Top 7 Easiest Languages to Learn (#7 May Surprise You) (2023)

Who says learning a language needs to be hard? The better question is, what are the easiest languages to learn in the shortest amount of time?

According to a European Commission survey in 2012, 61 per cent of British respondents could not speak a second language. In a world that's becoming more multicultural and globalized by the second, getting by with just English is simply not enough.

If that alone doesn't get your juices flowing, learning a language has shown to help you make more money by adding 5-15% increase to one's wage, and helps expand your career opportunities.

We've already written extensively about the most useful languages to learn, but what are the easiest languages to learn?

Playing to your strengths

One way to hack this process is to first understand that as English speakers, we have in our hands one of the most connected languages that exists. It's linked to many European Germanic languages by descent or influence, and over 50 percent of English words stem from Latin or French.

Top 7 Easiest Languages to Learn (#7 May Surprise You) (1)

This probably doesn't come as a big surprise to most, as the structure, alphabet, and makeup of the language is very similar to Spanish, Italian, French, and other languages from the latin root.

Bestselling author and polyglot, Tim Ferriss, says that you should consider a new language like a new sport.

There are certain physical prerequisites (height is an advantage in basketball), rules (a runner must touch the bases in baseball), and so on that determine if you can become proficient at all, and—if so—how long it will take.

For example, it would a wiser choice and a higher likelihood of success if a professional water polo player decided to transition into playing handball. Similar structures, rules, and physical requirements.

However, it wouldn't be too wise if Kobe Bryant started to play professional ice hockey. It involves learning too many new rules, an entirely new skill (skating), and the likelihood of success decreases significantly (or will take 10x longer).

Language learning is no different.

As a "professional" language learner, we need to first breakdown our strengths and our understanding of existing rules and structures. If you already speak English, the easiest languages to learn will be those with similar sounds and word structure. An example would be learning how to speak Spanish, with similar latin roots,instead of a completely different root like Mandarin.


The Golden Sentences

If you want to determine which are the easiest languages to learn, you should aim to answer the following questions first.

1. Are there new grammatical structures that will postpone fluency?
2. Are there new sounds that will double or quadruple time to fluency? (particularly vowels)
3. How similar is it to languages I already understand? What will help and what will interfere?
4. All of which answer: How difficult will it be, and how long would it take to become fluent?

An effective tool to answer all of these questions is called The Golden Sentences.

It comprises eight sentences that expose much of the language and quite a few deal breakers.

The apple is red.
It is John’s apple.

I give John the apple.
We give him the apple.
He gives it to John.
She gives it to him.
I must give it to him.
I want to give it to her.

Here's a directly translated version of these sentences in Spanish.

Top 7 Easiest Languages to Learn (#7 May Surprise You) (3)

There's a couple of reasons why these sentences are helpful:

  1. It shows you how verbs are conjugated based on the speaker (gender and number)
  2. You can see a high-level view of the fundamental sentence structures, which helps you answer questions like: is it subject-verb-object (SVO) like English and Chinese (“I eat the apple”), is it subject-object-verb (SOV) like Japanese (“I the apple eat”), or something else?
  3. The first three sentences show you if the language has a noun case that may become a pain in the butt for you. For example in German, “the” might be der, das, die, dem, den and more depending on whether “the apple” is an object, indirect object, possessed by someone else, etc.

If possible, we recommend you check with a Rype teacher or your own language teacher to fully understand the translation of these sentences and how transferable your existing languages are.

As a rule of thumb: use The Golden Sentences as your guiding map, before you choose the vehicle (the method). It will help you achieve your goals in half the time.

Top 7 Easiest Languages to Learn

Now let's dive into dissecting which are the easiest languages to learn for beginners.We profiled each of the languages we'll mention into the following categories:

  • Speaking: This is based on the ease with which learners are able to pick up this language.
  • Grammar: Based as a criterion when ranking a given language as easy, moderately easy, or difficult to acquire.
  • Writing: In many languages, learning to speak first and write later makes the journey easier. Other languages are equally easy to speak and write. This item spells out the easiest languages to write alongside the most difficult. As with speaking, easy, moderately easy, and difficult were used to qualify each language.

We've decided to rank the order from easiest languages to learn to the hardest.

1. Spanish

Speaking: Very Easy
Grammar: Very Easy
Writing: Easy
Overall: Very Easy

As English speakers, we can be thankful that Spanish pronunciations are one of the easiest to learn.Overall, Spanish has a shallow orthographic depth – meaning that most words are written as pronounced. This means that reading and writing in Spanish is a straightforward task.

With only ten vowel and diphthong sounds (English has 20), and no unfamiliar phonemes except for the fun-to-pronounce letter ñ. This makes learning how to speak Spanish the easiest out of the bunch and may give you the best return on your time and investment, as 37 per cent of employers rated Spanish as a critical language to know for employment.

Start learning Spanish.‍

2. Italian

Speaking: Easy
Grammar: Easy
Writing: Moderately Easy
Overall: Easy

Italian is the most "romantic" of the romance languages. Luckily its latin-rooted vocabulary translates into many similar Italian/English cognates, such as foresta (forest), calendario (calendar), and ambizioso (ambitious).

Like Spanish, many of the words in Italian are written as pronounced. Moreover, the Italian sentence structure is highly rhythmic, with most words ending in vowels. This adds a musicality to the spoken language which makes it fairly simple to understand, and a spunky language to use.

Learn Italian on Rype

3. French

Speaking: Moderate
Grammar: Moderate
Writing: Moderately Easy
Overall: Moderate

Welcome to the International language of love. Despite how different French may appear at first, linguists estimate that French has influenced up to a third of the modern English language.

This may also explain why French’s Latin derivations make much of the vocabulary familiar to English speakers (edifice, royal, village). There are also more verb forms (17, compared to the English 12) and gendered nouns (le crayon, la table).

But it's not all easy.

Pronunciation in French is especially difficult, with vowel sounds and silent letters that you may not be used to in English.

Take a French lessons trial

4. Portuguese

Speaking: Moderate
Grammar: Moderate
Writing: Moderate
Overall: Moderate

With the Brazilian economy ranking 6th in the world, Portuguese has become a powerful language to learn. One great element of the language is that interrogatives are fairly easy, expressed by intonation alone (“You Like This?”) If you can say it in Portuguese, you can ask it. What’s more, in Brazilian Portuguese, there’s one catch all question tag form: não é.

The main difficulty with the pronunciation is the nasal vowel sounds that require some practice.

Find a Portuguese tutor online

5. German

Speaking: Difficult
Grammar: Moderate
Writing: Moderate
Overall: Moderately Difficult

For many English speakers, German is a difficult language to pick up. Its long words, four noun case endings, and rough pronunciation gives your tongue quite the workout each time you speak.

German is recognized as a very descriptive language. A good example is how they use the noun by combining the object with the action on hand.
Example: das Fernsehen - the television, combines the words fern, far, andsehen, watching, lit. far-watching.

On the other hand, German can be a fun language to learn and the grammar's considered to be quite logical, with many overlapping words in English.

Just watch out for the exceptions to the rules!

6. Hindi

Speaking: Moderate
Grammar: Moderately Difficult
Writing: Difficult
Overall: Moderately Difficult

Despite first glance, there are many familiar words in English which are either Hindi or of Hindi origin. For example guru, jungle, karma, yoga, bungalow, cheetah, looting, thug and avatar. Vice versa, Hindi also uses lots of English words. They are read and pronounced as they are in English, but are written in Hindi. For example, डॉक्टर is pronounced doctor and स्टेशन is pronounced station.

This shows that while learning the vocabulary and pronunciation of Hindi may not to be too difficulty, due to its similarity to English, writing Hindi is a different ball game.

7. Mandarin

Speaking: Difficult
Grammar: Difficult
Writing: Very Difficult
Overall: Very Difficult

Last, but not least: Mandarin. We mainly put this here to show you the contrasting difference between the easiest language to learn (Spanish) versus the hardest language to learn, for English speakers.

While language learners won't struggle as much on the grammar, mastering the tones can be very difficult. Mandarin is a tonal language, which means the pitch or intonation in which a sound is spoken affects its meaning. For example, tang with a high tone means soup, but tang with a rising tone means sugar.

Learning Mandarin has its rewards though. The poetic script of the Chinese written character can give the learner a useful insight into the Chinese mind. But according to BBC, you’ll need to memorize over 2,000 characters to read a Chinese newspaper!

What's the Easiest Language to Learn?

Winner: Spanish

The clear winner from the 7 easiest languages to learn is Spanish. Everything from writing, grammar, and speaking will come more naturally to the English speaker. Similar rules, structure, and Latin roots.

It'll be like going from playing football to ultimate frisbee

If you are interested in learning Spanish or any other of these easy languages, we can help you atJumpspeak.

We recommend starting with our language lessons trial, 100% risk-free.

Over to you

What do you think are the easiest languages to learn? Is there a language we may have missed?

Here's a video from 5-Minute Language sharing their perspective.

FAQs

What are the Top 5 easiest languages? ›

5 easy languages to learn
  • English. It's the most widely spoken language in the world, making practice possible. ...
  • French. French has over 100 million native speakers and is – as the official language in 28 countries – spoken on almost every continent. ...
  • Spanish. ...
  • Italian. ...
  • Swahili.
Feb 29, 2016

Which language is the easiest to learn? ›

15 of the easiest languages to learn for English speakers -...
  • Frisian. Frisian is thought to be one of the languages most closely related to English, and therefore also the easiest for English-speakers to pick up. ...
  • Dutch. ...
  • Norwegian. ...
  • Spanish. ...
  • Portuguese. ...
  • Italian. ...
  • French. ...
  • Swedish.
Oct 24, 2021

What is the 10 easiest language to learn? ›

The Romance languages are almost just as easy to learn

For a native (or not) English speaker such as yourself, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish are practically just as easy to learn for you as the Germanic languages.

What is the 7 hardest language to learn? ›

7 Most Difficult Languages to Learn for Native English Speakers
  • 1 – Chinese (Mandarin)
  • 2 – Arabic.
  • 3 – Japanese.
  • 4 – Korean.
  • 5 – Hungarian.
  • 6 – Finnish.
  • 7 – Xhosa.
Feb 7, 2020

What are the 3 easiest languages? ›

Read more about language courses here.
  • NORWEGIAN. Grammar, syntax and word order are all similar to English thanks to shared North Germanic roots. ...
  • SWEDISH. ...
  • DANISH. ...
  • SPANISH. ...
  • PORTUGUESE. ...
  • ITALIAN. ...
  • FRENCH. ...
  • ROMANIAN.
Feb 13, 2014

What is the 1 hardest language to learn? ›

Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.

What is the 5th hardest language? ›

5 of the most hardest languages to learn in the world
  • Mandarin.
  • Japanese.
  • Arabic.
  • Xhosa.
  • Russian.
Apr 13, 2022

What are the 3 hardest languages to learn in order? ›

Generally, if you're an English speaker with no exposure to other languages, here are some of the most challenging and difficult languages to learn: Mandarin Chinese. Arabic. Vietnamese.

What is the top 10 hardest language to learn? ›

Let's explore the 10 hardest languages for English speakers to learn, and the challenges they deliver:
  1. Mandarin. Mandarin is spoken by 70% of the Chinese population, and is the most spoken language in the world. ...
  2. Arabic. ...
  3. Japanese. ...
  4. Hungarian. ...
  5. Korean. ...
  6. Finnish. ...
  7. Basque. ...
  8. Navajo.
Sep 16, 2022

Can you learn 2 languages at once? ›

Answer: Thankfully, your brain can definitely handle learning two (or more!) languages at once! (Two down, 6,998 to go.) But there are also some ways you can make this linguistic task easier on yourself.

Is Japanese or Chinese harder? ›

Both Chinese and Japanese have a fierce reputation to be the hardest languages to learn. But, for English native speakers, that's not accurate. The truth is, there's no such thing as an easy or hard language. But, whichever you choose will require a commitment from you if you want to reach fluency.

What are 20 the easiest languages to learn? ›

The Easiest Languages to Learn for Native English Speakers
  1. Spanish (3/30) Number of native speakers: 480 million. ...
  2. Dutch (3/30) Number of native speakers: 24 million. ...
  3. German (6/30) Number of native speakers: 95 million. ...
  4. Italian (7/30) ...
  5. Afrikaans (7/30) ...
  6. Esperanto (7/30) ...
  7. Portuguese (9/30) ...
  8. French (9/30)

What is the 2 hardest language? ›

2. Arabic. Arabic is the queen of poetic languages, the 6th official language of the UN and second on our list of toughest languages to learn.

Can you learn a language in 3 months? ›

To understand 95% of a language and become conversational fluent may require 3 months of applied learning; to reach the 98% threshold could require 10 years. There is a point of diminishing returns where, for most people, it makes more sense to acquire more languages (or other skills) vs.

What is sweetest language in the world? ›

According to a UNESCO survey, Bengali has been classified as the sweetest language in the world. As a language, Bengali is widely spoken all over India, including Assam and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. The sweetest language in the world is also recognized in the Constitution of India.

What is the 3rd hardest language? ›

Polish got the number three spot on our list. Spelling and grammar are a couple of areas in which Polish can give English speakers a hard time. Words are loaded with consonants, which makes them difficult to spell and pronounce.

What is the second easiest language? ›

Easiest (about 600 hours of study)

Of these, Spanish and Italian are the easiest for native English speakers to learn, followed by Portuguese and finally French.

What is the hardest language to say? ›

Arabic is considered to be one of the hardest languages for English speakers to learn, not just because there are around 20 ways to say hello in Arabic, but also because the Arabic language has complex grammar rules and pronunciation with complex sounds, that are completely unfamiliar to English speakers.

What is the hardest language to write? ›

Japanese has a reputation for being one of the world's hardest languages, and for good reason. Japanese has not one but three scripts you need to learn. Hiragana and Katakana, used mainly for writing foreign and Japanese words respectively, are phonetic, both containing 46 characters.

What is the oldest language in the world? ›

Sumerian can be considered the first language in the world, according to Mondly. The oldest proof of written Sumerian was found on the Kish tablet in today's Iraq, dating back to approximately 3500 BC.

Can you learn a language while sleeping? ›

Not a lot, unfortunately. As Jennifer Ackerman notes in her splendid 2007 book Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream, learning a language while sleeping “is probably impossible, [and] attempts to teach slumbering adult subjects vocabulary of foreign languages or lists of items have failed miserably.”

What language has the most words? ›

Korean includes many words of Chinese origin, and borrows words from English and other languages as well. Still, it's a stretch to say that Korean has the most words of any language in the world because one of its dictionaries has over a million headwords.

What is the 8th hardest language to learn? ›

What are the hardest languages to learn? It depends on what languages you already speak.
...
8 Hardest Languages to Learn In The World For English Speakers
  1. Mandarin. Number of native speakers: 1.2 billion. ...
  2. Icelandic. ...
  3. 3. Japanese. ...
  4. Hungarian. ...
  5. Korean. ...
  6. Arabic. ...
  7. Finnish. ...
  8. Polish.
Jan 22, 2021

What language did Jesus speak? ›

Jesus likely understood Hebrew, though his everyday life would have been conducted in Aramaic. Of the first four books of the New Testament, the Gospels of Matthew and Mark records Jesus using Aramaic terms and phrases, while in Luke 4:16, he was shown reading Hebrew from the Bible at a synagogue.

What is the #1 language? ›

1. English – 1,121 million speakers. It is the most widely spoken language in the world because of the global impact of England and the United States in the last three centuries.

What is the 3 oldest language? ›

Greek is the third oldest language in the world. Latin was the official language of the ancient Roman Empire and ancient Roman religion. It is currently the official language of the Roman Catholic Church and the official language of the Vatican City. Like Sanskrit, it is a classical language.

What's harder to learn English or Spanish? ›

English, on the other hand, is VERY hard to read, pronounce, and write. Spanish has 25 phonemes; it's generally agreed that English has 44 phonemes. (Phonemes are speech sounds.) So it's generally harder for a Spanish speaker to pronounce English well.

Is it too late to learn a language? ›

It does not matter how old you are, it is never too late to start learning a foreign language. Many language learners are put off by their advancing years; they believe age is a barrier to learning an entirely new language. However, this is not the case.

What is the strongest language to learn? ›

The Most Important Languages To Learn In 2021
  1. Mandarin Chinese. With over one billion Mandarin Chinese speakers in the world, of course it tops the list of most important languages to learn in 2021. ...
  2. Spanish. ...
  3. German. ...
  4. French. ...
  5. Arabic. ...
  6. Russian. ...
  7. Portuguese. ...
  8. 8. Japanese.

What is the hardest language to learn in 2022? ›

Mandarin Chinese, for example, is often considered the hardest language to learn for an English speaker, alongside Arabic and Japanese.

What age is best to learn a language? ›

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.

How many hours a day should you study a language? ›

For most people, around 30 minutes of active study and 1 hour of language exposure a day is a schedule that will give you great results. It's a model that's sustainable over a long period to help you reach fluency.

Can Duolingo make you fluent? ›

We see this question a lot and the answer is: yes. Duolingo is a free language-learning platform, and every language and lesson is totally free!

What is the #1 hardest language to learn? ›

1. Mandarin Chinese. Interestingly, the hardest language to learn is also the most widely spoken native language in the world. Mandarin Chinese is challenging for a number of reasons.

What is the number 1 hardest language to learn? ›

Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.

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