level. Great for reducing teaching effort, but a poor substitute for proper preparation for later language learning... Languages generally become much harder later on when a good learning basis is not prepared earlier.
mhmdyasr profile picture mhmdyasrJune 2021
Just speaking from my POV,
easiest: English
toughest: Japanese