10 Easiest Languages to Learn for Anyone

Most people can only speak one language, we live in an era where the international relationship is everything. Have you been considering learning another language, possibly because of that vacation or that new job position abroad? Worry no more as this article will tell you the top 10 easiest languages to learn.

 

Esperanto

 

 

Esperanto is an artificial language. No country has it as its official language, nonetheless, it is a recognized language by the French Academy of Sciences and UNESCO. This artificial language is easy to learn particularly for Indo-European speakers. It was formulated in the late 19th century to serve as a universal second language, to enable unity and international understanding. Due to that goal, Esperanto has easy grammar, simple rules, and a lot of words that resemble words from other languages. It was created to be easy and to be understood with minimum effort.

 

 

Afrikaans

 

 

It is one of the world’s newest languages and it is spoken by approximately 8 million speakers in Namibia and South Africa. Afrikaans is a West Germanic language just like the English language and most of its words come from Dutch. It is easy to learn because there is no verb conjugation like English and does not have gender inflection like French. It is said to be a simplified version of Dutch.

 

 

French

 

 

Many of the English words are influenced by French vocabulary for example cliché, resumé, entrepreneur, financé, and many others some are even written in the same way, examples are; Table, information, attention e.t.c. For English speakers, French is an easy language to learn, the gendered nouns and word tones might be a little harder but weeks of learning will make you a pro in no time.

 

 

Spanish

 

 

Spanish is easy to learn because words are pronounced exactly how they are spelled most of the time, Although you will have to learn how to conjugate verbs, the truth is that the conjugated endings are generally similar and that you pronounce the words the way they are written and that makes Spanish an easy language to learn.

 

 

Italian

 

 

It is easier to learn Italian if you already speak any of these languages, such as Spanish, French, or Portuguese as they are very similar to Italian. However, even if you don’t speak any of the above languages, Italian is easy to pronounce because it has shallow orthography, and thus it is easy to know how an Italian word is pronounced just by its writing. Another component that makes Italian an easy language to learn is that English has several Italian borrowed words in its vocabulary and other phrases that are very similar to Italian ones.

 

 

Dutch

 

 

Because of structural and syntactic similarities, Dutch is a relatively simple language to learn for English speakers. In addition, the vocabulary matches the English one as well, with words such as Beer (Bier) and Good (Goed). The languages both have several French borrowed words, which means you can perhaps understand English words in the Dutch ones. The Dutch language however has a few sounds that are not found in the English language, like the ui-sound and the g-sound.

 

 

Swedish

 

 

It is also a Germanic language, Swedish includes many words that are related to English. An example of this is fot, the Swedish word for foot. Similar to English, Swedish has a Subject-Object-Verb structure and Swedish verbs do not have any tone, which implies that conjugations are simple. Swedish is often characterized as being a sing-song language and once you have learned the extra four vowels the language has, it can effortlessly be understood.

 

 

Norwegian

 

 

The Norwegian language has a very uniform pronunciation. In addition, the language is relatively simple to learn for English speakers as the syntax and word order of both languages are identical and Norwegian verbs are very simple because they do not have any inflections in respect to a number or person. Norwegian has a ‘pitch tone,’ which is a technique to stress whether the first or second syllable is identical words. The only hard part of learning Norwegian is that chances to speak the language are not very common as all Norwegians are taught English in school, so they are all good English speakers.

 

 

Frisian

 

 

The language is only spoken by approximately 500 thousand people in the north of the Netherlands, Frisian is a good alternative for English speakers to learn. It is the language that is nearest to the English language; the northern part of the Netherlands and England used to be in close contact because the canal used to be dry land for a long time. In the 8th century, the time of Old English, the two languages disconnected. The English and Frisian language has several similarities, which is also the same for the structure and tones of the vocabularies. To illustrate this, the verbal saying “Good butter and good cheese” (Goed bûter en goed tsiis). See how similar it looks in writing saying it out loud one would hardly tell apart which is English and which is Frisian.

 

 

Haitian Creole.

 

 

Learning Haitian Creole will be easy for French speakers. Being a French-based pidgin, both languages have several similar words. Some related words in both languages are aktivite / activité (activity), aprè / après (after), onz / onze (eleven,) and refòm / réforme (reform). The only difference between the two languages is that there is verb conjugation in French while Haitian Creole does not conjugate verbs.