The easiest second languages for English speakers are often Germanic or Romance languages like Dutch, Norwegian, Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese, due to shared vocabulary, grammar, or roots, with Norwegian often cited for simple grammar and Dutch/Spanish for high word similarity. Ultimately, the "easiest" depends on your native tongue, but these languages offer quick wins through cognates and familiar structures.
Depending on your goals and interests, you may want to choose a second language to study based on how easy it is to learn. Dutch, Spanish, and French are the easiest languages to learn if your first language is English.
The Most Important Languages To Learn
To become proficient in one of these languages, it usually takes 44 weeks of study or 1,110 classroom hours. Finally, the “Big Four.” According to the US Department of State, the four most difficult languages to learn are Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Korean.
Norwegian, Danish, and Dutch are easiest languages for English speakers due to shared Germanic root and simple grammar and familiar vocabulary. French, Italian, and Spanish are romance languages have familiar vocab and phonetic pronunciation but vary in grammar difficulty.
Duolingo's mock test is not 100% accurate, but it has gotten more accurate over time.
English is the number one international language (lingua franca), boasting around 1.5 billion total speakers, making it dominant in global business, technology, and tourism, even though Mandarin Chinese has more native speakers. While Mandarin is the largest by native speakers, English's vast number of second-language users cements its role as the primary global communication tool, followed by Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish in overall speaker numbers.
Frisian is the closest language to English
The closest language to English is Frisian. This Germanic language is spoken by about 400,000 people in an area historically known as Frisia—now within the modern regions of Netherlands and Germany.
They concluded that the ability to learn a new language, at least grammatically, is strongest until the age of 18 after which there is a precipitous decline. To become completely fluent, however, learning should start before the age of 10.
10 most fun languages to learn
The CIA needs pretty much every major language that you can think of. Their biggest concerns recently have been Middle Eastern languages, but they had a director (Leon Panetta) that basically said everyone who works at the CIA had to learn another language.
You can also identify your nearest endangered language.
Toki Pona is an isolating language with only 14 phonemes and an underlying feature of minimalism. It focuses on simple, near-universal concepts to maximize expression from very few words.
Spanish. This pick should come as no surprise. Spanish has always been a go-to language for English speakers to learn due to its practicality and wide reach. Well, it's also one of the easiest languages to learn for English speakers.
Generally speaking, Japanese is more difficult than Chinese when it comes to grammar. Mandarin Chinese is an analytical language, like English, and each word has only one form, no matter how it's being used in a sentence. It's also a subject-verb-object language, like English.
According to research, babies who experience language development earlier than average grow up to have higher IQ levels. This is mostly noticeable during adulthood. That being said, language delay is also the most common developmental delay experienced by children under the age of 3.
Yes, it's true that older language learners will have to work a bit harder than children. In fact, a study from Harvard and MIT found that children are able to absorb new languages faster than adults until the age of 18 or 19, and that the best age to learn a language is before 10 years old.
There's no single "number one" easiest language, as it depends on your native tongue, but for English speakers, Norwegian, Dutch, Afrikaans, Spanish, and Italian are consistently ranked as very easy due to similar Germanic roots (Norwegian, Dutch, Afrikaans) or shared Latin vocabulary (Spanish, Italian) with English, plus simple grammar and pronunciation. The truly easiest language is the one you're most motivated to learn and find engaging content in, as personal interest drives acquisition.
Here are some pretty similar pairs:
The Closest Major Language To English: Dutch
Like Frisian and English, Dutch is another West Germanic language that developed from Proto-Germanic. Because of this, Dutch possesses many words and phrases similar to English and has a similar grammatical structure.
Scots, a "sister language" so similar to English some consider it a dialect. Frisian, a close "cousin" to the English language that's still spoken today. Dutch, the closest major language to English. German, a related language that's distant enough to present language learning challenges.
Powell Alexander Janulus (born 1939) is a Canadian polyglot who lives in White Rock, British Columbia, and entered the Guinness World Records in 1985 for fluency in 42 languages.
Indeed, while some languages might have more entries in a standard dictionary, linguists and historians often crown Arabic as the undisputed richest language in the world due to its unique root system and massive lexical volume.
Tamil. The record holder for the world's oldest language still in use today goes to Tamil. Around 78 million people speak Tamil, mostly in Sri Lanka (an island nation southeast of India), southern India, and Singapore. Tamil is one of 300+ languages Propio works in for translation and interpretation services.