Top 5 Easiest Languages To Learn For English Speakers
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🗣 Wondering about the easiest languages to learn as an English speaker? Well, all will be revealed!
I’m going to tell you about the 5 languages that you'll find easiest to learn, so you can do something amazing in your life! 🙌🏼 … including:
• An African language
• A Romance language
• An Asian language
• A Germanic language
• A Scandinavian language
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Stories are the best way I have found to learn ANY language (even the easy ones). Forget the boring textbooks and time-wasting apps and learn a language the natural, effective way with one of my story-based courses.
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⏱TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Intro
00:21 Learn Afrikaans
03:37 Learn Italian
05:55 Learn Indonesian
08:47 Learn Dutch
10:24 Learn Norwegian
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My name is Olly Richards, and on this channel I document my experiments in foreign language acquisition.
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Here are some other videos I like about easy languages:
🚀 How to learn one of these languages fast? Follow the 10 rules of StoryLearning: https://youtu.be/PqCJSXHYth8
Top 5 easiest languages for Spanish speakers.
I can some what understand Italy and Portugal.
Try Greek !! Its not easy but English language is 39,1% made out of Greek in total… So i believe you will find it interesting ! (Okay greek is inside every language but English particularly have a recor of loans out of greek)
My maternal grandmother was Norwegian. Through My Heritage I was able to find a third cousin in Norway. She speaks English fluently, but I think it would be pretty cool if I could Norwegian. Now that I know it isn’t a difficult language to learn, I am encouraged to give it a try. Thank you for the video. I am subscribing to this channel.
To me, Afrikaans is what English must sound like to people who don’t know English. It’s like hearing a conversation in a different room where you can’t quite make out what is being said.
As a non native english speaker, afrikaans more sound like german
@ouidefou true, my family are dutch afrikaans and i thought they sounded german too
@ouidefou that’s cap I know over 250 languages
Same with Dutch!!!
I’m fluent in English, German (home language) and Afrikaans. Comparing Dutch and Afrikaans is like comparing Plattdeutsch and Hochdeutsch. Afrikaans is a beautiful language, if spoken correctly it contains almost no English words, it’s also much clearer than Dutch.
I have studied Spanish, German, and French. Of all those, Spanish is definitely the easiest.
I find German slightly easier to Spanish but I’m having such a bad, bad time learning Spanish atm because I’m doing Spanish A-level 😂
Well, German is 100% the most difficult of the three.
I must agree! because im learning spanish past 3 month and i can improve and will keep improving since i also learning from music, film and newspaper
They are very similar bcs they are latin languages
The language you like most is the easiest to learn. There’s more to language then study, grammar and vocabulary. Mastering a language is a serious time commitment. You have to spend thousands of hours with it. I’ve been learning and “using” Russian everyday for 10 years; 6 of them spent in Russia. It was/is a huge commitment that most people simply won’t make.
I started Russian a week or so ago after watching Удивительные люди and liking the expressiveness of the language. Even though I’m already fluent in 3 languages (English, Afrikaans, German), Russian is not one of the ‘easy’ languages.
@Visionery1 Your knowledge of German should help you out a lot with grammar, especially noun cases. Thankfully, Russian noun cases aren’t nearly as bad some other languages like Hungarian with 18 or Tsez with 64 (That isn’t a joke).
@Visionery1 I’m currently trying to learn russian! It’s hard but I enjoy it
00:20 Afrikaans
03:35 Italian
05:53 Indonesian
08:38 Dutch
10:18 Norwegian
Thank you
Thanks man 😂
I would of thought German or Hebrew would of been in their somewhere…🤔
@Megan Molesworth hebrew would never be on this list TRUST me😂 we have a sound that I’m not even sure that even mandarin speakers can pronounce cause some of their sounds we use but the one I’m speaking about is much much more complicated it’s the ח sound not only is it difficult to pronounce but also you can’t write it in english but have to change it a bit to h which is the closest sound to the ח sound
for example:
my last name in hebrew is: חדד
and in english it’s: hadad
which is pronounced differently in english😅
@WebtoonAddict🏳️🌈 Thankyou for that, you learn something new everyday.😊🇮🇱
Amused that you chose Norwegian as your #1. I learned Norwegian at 15 as an exchange student. I found many aspects easier than English, not least of which was the consistent pronunciation. I still enjoy keeping in contact with friends and family in Norway via social media and exercising my language skills.
Koselig
@Cool Cat Ja, der er det!
I technically just start Norwegian and the pronunciation has me stressing 🥲
@Zenith Keep at it. Don’t stress, just keep trying! You’ll get it as you keep working on it.
There’s that Trollhunter movie!!! 😍 and can get an introduction to listening to Norwegian!
I’ve been studying Italian for 5 years as my first second language. It was really hard to get close to fluent for two main reasons: nightmare level verb conjugations with like 7 tenses to choose from (still don’t know remoto) and the big one.. the way they convey and construct thoughts is fundamentally different from English.. one example is the numerous ways they use reflexive verbs where we don’t, but it goes way beyond that. They have a preference to make their sentences feel elegantly crafted.
Don’t worry even the Italians don’t know passato remoto, unless you’re in Naples
@just_kiri Same in French; our conjugations are a nightmare, but in practice we only use a few of the tenses, and most French people are just unable to use the intricate, very literary ones such as past subjonctive (and I’m one of them). But you do have to know how to use the reflexive form.
Exactly the same in Spanish hahaha
@JACQUES MIARD Italian and French share 90% of the grammar, syntax and lexicon.
@Matteo Bertotti Spanish too.
Indonesian is my first language, and I learned English in school as foreign language. Based on my experience (comparing the pronunciation, grammar, etc), Indonesian is easier to learn than English 🤓
I’m colombian, I’m studying indonesian from duolingo and some other places, it’s super easy, but almost every word is totally new, that’s the downside
@andres I am Norwegian and I think Norwegian is the easiest language to learn for an english speaker because this to languages are near related to each other. But austronesian languages (like Indonesian) are easy to learn. My wife speak is filippina and she gave me a dictation in filippino and even I not have learn the language at all, I write much of it rigth because the pronunciation and writing is almost the same in austronesian languages. In english it is absolutely not so.
We had a huge influx of S Africans into New Zealand in the 90s when I was in high-school. We had a couple of Afrikaans speaking teachers and I would sometimes ask them about Afrikaans as I was studying German at the time and noticed how similar Afrikaans, German, and English all are (obviously, they’re all Germanic). I was amazed at how much Afrikaans I could read already. Listening is a bit tougher but I can totally agree that Afrikaans would be fairly easy for an English speaker to pick up.
Yes, all the Germanic languages are MUCH more similar than than they appear to be when you first hear them or see them written. For English speakers if you think of anything that was around for the Norman invasion in 1066. So basically anything around for King Arthur, the Round Table, & Maid Marian …. Those words in English are almost the same in ALL the Germanic languages. Sentences likemy “My mother is young”, “Ice is cold”. etc are almost the same in all of them.
afrikaans is baie maklik
I love the idea of the Norwegian Sprakkafe. I wish there were more of these type places in the UK to encourage people to learn languages.
I always thought my language skills were poor but a trip to Rio De Janeiro confirmed the opposite that my French and Spanish was still pretty good. Plus the Brazilian Portuguese I’d picked up. On a boat trip some Sao Paulo Italians also said I spoke fluent Italian. I guess getting a good base in one language can often help in others.
Spanish is a 2 out of 10, French a 3, Italian a 4, Portuguese 4, Latin 5, German 6, Greek 7, Ukrainian 7. Japanese is a 10. This is my evaluation from having studied these particular languages over my lifetime. Japanese is on top of NSA’s six “superhard” languages. Diplomats require much more effort over a longer time to master them. Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Finnish/Hungarian/Turkish, Chinese are the six categories. I just began Ukrainian in honor of my grandparents.
I have studied both Spanish and German and would say German is twice as hard, it’s surprisingly difficult. I’m not sure how much of the difficulty was lack of native speakers to practice with, there are just more native Spanish speakers where I live who want to do language exchanges.
@Hollis Williams good observations, thanks!
@Claudia Hansen is french really easier then Italian
@Batuhan Bayraktar yes, I think so, because the endings for adjectives have to change more than French in the plural and accusative. Otherwise, the structure, underlying word roots etc. are both of Latin derivation.
@Claudia Hansen thanks for this beneficial information. The reason why I asked this was because I want to learn five languages. I can Turkish English and German. At school I am learning Spanish but I couldn’t make up my mind about the 5 language.
Italian is only easy if you already know a romance language (for example French or Spanish). I personally started recently to learn Italian, and since I speak French and Spanish, it’s really a quite straightforward process 🙂
It’s very controversial when he says “we pronounce the way we read”. No, we don’t.
@Sarah Basto When do you pronounce the closed E and O vs the open E and O in Italian?
@Sarah Bastoi think its one of the easiest languages to read (at least between European languages, I don’t know others). But it surely isn’t a easy language: the grammar is very complex compared to English and it’s full of exceptions
Speaker of portuguese also think italian is easy
But you already know a huge portion of vocabulary if you speak Australian or American language, it consists 50% of romance words.
8:50 For major languages, Dutch probably is closest to English, but I believe that Frisian is even closer than Dutch to English. You can make sentences in both Frisian and English that not only mean the same thing, but sound almost identical, pointing to a deep connection between the two.
I came here just to see if anyone had already made that comment. I’m not a Frisian speaker, but I always thought it was even closer to English than Dutch is.
No clue if it is true or not, but I guess it is. I’ve heard Native Frisian speakers can read and understand medieval English more easily than English Native speakers.
The main difference between both languages is that Frisian is very Dutch-like and English is very French-like. This is the reason why English is the least Germanic language because it was heavily influenced by Old French and Latin.
@MEP Indeed – the Norman Conquest in 1066 basically made Norman French the language of the (new) English nobility, which eventually filtered down into the language of the common folk. Modern English is basically a hodge-podge of Old English (essentially what the original Anglo-Saxon settlers spoke, and much more Germanic), French (at least the Norman dialect), and a fair amount of Scandinavian influence (the Normans were originally Scandinavian, and the Danish among others invaded eastern England, putting their stamp on the language as well). No wonder it can be a tricky language for foreigners to learn.
The Normans were not Scandinavian, only a tiny part who settled in a very limited part of present day Normandy. This is why they all spoke French after 20 years.
I was in the U.S. Navy in the 80’s. We were visiting Norway so we brought along a Norwegian/English dictionary and made up our own sentences. We got along very well and I remember them to this day even with using them. Not fluent by any means but must agree it was relatively easy to begin learning.
Being a native speaker of Indonesian, honestly I was quite suprise that there’s verb conjugations, gendered nouns, articles, even tenses in other languages, because all of those feature doesn’t exist in my first language, I never realise how simple the Bahasa Indonesia is until I started to learn another language
Yeah
It’s funny. Not one but f those phenomena are necessary either.
But the high school level of national exam for Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia is harder than the English one 😂.
How can you do without tenses?
How do you even tell DID from DOES or WILL DO?
@Андрей Березин by the time indicators: yesterday, tomorrow, now, an hour ago, etc. And there’s Indonesian word for “will”: “akan”, and “have”: “sudah” or “telah”. But there’s no change in verbs when using those words.
@eRisforus that means you cant just say “I was walking”, you have to indicate certain time which makes it a very odd instrument. Like having a separate hand for every item you decide to grab. Very uncomfortable
Indonesian is a new language created in 1928, modified version of austonesian malay, more or less mixed with:
40% Dutch
30% Javanese
15% Arabian
10% Portuguese
5% various local tribe languages
Example of loanword in Indonesian:
Gorden, Kantor from Dutch (Gordijn, Kantoor) – (Curtain, Office)
Gede, Lengser from Javanese (Gedé, Léngsér) – (Huge, Fallen)
Kursi, Selasa from Arabian (كرسي/Kursiun, الثلاثاء/Thalatha) – (Chair, Tuesday)
Sepatu, Keju from Portuguese (Sapato, Queijo) – (Shoe, Cheese) .and many more.
As a polyglot, I agree. I have told many people that Afrikaans is the easiest language to learn. Indonesian is a surprisingly straightforward and easy language. Good list!
any tips on learning Spanish?
@K Immersion
Spanish has a lot of great content and stories(Woo Story Learning!)
You should also use the language
And the great thing about Spanish is that you can easily convert a lot of English words into Spanish with a couple rules
Like Tion becomes Ción
Words starting with S get an E before them mostly
So we go from Station to (la) estación
And there are even more tips and tricks
There is an audio course called Language Transfer that teaches how to do that but you can also read an article about these tricks
I think scots is the easiest language to learn
Prove me wrong i dare you
Swedish is also not a bad language either and in many ways is quite similar to Norwegian. My mom’s family is Svensk and Swedes are happy to help you learn the language as well. They love it when we attempt to speak it. And yes, they know of the “Swedish Chef” on the Muppet show over there too but tend to take it in stride. They know we anglophones sometimes consider Swedish to be a bit “singsongish” by the high and low tones/accents often heard.
As an American living in Denmark for almost 16 years, I can definitely say that learning Danish is not so easy. Even while living in the country, surrounded by the language, it’s been a real struggle. And I actually use the language daily!
As a symphony musician & conductor, I’m very familiar with many Italian & French words – though I don’t speak those languages. Many of these words have cognates in other languages, so I’m sometimes able to figure out foreign phrases I don’t know. Learning & speaking German actually improved my understanding of English grammar, so my German & music education prepared me to become an ESOL tutor.