What's the easiest foreign language to learn?

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Depends, is your native language english?

If yes, than Arabic, Russian, Chinese and Hindi would probably be in the harder group of languages to learn.

Out of your list I only speak german, it's grammar is more complicated than english, pronunciation I would say is easier (and more easy to get from the spelling). There are lots of words fairly similar to english so the vocab isn't too bad, only hard part of that is memorizing which of the three genders go with each noun.

Edit: Didn't see the other category, Swedish is also easier than german. But practically not very useful for most people.
 
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Spanish is supposedly one of the easiest languages to learn. Also, it's useful.
 
panvard92 said:
In terms of work/understanding

Spanish
Italian
French
Chinese
German
Russian
Hindi
Arabic
Other (specify 🙂)
Click to expand...

Chinese and Japanese are very hard to learn. The characters are insane. Native speakers like me had to learn 5,000 different characters from grade 1 to 9. 😱

crazycomplexcharacter.png
 
Forget easy. Jump straight to Latin and Greek!

You ought to have some goals beyond learning any language 'just to learn one.'

Spanish has some social use.
French is a literary language. There are plenty of scholarly works out there (mostly dealing with literature or linguistics) that will quote a paragraph written in French and never bother translating it, on the assumption you should already be able to read it yourself. Spanish doesn't get that kind of respect. Well, or even quoted<G>.
German for some science writing, especially chemistry.
Etc.
 
The only language that I have studied on your list is spanish, and I actually found it fairly easy to pick up.
 
In my opinion, Spanish or Chinese (which is harder) will probably provide the most benefits. IF you become a doctor a lot of patients you might need to communicate with are either hispanic or chinese, this is of course based on the place i volunteer (hospital) and the various types of patients i see.
 
Styria said:
French is a literary language. There are plenty of scholarly works out there (mostly dealing with literature or linguistics) that will quote a paragraph written in French and never bother translating it, on the assumption you should already be able to read it yourself.
Click to expand...

😍 Social use, psht. Who needs that? 😀

I think the easiest would have to be Spanish, although people tell me it becomes more difficult in later years. I already know Russian (native language) and have been taking French in high school, so my next point of attack is Italian. 😀 These may be more difficult, but in my opinion, totally worth it, since I'm disgruntled with having to read great literary works...translated.
 
Algophiliac said:
But...what girl in any country can resist the romance languages? :laugh:
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Yeah, you won that one. Let see. But I am Asian dude. Speaking French won't help me in the process of "Do one." 😡
 
tennisball80 said:
Yeah, you won that one. Let see. But I am Asian dude. Speaking French won't help me in the process of "Do one." 😡
Click to expand...

Dammit. 😀 Not to worry, I'm sure being a doctor will do the trick. Saving lives is just sexy.
 
Ahahahaha.

Trust Tennis and Algo to turn any conversation into finding a way to 'score'.
 
Algophiliac said:
We're very concerned about our scores. 😀
Click to expand...

Dude, what are you talking about ? Scores ? :bullcrap:

We have been talking about residency and saving lives. Not scores.

We are all interested in saving lives and want to have the highest moral standards as future physicians.
 
tennisball80 said:
Dude, what are you talking about ? Scores ? :bullcrap:

We have been talking about residency and saving lives. Not scores.

We are all interested in saving lives and want to have the highest moral standards as future physicians.
Click to expand...

Well of course! I meant our exam scores and residency rotation scores, which will lead to saving more lives. 😀 We have the absolute highest moral standards for the future.
 
:hijacked:

CScull. What a surprise to see that you posted on this thread.
 
Ah, I love you guys.
 
Lol. Future Moddess, I am not. They take the time to explain things to newbies, and I'm like, "Dudes, Google is your friend. Wikipedia is your friend. Your guidance counselor is your friend. Seriously."

ETA: Languages. Fo sho.
 
Hey if we just say languages in every post, is that staying on topic?

Haha, at least your not the one asking the stupid questions, I'm very relient on Maygyver and his "Let Me Google that For You".
 
Isn't using languages in every post technically staying on topic? 😀

And google and wikipedia are my most used sites. Closely followed by SDN now.
 
I love google. It's awesome, there are points in time where I'm too lazy to open a new internet explorer and type in google and then search what I want to... so I post on here and "poof!"

It's magic.

I think if we do say something about languages it would at least make us look like we're tryin to stay on topic...
 
CScull said:
I love google. It's awesome, there are points in time where I'm too lazy to open a new internet explorer and type in google and then search what I want to... so I post on here and "poof!".
Click to expand...

This.

In big, bold red letters. At the top of this forum.

We'd have about a third of the posts that we do now.

(Languages. Fun. I am fluent in Pig Latin!)
 
You've lost me Tib. This has been happening quite often lately... stupid spaziness.

(I've never been very good at the language of Pig Latin.)
 
We need a post telling people to check Google before they ask questions. S'all.

I'm moderately fluent at sign language. Yay me!
 
OOOOOH.

Thanks for that.

I feel slightly idiotic.

No more so than normal though, so it's good.

Er... I know how to say I love you in sign language... and parts of the alphabet...
 
Latin is super easy, but you have to want to only be in it for the grade. You get like...no practical use out of it.

I'm going to have to take a year of language in college, and I'm interested in German. The ugly, abrupt sounds get me every time 😛
 
I have studied French, Spanish, and Chinese, and my opinion is that languages that are more similar to your native language in both grammar and vocab are easier to learn. Chinese is difficult because it is so different. Things like the characters(they take a lot of work to memorize... even the simplified ones, and I only know about 2 or 3 hundred) and the four tones make it harder for a native English speaker like me to learn, even having heard them occasionally since I was little and having had Chinese lessons when I was little. Basically, if you go Chinese (or any really-different-from-English language) it's a lot of work.

French, was the only language at my school from kindergarten through 3rd grade (before the French teacher retired and we got a Spanish teacher), and I don't remember much. All I really know about French as a language is that things are not spelled how they sound (I hated French words when I was doing spelling bees).

Spanish has lots of nice cognates and the only part I can think of off the top of my head that I don't like are all the conjugations, but you'll see that in a lot of languages.

Oh, and I heard somewhere that either Finnish or Icelandic was known as really hard to learn, especially in terms of grammar.

Don't know how much this helps, but it's all I've got.
 
Algophiliac said:
😍 Social use, psht. Who needs that? 😀

I think the easiest would have to be Spanish, although people tell me it becomes more difficult in later years. I already know Russian (native language) and have been taking French in high school, so my next point of attack is Italian. 😀 These may be more difficult, but in my opinion, totally worth it, since I'm disgruntled with having to read great literary works...translated.
Click to expand...

=D

I'm slowly learning Homeric Greek so I can read the Iliad. And I got to play with Estonian one weekend and Hebrew another. Heeee!
 
Spanish seems to be fairly easy if english is your native language
 
I've studied German, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Arabic, and Hebrew for at least a semester each (most for a year or more) and here's what I can tell you:

Arabic and Hebrew are grammatically very very simple.
German is grammatically complicated but there are a lot of cognates and pronunciation is really simple.
Japanese is grammatically simple in sentence structure, but there are a lot of different levels of formality of saying things, plus different vocabularies for males and females. Pronunciation is pretty easy and it's vastly simpler than Chinese. Japanese has a phonetic alphabet as well as word-stem characters.
Russian is pretty fun. More complicated grammatically than Arabic or Hebrew but less so than German.
French pronunciation and grammar I found difficult.
Spanish is pretty easy but grammatically nearly as complicated as Russian or German. As is French.

Ease also has to do with your particular learning style. I'd say forget ease and go for usefulness. Arabic and Spanish will be useful, most likely, especially in medicine where you might be treating immigrants sometimes. As will Russian if you plan to go anywhere in Europe east of Düsseldorf. Japanese and Chinese would be very useful in business. German is useless because all Germans speak better English than most congressmen. (I know from experience, sadly – I majored in it and spent a year there).
 
panvard92 said:
In terms of work/understanding

Spanish
Italian
French
Chinese
German
Russian
Hindi
Arabic
Other (specify 🙂)
Click to expand...

well...german is apparuntli veri similar to english...most ppl i no found it easy

french is not hard really, the onli thing about it is that its grammar rules are complex n there are loads!
 
A lot of it depends on when you start taking it too. It's much easier to learn a language when you're younger and/or you speak more than 1 other language.

I started taking Spanish in 7th grade. I was able to pick up a good "Mexican" accent (that's what we were taught), and I was fluent at one point. It has been extremely helpful when there's no translator around. I've also had hispanic people ask me where in Mexico I was born (the answer is California).

I started German when I was a freshman in college. It was fun, but I think having the basis of Spanish made it easier to learn some of the grammar, but I never did nearly as well as Spanish, and I forgot it much faster. I can still understand it when I hear it or read it, but my speaking ability is very poor. I have not needed to use German at all other than when I travel to German speaking places.
 
panvard92 said:
In terms of work/understanding

Spanish
Italian
French
Chinese
German
Russian
Hindi
Arabic
Other (specify 🙂)
Click to expand...

If you learn latin, it will make learning spanish, italian, french, and the other romance languages a breeze. I thing spanish is the easiest and most useful. If you can learn to speak english, spanish, mandarin chinese, and arabic you can speak to almost anyone on the planet (at least that is what my spanish teacher told me)
 
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