It’s always fun to learn a new language, but learning a new language as an adult can be as challenging as trying to acquire a US work visa as a foreigner. Many linguists suggest that if you’re trying to learn a new language, languages within your ethno-linguistic group will be easiest to acquire. There are over 7,000 languages spoken in the world, but you may be wondering which ones are easiest to pick-up as a native-English speaker.
Languages that use the Latin alphabet and have similar vocabulary are a good place to start. Languages that have most in common with English include other Germanic languages such as Dutch, German and Norwegian, and Romance languages such as French, Spanish and Italian. Japanese is considered one of the hardest languages to learn. Here are some examples of some of the languages that are easier to learn if your mother tongue is English.
Frisian
I begin by mentioning Frisian because it is often regarded as the language most similar to English. Frisian is spoken in a small area of the Netherlands. However, modern English and Frisian are mostly unintelligible to each other. After at least five hundred years of being subject to the influence of Dutch, modern Frisian bears a greater similarity to Dutch than to English.
Norwegian
I fell upon an interesting website called Page F30 which provides interesting information explaining why Norwegian is the easiest language to learn as a native-English speaker. For one, Norwegian is a Germanic language, however unlike other Germanic languages, Norwegian has much easier grammar. Norwegian word order is also different than other Germanic languages, and actually much closer to English. Moreover, Scandinavian verbs have some of the easiest conjugation you can find in Europe. Past tense is generally formed by putting a -te on the end of the stem, like the -(e)d in English (walk, walked). Norwegian plurals are also easy. Add an -r to the end if it ends in a vowel, add an -er if it ends in a consonant. For example, problem becomes problemer.
Spanish
English speakers often consider Spanish to be very easy to learn, even though Spanish is not the closest relative of English. Spanish is third most spoken language in the world and considered one of the easiest to learn as there is an abundance of learning materials available and accessible to the population. Though German vocabulary may be easy to grasp, Spanish grammar is highly regular and logical and the simple, pronunciation is very similar overall, the grammar is not too difficult and there is lots of familiar vocabulary. Moreover, once you learn Spanish, picking up French or Italian is simple.
French
French is still a very popular language to learn among native English speakers. Many find it to be similar in syntax and in vocabulary. The grammar is quite complicated however. But with all the material available, like Spanish it is a very accessible language to learn.
Afrikaans
Afrikaans used to be Dutch, but changed into a language of its own after a lot of isolation and other influences. Afrikaans is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia. There many words that are very similar to English. Often cited as the “best” of the easy to learn languages for English speakers, Afrikaans has nearly 7 million speakers living in five countries in Southern Africa.
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