Hardest and easiest languages to learn?

The good news is that agencies which need to have some idea in advance as to how fast their employees can pick up a foreign language have done all the hard work of figuring this out.

They rate the easiest languages for English speakers as things like: Africaans, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, etc.

And the hardest (for English speakers): Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese, Arabic, and Korean

Ok so why is this the case? Well most of the languages in the "easy" category are romantic languages (based on latin) or Germanic languages (which is the same family as English). English has been quite heavily influenced by romantic languages due to the widespread use of latin in (relatively) recent history and the fact that the English and the French have been invading each other and mixing their languages for like several hundred years.

The most difficult ones (typically middle Eastern, African, and Oriental languages) come from cultures which have had relatively little contact with English speakers historically so there are few if any similarities between the languages. Among these "little contact with English" languages, some happen to have a few similarities just by chance and some just happen to have almost no similarities. The ones that have had little to no contact with English in the past and happen to be really different in structure are the hardest ones. Mandarin for example uses symbols so there really is no "alphabet", there is also no way of knowing how to pronounce the words from seeing the symbols, the grammar (like past tense etc.) is completely different. All in all it is a perfect conglomeration of things that make it unintuitive and unnecessarily frustrating for English speakers to learn.

Hope that was helpful :)

I personally have way more problems with Chinese than I did with Japanese or Korean, so I'm going to say that's the hardest. French and Spanish would be the easiest.

If you're looking to learn a language different from English, then I recommend Japanese. The language itself is simple, accents are easy, and there's a ton of resources on it nowadays. All the kanji may be difficult, but not knowing them all doesn't get in the way of holding a decent conversation. Sure homophones can be a pain, but context usually eliminates that. Korean is fun too and has similar grammar, although the accent takes a tad more work and there's less learning resources.

I've heard that Vietnamese is also one of the easier ones, but I wouldn't know because I haven't found enough learning resources to try yet. It'd definitely be something worth looking in to if you can though.

Language classes I've taken: Spanish, Latin, Arabic, Cantonese Chinese, Mandarin Chinese and Arabic. I've learned other languages on my own or through friends and coworkers (I learned some Romanian from a family I used to work for, Hindi/Urdu, French, Hebrew, Dutch and Korean being the others).

1. Hardest language was Japanese. I naively assumed that it would be easy because some of the pronunciations and the writeen language was based on Chinese (which I had been learning since I was a child). WRONG. It only helped me a little, but there were a lot of differences that I would sometimes confuse the two. Even though Japanese written language is based on Chinese, they use 3 different systems to write (all based on Chinese in some way) - that can be very difficult.

I could also say that Chinese was very hard because it's a tonal language and the meanings change based on that (4 in Mandarin, 8/9 in Cantonese). That in and of itself is enough to be hard. And of course, the characters are not at all easy to write. Even though it's one complete system, we have Traditional and Simplified Characters, with Simplified being a kind of shorthand. But you can write in script and that would be a "true"shorthand.

2. The easiest was either Spanish or Arabic. Spanish because my parent's best friends (who lived next door) were Puerto Rican so I grew up around it. Of course, I'm from NY, so there's a lot of Spanish speakers here. I did incredibly well in it.

Arabic was easy for me (and it's considered a difficult language actually) but I think it was because I had a genuine interest in it (even though it was a required language for me).

I've tried many languages, from as simple as Norwegian and Afrikaans to Chinese and Arabic.

The hardest was Russian, due to the weird sounds and declensions.

The easiest was Thai (although I never studied the script) because of the simple grammar.

I find analytical languages (languages without conjugation, declension, gender, plurals, etc.) to be the easiest to speak, although the writing is hard. Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai are examples of these languages. The word order is a bit tough, but otherwise one can easily become proficient in speaking the language (writing and reading can take a bit more work, though).

The hardest languages, in my opinion, are the Slavic languages because of foreign declensions, irregular conjugations, the neuter gender, and strange phonologies. Slovene also has a dual number (a special declension for two of an item), making it even more complex.

For me the most difficult would be Chinese or Thai! I don't know any languages related to them, and the tone system looks daunting to learn. They are awesome languages however, and hats off to whoever can learn them well!

Since I speak Persian fluently, the easiest languages for me to learn would be any Indo-Iranian language like Hindi or Pashto, or any Turkic language like Turkish or Kazakh. The Turkic languages have borrowed alot of Persian words and their structure is gramatically (but not lexically) very similar to Indo-Iranian (but not other Indo-European languages, they're a whole different story).

Also, with regards to any native monolingual English speaker, Swahili or Indonesian would be easy and useful languages to learn. They are in fact easier to learn than even some Indo-European languages like Russian or Greek. They have simple agglutinative patterns and have simple phonology which is easy for English speakers to learn! They're also offer a window to Islamic-influenced cultures in Africa and Southeast Asia.

I haven't taken any courses but I will say:

Hardest- Japanese/Chinese- I'm learning Japanese and there are 2,000 characters used in ones daily life plus the grammar is hard but pronunciation is easy. My friend, who is studying Chinese says it's hard for pronunciation and from what I know there is 4 different tones then after that there is the same kanji found in Japanese and Chinese but Chinese originally had kanji which Japanese adopted. Once again though, my friend said Chinese grammar is easier.

Easiest- Spanish/French/English- I had to take French from grade 5-grade 9 here in Canada and French was pretty easy but I dropped it; I hear Spanish is a lot like French. English is easy in my opinion because for some verbs we have no conjugations like other languages, no feminine and muscline stuff. But often, non-native speakers find "the," "a" and "it" hard plus some prounication such as:

Night (Nait)

Why?

For my, Japanese is hard because it looks hard to foreigners like: 私の家に来てください！- Please come to my house. I honestly thought it was going to be super hard and before I have felt like quitting but it is a truly important thing for me.