The difficulty level of any language depends on the learner. How motivated is the learner to acquire a certain language? Is he or she confident of their ability to acquire the language? To a confident and motivated learner, no language is really difficult. In fact, the learning process becomes its own reward.
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spoilers:
for english speakers, it turns out to be spanish and then german.
But I wonder, what makes spanish easier than other romance languages?
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There’s no way German is the 2nd easiest language to learn for English speakers. Swedish or Norwegian maybe.
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Japanese and German. This is probably just a subjective guess because I have studied these 2 languages.
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I think it´s fair to say that Spanish is the easiest (popular) Romance language. French for instance has a more complicated grammar and is even for other Romance language speakers hard to pronounce. The same counts for Romanian. Italian and Portuguese are more difficult to pronounce than Spanish and have less common vocabulary with English (in this category French might be even closer to English than Spanish). Spanish has a clear and logical pronunciation, a not too complicated grammar and quite a lot common words with English. Moreover native Spanish speakers tend to speak with a reduced vocabulary and in a more simple way than French speakers do. That’s no judgement but an observation I’ve made. It’s definitely not difficult to connect with Spanish speakers even with a low level of vocabulary and grammar.
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I have no experience with Romance languages, but Norwegian is definitely the easiest between Swedish and German. Swedish and Norwegian are analytical languages with grammar very similar to English, and most of the common words are cognates with English.
Depending on our definition of “easiest”, I would argue for Scots (if we agree it is its language) or West Frisian (if we don’t). The only thing holding these back, in my opinion, is the availability of content and native speakers to engage with. Frisian writing and spelling is kind of like Dutch in that it takes some getting used to, but take a look at Frisian wikipedia and try reading some pages!
I am not directing that at you specifically Mark. Rather anyone that might be interested :).
Factoring in availability of content and speakers I would hazard a guess that it is easiest to learn Spanish for a speaker of English living in America.
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I think when people just talk about Spanish and German being relatively easy for Anglophones to learn, they forget about other Germanic languages. I would think Dutch, having less grammar than German and perhaps more words in common, would be easier to learn than German, perhaps easier than Spanish as well. Similarly, Scandinavian languages (not Nordic languages in General, just Scandinavian ones) should be among the easier ones. I don´t know the other Germanic languages, but I´d suppose Afrikaans wouldn´t be too different from Dutch.
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Portuguese although it is harder than spanish phonetically is a cake walk for an english speaker. French I have to agree has the most irregular spelling, harder vowels, but has more words in common with english since english borrows from french. Italian, spanish, and portugese are all kind of the same generally. Also I know for sure native speakers of spanish dont speak more simply than any other native speaker of any other language. But I think spanish is the most popular and studied romamance language of them all so this might make people think its easier since they already know dome basics etc.
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“Factoring in availability of content and speakers I would hazard a guess that it is easiest to learn Spanish for a speaker of English living in America.” This is huge also if one knows 100 or so words, colors, and numbers it helps a ton thats a decent starter package plus basic knowledge of language along with lots of native speakers once one attains a level high enough not to bother people lol.
Out of curiousity when steve says “learn” he means get to a functional level? Because the learning curve for certain languages seem very different also certain domains will be more difficult than others in different stages (although this is too difficult to decipher for every language) there was a czech linguist who said more grammatical languages tend to have more regularity but are more complex initially for a new learner but once one has the system done the lack of irregularity allows for smooth cruising idk does this sound somewhat correct?
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in my opinion, its your interest in learning the language that matters. for example, if my mom forces me to learn Spanish, I might get to know words and phrases in Spanish, but i’ll have no interest learning. But really wanna learn Mandarin Chinese, I’ll probably invest more time and have more interest. So yeah, thats what i think
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I agree with most of that but I’d quibble with French having a more complicated grammar than Spanish. Spanish uses a lot more of the different conjugations in regular speech than French does.
So if it’s not verbs what do you mean by more complicated?
The rest I agree with. The pronunciation of Spanish is easy.
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I’ve never studied french but have only examined it in the way of a linguist (im not a linguist but i mean examing its features etc) the OP said “Moreover native Spanish speakers tend to speak with a reduced vocabulary and in a more simple way than French speakers do” which is heavily dependent on speaker for example in english at times i speak very simply but other times i speak fast with a lot of jargon. Spanidh in the US has alot of bilinguals and their spanish is fast (similiar to a native speaker in accent/rythem) the vocab/structures are extremely simple vs a true native so this could make spanish seem like the easiest romance language as well. But if FSI didnt lump them in different categories there must not be much difference etc.
french can be nightmare with listening comprehension and the spelling . spanish verbs are complex in some ways they are slightly more complex than french in my mind because of the more conjugations you need to learn
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