The 11 Easiest Languages to Learn Depending on Your Native Language and Learning Style

The 11 Easiest Languages to Learn Depending on Your Native Language and Learning Style You Cant Argue with Science: The 11 Easiest Languages to Learn Two roads diverged in a wood, and Iâ€"I took the one that I didnt have to hike, struggle and bushwhack through.When it comes to learning a language to fluency, that could make all the difference.Lets face it, weve all got stuff to do.Theres no shame in hitting that easy button sometimes.We get itâ€"youve got a life.Were all parents, friends, neighbors, small business owners, full-time travelers or artists.But far too  many people never know the joys of a second language because they think they dont have time to learn, that learning is too hard or that they just cant do it.Were here to tell you definitively, thats just not the case.Now, if youre a native speaker of a European language and want to devote yourself to learning the intricacies of a language like  Pirahã, we support you wholeheartedly. But if youre looking for a language thats not gonna require 3-hour evening classes Monday through Friday for the next 10  years, well, we support you just a little more wholeheartedly.And t hats what were here to help with! What Makes a Language Easy to Learn?Theres no such thing as one language thats just plain easier than all the others, but there are a lot of languages that are way easier for you personally to learn.I travel all over the world and one thing Ive noticed is that all 7  billion of us seem to have strong opinions on our native languages.Two people in the same country (even the same city!) will tell you with equal  degrees of confidence that their language is super hard and super easy, that youll never learn it or that its a piece of cake. Theyll swear to you that English was a breeze to learn, or that its the hardest thing theyve ever done.What accounts for these huge differences in opinion? Two things:1. Theres no such thing as a universally easy language.2. The ease of a language depends on the learner.There are generally three major things that make a language easy or hard for any given learner:1. How closely its related to the languages you alread y know.2. How complex its system of sounds is.3. How complicated its grammar is.Some learners struggle more to understand the strange sounds they hear coming out of noses and throats and rounded lips, and others would take a good French nasal vowel over German noun declensions any day of the week. Whatever your learning style is, here are 3  kinds of  easy languages for you to get started with.Keep in mind that the more commonly studied languages on this list are available to learn with fun videos on FluentU, which is designed to make language acquisition as easy and intuitive as possible! FluentU takes real-world videosâ€"like news, music videos, movie trailers and inspiring talksâ€"and turns them into personalized language lessons.You Cant Argue with Science: The 11 Easiest Languages to LearnLinguistic Neighbors: Languages Related to Your Native LanguageWanna see something cool?That  is my house. Dat  is mijn huis. Das ist mein Haus. Dit is my huis.It doesnt take long to crack the code and figure out that these four  lines say the same thing in closely related West Germanic languages  (English, Dutch, German, and Afrikaans, from top to bottom). Maybe some of the words for that are a bit more of a stretch, but how quickly do all the others fall into place when you look at them?This is what its like when you start learning a language related to your own. Youll see cognates, or words that have a common origin and similar meanings, like little hints buried in a foreign language sentence.Learning the languages most closely related to your own is like learning with linguistic training wheels. Here are a few examples of languages that are childs play for certain learners, depending on what languages they already know:1. DutchEnglishs first cousin, the only language more closely related to either one is Frisian. Dutch is full of English cognatesâ€"drinken (to drink), kat (cat), week (week), licht (light) and hundreds more. Once youve got the most basic fundamentals down, you  should be more than ready for basic conversations and childrens books.2. Haitian CreoleAre you a native French speaker, or have you held on to some high school French? Haitian Creole, one of the largest French creoles, is made up of a mostly French vocabulary mixed with indigenous flavors of the new world.3. TagalogThe Philippines is not only one of the fastest-growing destinations for young expatsâ€"its also a country where Spanish-speakers can learn the local tongue with ease. Everyday items are usually similar or exactly the same as the Spanish name.Dont see anything familiar here? Its okay. You dont have to already know a big world language like English, French or Spanish to get started on some easy language learning. Unless you only speak a language isolate like Korean or Basque, there are plenty of long lost linguistic cousins waiting for you to look them up and get in touch!Check resources like the Ethnologue to learn about your languages family tree and what other tongues are most closely related to it.Effortless Phonology: Languages with Painless PronunciationHave you ever overheard a foreign language like Arabic or Cantonese and wondered how all those sounds even make up a  real  language? To some extent, this is just because the speech sounds of unfamiliar languages often sound garbled and meaningless to foreigners.But in terms of phonology (the system of speech sounds in a language), not all languages are made equal: Some have dozens of different consonants and vowels, and some have only a few.Do French nasals or Arabic pharyngeals sound like linguistic nightmares? Dont panic.If learning all the new sounds of a foreign language is your biggest challenge, you should consider starting with a language like one of these:4. SpanishYou saw this one coming, right? Spanish is often the go-to language for Western  learners  because of its small inventory of speech sounds and user-friendly phonetic spelling system. In Spanish, a always sounds more or less like a (even with an accent mark), which we as learners really appreciate. Thanks, Spanish.5. JapaneseJapanese has historically gotten bad PR among language learners, but its pronunciation is actually remarkably simple. Of its 19 consonants, only a couple are rare among world languages, and its five vowels are remarkably similar to those in Spanish.6. ItalianIts got a few more vowels than its cousin down in Spain, but Italians big advantage is that most of its consonants and vowels are among the most common sounds found in world languages. That means most learners wont find many words they cant get their mouth around!To see whats out there for you beyond these three, you could start with this list of world languages ordered by number of phonemes (distinct speech sounds) to get an idea of which languages are more phonologically difficult than others.Keep in mind that most of the extremes (languages with very many or very few phonemes) are very old, very isolated languages th at might not be easy or practical to learn, but you can still use the tool to compare whether Greek or Russian is your best choice.Goodbye Grammar Book: Languages with Simple StructuresJust like some languages love to play with  diverse  and complicated sounds, some seem to have an endless love affair with rules and grammar.Ive always shied away from German for this reason.  Its four noun cases,  infinite list of adjective declensions and word order rules are enough to send me running to the nearest biergarten.Other languages, thankfully, arent quite so strict and demanding. You learn some vocabulary and a few basic usage rules, and youre good to go. Here are some of those languages:7. Mandarin ChineseThis is probably the first time youve seen Chinese on a list of easy languages, right? Thats a shame, because structurally speaking, its a cinch. Almost every word of Mandarin has one and just one meaning. It also  generally follows a subject-verb-object word order, common to most of t he worlds larger languages,  so no new tricky syntax for most learners.8. AfrikaansWe mentioned Dutch above, but Afrikaans is like a grammatically boiled-down version of its parent language. Whereas Dutch demands verb conjugations like those in Englishâ€"for instance, I am, you are, it isâ€"Afrikaans doesnt bother you with the details. In South Africa its ek  is  (I am), jy is  (you are),  sy  is  (she is). What could be easier?9. MalayThe language known regionally as Indonesian or Malaysian totals around 270 million total speakers, making it both one of the largest and fastest-growing world languages. Even better, it has no grammatical categories for gender, number or tense. Basically, you learn one form of a word, and you can use it just about whenever you want.10. EsperantoThis language was invented by some linguists who were also great global citizens, and even though its made up, its 2 million speakers, several hundred thousand Wikipedia articles, and organizations worldwide wo uld argue that it still counts.  Esperanto  was designed with you in mind: Minimal grammar, easy rules and as a bonus, lots of things that resemble many other world languages.I confess: I hate learning grammar. Its not just me, right? If youre a free-spirited language learner who cant be bothered with the details, then go for one of these simply structured languages.11. Bonus Easy Language: EnglishLearners across the globe seem to have extreme feelings towards Englishâ€"its the hardest or the easiest language theyve ever learned, they love it or they hate it. But as weve referenced here and there throughout this post, linguistically speaking, it falls somewhere around the fiftieth percentile.My mother tongue has some difficult sounds like interdental th, some phrasal verbs that admittedly make no sense  and a spelling system that makes even less sense. But in general, English doesnt have a lot of inflections, so theres no messy grammar and most, though not all, of its sounds  will b e familiar to speakers of other languages. But theres one other factor that makes English in many ways the easiest language of them all.Its absolutely everywhere. You cant avoid it. Open up your browser, turn on the television, travel to any major city across the globe, and youd need heavy duty earplugs to avoid hearing the Anglo takeover.Its often difficult to learn less widely-spoken languages like Danish, Turkish or Thai, but English decided a while back that its kind of done with national borders, which is good news for language learners. With the wealth of English language media on just YouTube and Wikipedia alone, you hardly need to look anywhere else.Even better: English speakers are absolutely everywhere, which means youve always got a conversation partner! You cant reasonably hope to bump into Hungarian speakers often enough to keep up your language skills outside Hungary, but with English, opportunities to practice are nearly infinite.So Whats the  Easiest Language to Lear n?By now, you can probably guess that theres no such thing.Some of the languages with the fewest speech sounds are the most remote and grammatically complex. Others entirely lack tenses or cases or inflections of any kind and are riddled with guttural sounds nearly impossible for speakers of most languages to pronounce.More than anything, it depends on your mother tongue and the languages you already know. And you also must take into account the sociological and international significance of a language: How much media is available in the language, and how many other speakers are there for you to reasonably practice with?The easiest language for a native Spanish speaker to learn will be totally different than the easiest language for a native Vietnamese speaker, and it can even differ vastly between two native English speakers from the same region but who have different learning styles.With the resources and some of the examples given in this post, you should be able to get started i dentifying your low-hanging linguistic fruits. No matter how busy you are or how difficult you think itll be, theres a language out there for everyone!What do you find challenging about learning a language? Is it the new sounds, the grammar rules, finding chances to practice or something else?Jakob is a full-time traveler, obsessive language learner, and dedicated language teacher. He writes about language, travel and the many places they meet on the road at his blog Globalect.