What's the easiest language to understand?

[Corinnebelle]

I'm sure this changes depending on your native language. But what is the easiest language to understand as far as idioms, sentence structure and grammar? Not talking about sounds here, pronunciation or languages scripts. But complexity or simplicity regardless of culture inferences. Which languages describe things the simplest versus more in more complexity.

Is this a different question to the easiest language to learn?

[Explorer]

That's an interesting question. I have always heard that Indonesian is one of the easiest languages to learn, even for speakers of European languages. You can understand it pretty quickly thanks to its regular grammar rules (it's not Esperanto, but still...). I haven't studied it in depth to give an educated opinion, but quite a few polyglots seem to agree.

Moreover, with over 200 million speakers, I think it's a really appealing language for those who are looking for something new and different.

And if you're still hesitating about how great this language is, just take a look at the country where it is spoken:

[Corinnebelle]

[mention]Explorer[/mention] I have heard Indonesian is easy.

[Meli578588]

For me it’s French . I grew up with Italian so maybe it’s close related.

By the way , can anyone tell me a little bit about Esperanto please .

[FurbyZeKat]

By the way , can anyone tell me a little bit about Esperanto please .

Best place to start is here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

It's the most successful constructed language. It had a great momentum at the beginning of the previous century but its internationalism didn't fit with the view of most dictators and populist governments. The Internet and Duolingo recently helped to raise the number of learners and resources.

Just curious - Japanese and Chinese : Which is harder to learn ?

Chinese has a very simple grammar, but it's a tonal language and the writing system is a challenge. Japanese has a somehow simpler writing system, thanks to syllabic alphabets. Anyway, for westerners they are considered as equally hard languages to learn. Your success will depend on your immersion with them (TV, music, people, chats, etc.)

[gmads]

[...] what is the easiest language to understand as far as idioms, sentence structure and grammar?

I'd definitely say that English should be among the top 3 if not at the very top. Such an uncomplicated language! It's a beauty: it is direct and straight-forward, it has a reduced number of elements —no gender, one definite article, two indefinite singular articles, three verbs conjugations—, it is flexible —not in its word order but in how words can be transformed from one grammatical category to another—, it has adapted quite well to embrace technological terms, and it is simple —forget about having to deal with the irrational complexities of clitics and their diabolic descendants: reflexive verbs et. al. As I first said, it is an uncomplicated language.

I have always heard that Indonesian is one of the easiest languages to learn, even for speakers of European languages. You can understand it pretty quickly thanks to its regular grammar rules.

I have also heard that, though I've never read anything beyond that. So it should probably be among the top three.

Just a few days ago I was wondering what would be the smallest and simplest language in the world; it turned out to be Toki Pona —which is closely followed by Mini.

So, given what is being said about Toki Pona, it should probably be among the three top easiest languages to understand.

Is this a different question to the easiest language to learn?

In principle it should not be, but I'd say it would depend on the complete characteristics of the language chosen to be the easiest language to understand.

---

  ㆍenglish ㆍgeneral ㆍdebate

[Upbeat 88]

I could just imagine how much it is to get a plane ticket there and back to
the U.S.A

[Explorer]

Just curious - Japanese and Chinese : Which is harder to learn ? I tried them both at first and there was no way ! Chinese seems harder for some reason. I stuck with my first choice , Japanese.

According to the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), Chinese and Japanese are Category 5 languages. That is, they are among the most difficult languages to learn. Chinese grammar is easier but the tones are hard to grasp, especially when people speak fast. On the other hand, Japanese pronunciation is simpler but the grammar is way more difficult. The Keigo (honorific speech) is a fundamental skill that takes several years to master. It's really hard to learn if you don't live in Japan.

I have also heard that, though I've never read anything beyond that. So it should probably be among the top three.

Indonesian is an inflexive language. There are no verb tenses, no grammatical gender, no adjective or noun modifications, no tones, it's easy to read and it's pronounced like it's written. The grammar is so simple and consistent that once you have learned something, you almost don't have to worry about exceptions or irregularities. Reaching fluency depends to a large extent on how fast you're able to add words to your vocabulary.

[FurbyZeKat]

So, given what is being said about Toki Pona, it should probably be among the three top easiest languages to understand.

I wouldn't say that. I'm far from being an expert but I've translated short texts into tokipona and it's very difficult to express most concepts with only 120 root words, and you can be pretty sure that the reader will understand something else.

Tokipona could be interesting as a spoken language when you're talking about topics around or in context of the situation of the persons talking.

[Meli578588]

French it the easiest for me and Japanese is the hardest so far.

[Corinnebelle]

They say French is beautiful and simple with few words compared to English. It is very interesting reading viewpoints on this subject.

[mention]Explorer[/mention]
Indonesian is an inflexive language. There are no verb tenses, no grammatical gender, no adjective or noun modifications, no tones, it's easy to read and it's pronounced like it's written. The grammar is so simple and consistent that once you have learned something, you almost don't have to worry about exceptions or irregularities. Reaching fluency depends to a large extent on how fast you're able to add words to your vocabulary.

How does one mark time in an inflexive language?

[Explorer]

@Explorer

Indonesian is an inflexive language. There are no verb tenses, no grammatical gender, no adjective or noun modifications, no tones, it's easy to read and it's pronounced like it's written. The grammar is so simple and consistent that once you have learned something, you almost don't have to worry about exceptions or irregularities. Reaching fluency depends to a large extent on how fast you're able to add words to your vocabulary.

How does one mark time in an inflexive language?

There's no verb conjugation in Indonesian, so time has to be marked with adverbs: I eat now, I eat yesterday, I eat tomorrow, I eat later, etc.

[gmads]

So, given what is being said about Toki Pona, it should probably be among the three top easiest languages to understand.

I wouldn't say that. I'm far from being an expert but I've translated short texts into tokipona and it's very difficult to express most concepts with only 120 root words, and you can be pretty sure that the reader will understand something else.

It sounds logical, yes, a set too small. Now I need to consider which language I would then propose as the third easiest to understand, along with English and Indonesian —from my point of view.

[Deleted User 114]

The 9 easiest languages to learn for English speakers: (says Babbel)

Norwegian
Swedish
Spanish
Dutch
Portuguese
Indonesian
Italian
French
Swahili

I recently watched a 1980’s film called Babbette’s Feast, it was mostly in Danish and French. There were subtitles, but I was quite surprised on how many Danish words I recognized that we use in English today.

[FurbyZeKat]

Now I need to consider which language I would then propose as the third easiest to understand, along with English and Indonesian —from my point of view.

From your point of view, it will most probably be Esperanto. Sendube vi povas tre rapide lerni kaj kompreni esperanton.

[Stasia]

It sounds logical, yes, a set too small. Now I need to consider which language I would then propose as the third easiest to understand, along with English and Indonesian —from my point of view.

English is indeed very easy, because of its simplistic grammar (one way of looking at it, is that Middle and Modern English are basically a glorified pidgin between Old English, Norse, and French). Pronunciation is a pain, though, because of the Great Vowel Shift, so it's easier to write English than to speak it.

Then there are languages like Quechua, where grammar is painful, but there is a beautiful logic to word-making: once you know some verbs and a few suffixes that can transform meanings of these verbs, you can create other verbs, adverbs, and nouns. And there are no exceptions!!! Once you learn a rule, that's it, no exceptions.

Personally, however, I found Spanish to be the easiest. Grammar is not too bad (comparing with my native Polish) and pronunciation is a breeze. Now, if it weren't for the Cyrillic, I'd consider Ukrainian to be the easiest (because it's so close to Polish), but the alphabet simply doesn't want to stay in my head and I sound like a semi-literate person when trying to read a text.

[Explorer]

Once you learn a rule, that's it, no exceptions.

I believe this is a key concept when classifying a language as "easy" or "difficult", regardless of the complexity of its grammar. Learning a rule and being sure there are no exceptions to that rule is a great relief for any learner. Unfortunately, human beings seem to love irregularities

[HeavenBender]

Hi Corinnebelle!

If you're specifically asking for the easiest language to understand, I would most definitely rule out Chinese (my heritage language). Not just Mandarin Chinese, but all varieties of the Chinese language. It's incredibly simple in terms of sentence structure in grammar, but it's a language rich in idioms in proverbs, and native speakers of all backgrounds love to use them in conversation AND formal contexts a lot.

For native speakers of English, German is notorious for its difficult grammar and sentence structures. It's not really that German has complex grammar but rather that it has grammar different from that of English.

I would say that most Romance and Germanic languages (with the exceptions of German and Icelandic) are easy to understand for native English speakers because of their simple sentence structures. Also, not only are idioms in European languages not as common as in Chinese, but a lot of idioms are also used in English.

[Izabela]

Now I need to consider which language I would then propose as the third easiest to understand, along with English and Indonesian —from my point of view.

From your point of view, it will most probably be Esperanto. Sendube vi povas tre rapide lerni kaj kompreni esperanton.

Based off my own experience, Esperanto is certainly one of the easier ones out there, and was immensely helpful to me break down the barrier of wondering if it was even possible for me learn a language other than my native tongue, English.

Laŭ mia sperto, Esperanto estas sendube unu el la pli facilaj lingvoj. Ĝi multe helpis min ke mi povu rompi ian muron inter scivolema mi kaj ĉi tiu mi kiu lernas multe da lingvoj. Kvankam plejparte mi legas kaj tre malofte parolas la lingvojn kun aliaj personoj. Eble iun tagon mi trovos aliajn kiuj helpos min kaj tiam mi vere lernas audi kaj paroli alialingve.

[Izabela]

I took a first dip into Haitian Creole soon after Duolingo opened up the course and this past week finally cycled back to it. Of course, I'm at least to some extent helped a lot by having a pretty good passive vocabulary from French so that helps me recognize a decent number of words by looking at them and then go rummaging in the French vocabulary to find what sounds close.

From what I've read though, the grammar is certainly not French, but instead likely mostly based upon grammar rules and structures found in a West African Volta-Congo language branch. It certainly baffled me quite a bit back earlier this year, but now I'm getting a sense of it and I very much enjoy the tricks of it when they start to make sense to me. The grammar probably underwent at least some simplification from its birth as a creole language meant to facilitate communication between the speakers of different languages. Perhaps that kind of simplification, though not done with the kind of intent as used by LL Zamenhoff and his constructed language of Esperanto, is helpful.

Again my opinion here is certainly influenced a great deal now by how much I've managed to slowly learn since 2010 and I got the itch to see if this aging brain of mine could learn a new language. So when I do study language these days, I have practice with knowing better what works for me.

[zerogrqvity]

[mention]Meli578588[/mention] I believe Japanese is harder to learn. When I first started Japanese, I'd heard this saying, "It is harder to learn any other language than Japanese if you speak English." I've lived on that and tried even harder.

Hope this answered your question

[Meli578588]

Thank you !

[SweNedGuy]

A case for interlingua

https://ia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendice ... nterlingua

The link is an introductory wikipedia page to learning the Interlingua grammar. The Interlingua wikipedia counts close to 25000 articles.

Unlike a synthetic highly structural language like Esperanto, Interlingua is more intuitive and it draws most of its vocabulary from Romance languages. English has close to 60% of its vocabulary from Romance languages.

I have listened once to an interlingua speaker and I didn't have any difficulty understanding. Native or L2 speakers of either Italian or Spanish can understand Interlingua completely without even missing any nuance. Native English speakers without any Romance L2 will experience some more difficulties.

[gmads]

A case for interlingua

https://ia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendice ... nterlingua

The link is an introductory wikipedia page to learning the Interlingua grammar. The Interlingua wikipedia counts close to 25000 articles.

Unlike a synthetic highly structural language like Esperanto, Interlingua is more intuitive and it draws most of its vocabulary from Romance languages. English has close to 60% of its vocabulary from Romance languages.

I have listened once to an interlingua speaker and I didn't have any difficulty understanding. Native or L2 speakers of either Italian or Spanish can understand Interlingua completely without even missing any nuance. Native English speakers without any Romance L2 will experience some more difficulties.

Great... I'll be taking a look at the link. Thanks.

[Corinnebelle]

[mention]gmads[/mention] I found this interesting article on toki pona on archive.ph It would certainly shrink the world, it would lose its color, but than it may open up possibilities for thought, make the world more fluid since it's based on physics and basics.

[Pinta]

[...] what is the easiest language to understand as far as idioms, sentence structure and grammar?

I'd definitely say that English should be among the top 3 if not at the very top. Such an uncomplicated language! It's a beauty: it is direct and straight-forward, it has a reduced number of elements —no gender, one definite article, two indefinite singular articles, three verbs conjugations—, it is flexible —not in its word order but in how words can be transformed from one grammatical category to another—, it has adapted quite well to embrace technological terms, and it is simple —forget about having to deal with the irrational complexities of clitics and their diabolic descendants: reflexive verbs et. al. As I first said, it is an uncomplicated language.

I don't think English is an easy language to learn. It really depend on your native language. If you speak Spanish or French, learning English might be relatively easy. But if you speak Japanese or Korean, it's very challenging. I guess English is pretty easy language among Latin languages, but it is still hard. Basically Latin languages are all complicated. They have upper case and lower case, cursive, silent letters, and complex grammar(they don't make any sense. For example, in English, why plural of paper is paper instead of papers?).

And it's vice versa too. If you speak English, it will be hard to learn languages like Japanese or Korean. So it all depends on your native language after all. English is definitely not the hardest language to learn, but not the easiest either.

[gmads]

[...] what is the easiest language to understand as far as idioms, sentence structure and grammar?

I'd definitely say that English should be among the top 3 if not at the very top. Such an uncomplicated language! It's a beauty: it is direct and straight-forward, it has a reduced number of elements —no gender, one definite article, two indefinite singular articles, three verbs conjugations—, it is flexible —not in its word order but in how words can be transformed from one grammatical category to another—, it has adapted quite well to embrace technological terms, and it is simple —forget about having to deal with the irrational complexities of clitics and their diabolic descendants: reflexive verbs et. al. As I first said, it is an uncomplicated language.

I don't think English is an easy language to learn. It really depend on your native language. If you speak Spanish or French, learning English might be relatively easy. But if you speak Japanese or Korean, it's very challenging.

I think it would be best to start from the start.

I'm sure this changes depending on your native language. But what is the easiest language to understand as far as idioms, sentence structure and grammar? Not talking about sounds here, pronunciation or languages scripts. But complexity or simplicity regardless of culture inferences. Which languages describe things the simplest versus more in more complexity.

Is this a different question to the easiest language to learn?

Corinnebelle initially mentioned it, this changes depending on your native language, and you also agreed with that, "It really depend on your native language."

I'd say we can all definitely concord that from the actual understanding-a-language point of view the only real possible answer is, it depends on your native language, there's no going around this. However, if we discard the native language factor, then we must talk about learning the language, since no one can understand any language without learning it.

Corinnebelle also established that, Not talking about sounds here, pronunciation or languages scripts, but since one cannot put aside this factor while learning a language, let's consider it briefly.

I may not know the meaning of a written word in Spanish or in English, but at least I can read it and pronounce it (even if in English I could err a bit on a particularly unknown complex word). However, Chinese characters may have two or three readings, in the best of cases, up to even a hundred! Yes, Japanese may have a simpler phonetic system than English (words written in Katakana or Hiragana sound as they are written), but I think most people would favor the idea that it is simpler to learn one reading per word (e.g. thou, though, thought, dough, tough) than tens. Yes, the English phonetic system is weird…

en-ghoti-fish.png (72.58 KiB) Viewed 13519 times

… but nothing beyond reasonable.

The core of Corinnebelle's question was: as far as idioms, sentence structure and grammar.

English has phrasal verbs, and in Spanish we have "perífrasis verbales." I'm willing to bet that most languages have their own peculiar idiomatic system. Regarding sentence structure, each language has one, thus, people used to a SVO structure (English) will suffer when jumping to the SOV train (Japanese), and viceversa. So, in general terms, these two points apply the same to all languages. Therefore, "as far as idioms, sentence structure and grammar" goes, we are only left with the language grammatical aspects to determine if a language is easier to learn than others or not.

All languages definitely have their own complexities, but if one were to create a comparison table with those of each language, in each and every sense, I sincerely think that English would be among the least complicated ones, thus, making it one of the easiest to learn. This, of course, doesn't mean that learning it will be an effortless endeavor. Of course it won't, especially as an adult. Regardless of the learner's native language, for the average person —those not interested in languages and without any experience learning them,— who might dedicate maybe four hours a week to go to a school and a few others for self-studying and homework, learning English will definitely be an effort that will last many many years.

I am no polyglot, Spanish is my native language, I manage along with English, and I have finished a few Italian online courses, though I am far far far away from being fluent. At one point or another I have twiddled with Bulgarian, Russian, German and Japanese. Currently I'm doing the Portuguese, Russian and Arabic Duolingo courses. From this little experience is from where I part to conclude what I think about English, that is, that as a whole it must be among the easiest to learn.

Japanese may lack the concept of noun gender or number, but having different counting systems, depending on what is being counted? Really?!

• Counting in Japanese: Objects of All Shapes and Sizes

  In Japanese, there are specific counters for specific items based on the nature, size and shape of the thing […]
  
  There are way more specific counters in Japanese, but these are probably the ones that are used frequently.

They may have only two verb tenses but then again, be ready to deal with the hierarchical social system of the language.

• Hierarchical Language - Japanese

  Japanese takes various forms, spoken and written, simple and honorific, general and polite, male and female, the aged and the young. Different industry and occupations also have different ways of speaking the language. It reflects the hierarchy and unity of the Japanese society. Japanese has an extensive honorific speech system, and the use of it in formal occasion sees the elegance in the Japanese language. However, the complicated grammar system makes learning honorific speech difficult. Even native Japanese cannot master the use of honorific speech thoroughly.

That last sentence is also an issue regarding the Chinese characters in their writing system (i.e. native people not being able to read them with confidence, at least when considering all those characters not used on everyday life).

I guess English is pretty easy language among Latin languages, but it is still hard.

English inherited many words from Latin, however, it belongs to what is called the West Germanic group, which includes German, English, and Dutch.

• Family of Language

Regardless of the family to which English belongs, yes, it is a pretty easy to learn language.

Basically Latin languages are all complicated. They have upper case and lower case, cursive, silent letters, and complex grammar(they don't make any sense. For example, in English, why plural of paper is paper instead of papers?).

Yes, but so are all languages.

Many languages use uppercase and lowercase letters, however, beyond the rules that many share (starting a sentence, personal names, etc), English language isn't particularly burdened with them. From what I know, German uses them more.

Do you mean cursive as in the style used in handwriting, like print vs. cursive? If so, yes, a number of alphabets, like Greek, Latin, Cyrillic and Armenian, use them, but other kind of scripts have more complex characteristics. Arabic, for example, may have three different shapes for a same letter depending on its position within a word. Also, many scripts tend to make optional the writing of the vowels, making it very hard for non-native speakers to deduce them.

Yes, Romance languages (Italian, French, etc) tend to have complex grammars, but I don't think that English (a Germanic language) comes closer to them, let alone to languages that also have a large case system, like Arabic, German, Quechua or Russian, among many others. So, there are languages with more complex grammars than those from Romance languages.

Pluralization might seem difficult when one comes from a language that does not uses it. Collective nouns is part of the pluralization system. Anyway, grammatically speaking, there are far more difficult concepts to deal with. For example, something as relatively innocent looking as prepositions, is without any doubt everyone's headache in any language.

And it's vice versa too. If you speak English, it will be hard to learn languages like Japanese or Korean. So it all depends on your native language after all.

Yes, that is true, but the general idea was trying to see, from a purely objective point of view (i.e. imagining that this could be done without taking into account one's own native language), which could be considered the easiest languages to learn.

English is definitely not the hardest language to learn, but not the easiest either.

I don't know if there is an "easiest" language to learn, but there are easier ones, or so it is said.

• 5 easy languages to learn

• Which languages are the easiest to learn?
  
  

Perhaps we could answer this question more easily if we tried to answer the opposite one: which are the most complicated languages to learn? As soon as we began to move forward, answering it little by little, we would be left with those easiest to learn. Of course, in order to arrive at any useful answer in a relatively short time and with the least amount of effort, the analysis would have to consider only the fifty (or even less? thirty?) most widely spoken languages in the world… or would anyone dare to compare the almost seven thousand languages that currently exist, along with the almost three hundred scripts that are used?

[MoniqueMaRie]

@gmads : there is a list of the most difficult languages composed by UNESCO

https://synergyfocusblog.wordpress.com/ ... the-world/

My comments on the first four of the list:

1.) I don't know how I would feel about Chinese if I had not had such a good teacher.
2.+3.) I cannot judge Greek and Arabic because I never tried to learn them.
4.) But for Icelandic, I can say that it is the hardest language I have ever tried to learn. So far, only a few words have stuck in my brain (using language drops), no grammar. My textbook seems to be useless.

[gmads]

@gmads : there is a list of the most difficult languages composed by UNESCO

https://synergyfocusblog.wordpress.com/ ... the-world/

My comments on the first four of the list:

1.) I don't know how I would feel about Chinese if I had not had such a good teacher.
2.+3.) I cannot judge Greek and Arabic because I never tried to learn them.
4.) But for Icelandic, I can say that it is the hardest language I have ever tried to learn. So far, only a few words have stuck in my brain (using language drops), no grammar. My textbook seems to be useless.

Wow! Great! I'll take a look at them. Thanks!

[Pinta]

@gmads
I apologize for my mistake. I was wrong about English being hard language to learn. Surely there are bunch of other languages that are way harder than English. After reading your reply, I realized that I was being ignorant. I didn't even know English is a Germanic language (to be honest, I didn't even know the difference between Romance language and Germanic language) . My knowledge was so shallow compared to yours, but I acted like I know everything. I'm really sorry about that.
My native language is Korean, which has one of the easiest writing system in the world. It doesn't distinguish upper case and lower case, and doesn't have additional writing system(cursive). Maybe that's why I thought English is so hard.

Thanks for taking your time to read my reply. And again, I'm sorry for being thoughtless.