What is the easiest language for you and why?
For me it is indonesian, because we don’t use conjugation, no gender, no time differentiation tenses (past, present, future).
How about you?
1 Like
I think Spanish is the easiest for me, but only due to prolonged and early exposure. Most of the languages I study tend to click as far as understanding, but getting to the thinking/speaking part is quite difficult for me.
3 Likes
From the languages I know so far (German, English, French, Arabic, Spanish, Russian), I think the easiest is English. At least, it was the one I learned the fastest 
I’ve heard about Indonesian, too, being fairly easy before, but I haven’t tried it yet.
Also, for English and German speakers at least, I’ve heard that Scandinavian languages are rather easy to learn, but same here, I haven’t tried any of them yet.
4 Likes
oh, now I am curious about scandinavian 
2 Likes
indeed, the more and the earlier exposure, the more we feel it easy 
I heard Indonesian is a really easy language to learn as well. One of the easiest Asian languages…
2 Likes
I feel so, but I am native. So I want to know from non-native perspective, lol
If I don’t include my native language, then Mandarin. Similar vocabulary, simple grammar…
3 Likes
I think there are three possibilities.
- There are languages which seem to be easier than others, such as Indonesian or Esperanto.
- Languages which are similar to your mother tongue or another language you already know very well.
- How you learned that language.
So for me, Hungarian was the easiest, as I learned it in the country (reason 3). Otherwise I might say that Esperanto seems to be very easy, and this is a mixture of reason 1 and 2.
7 Likes
The easiest language for me is Turkish
3 Likes
Excluding my native languages (Korean and Chinese), the easiest languages for me are definitely Japanese and Vietnamese.
- They all belong to the same area and language group (East Asia), hence the similarities in vocabulary and the use of chinese characters.
- Japanese and Korean are very similar in terms of both grammar and vocab; S-O-V sentence structure, use of verb and subject grammatical particles, preposition rules, honorifics, grammar inflection etc.
- Vietnamese and Chinese have similar grammar structures; no tenses, no particles, S-V-O sentence structure and both are tonal languages with Vietnamese vocabulary sounding quite similar to Chinese and even more so to Cantonese.
The most important factor is my interest in East Asian languages and culture (because this is where I’m from).
But recently I’ve started learning Swahili and Norwegian. To my surprise, they are quite easy as well, albeit to me personally, Japanese and Vietnamese are still the easiest, but Swahili and Norwegian come close
8 Likes
For English speakers, I would agree that Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Melayu are one of the easiest languages to learn, even easier than English to a certain extent!
However, for non-english speakers, Bahasa Indonesia & Melayu might be difficult because :
- Different sentence structures
- There are no conjugations but with imbuhan and the suffixes and affixes placed on a root word to define a noun or a verb in different states, it is quite hard to understand for non-english speakers
- Nuances are very different in Bahasa
Overall, I would agree with you that it’s quite easy to learn (I’ve been learning for almost 9 years ) but it’s best not to learn both Bahasa Indonesia and Bahsa Melayu together even though they are very similar because of the huge amount of false cognates!
4 Likes
I seem to be acquiring Spanish very quickly, unlike my efforts in Japanese and ASL. I already speak French so that’s why.
1 Like
I’ve been at Vietnamese for about 2+ years and it’s really easy to learn as a written language. Pronunciation is the hardest part. But if you are used to tonal languages, it’s easy.
I’m curious about the tones, too. How are the tones of Vietnamese/Cantonese for you being a native speaker of Korean/Taiwanese/Mandarin? Are they really easy for you? For me the tones of Mandarin were OK because there are only four that are clearly distinct from each other, but the tones of Vietnamese or Cantonese (or Taiwanese) are quite difficult for me to distinguish 
1 Like
For me it’s either Dutch or Spanish. Both are similar to English and don’t have confusing pronunciations or spelling systems, at least in my opinion.
3 Likes
I’ve learnt Chinese and Taiwanese since I was born, together with Korean so I cannot remember learning Chinese & Taiwanese tones. It just comes naturally and I just know the tones(?)
For Vietnamese and Thai, the tones are pretty easy to me probably because I listen to a lot of Thai and Vietnamese content so I don’t find it difficult to distinguish the tones
Cantonese was quite difficult for me at first, with a few tones sounding very similar but because I study music so I used music notes to denote the notes and it’s all fine for me now
2 Likes
When I started learning Vietnamese, I found this YouTube Channel to be the best for learning tones (as a native English speaker). Most “Learn Vietnamese” channels are made by native speakers of Vietnamese and for them, I think the tones just come naturally. On this channel, he’s learned Vietnamese as a second language so the way he explains the tones and the pronunciation makes a lot more sense language learners who are tonally challenged.
3 Likes
Interesting! Thank you guys 
For me the easiest languages were actually the ones “further away” from my native tongue. @Rina mentioned Scandinavian languages for native English speakers - I’m a native English speaker and although I could quickly see the connections between English and Swedish, I did not enjoy it and really struggled because there were too many similarities - I couldn’t keep them separate in my head 
although a lot of people do appreciate the similarities when learning.
The easiest languages for me have been Finnish, ASL, and KSL.
3 Likes