German!

English, Spanish, German, Dutch are all related somewhat and relatively easy to learn. French is harder (don't know about Portugese).

I guess you got something wrong:

English, German and Dutch are related indeed, they belong to the Germanic Language Group, as well as Swedish, Norwegian and others...

But Spanish belongs to the Romanic Language Group, as does French, Portuguese, Romanian, and Italian.

I see. Could be. I just found Spanish not too difficult, but then again I don't speak it.

german language suxx when it comes to writing, like all this s, ss or sz - whats the sense behind this, its all the same when you spell it?! or all this silly rules when you have to write some words uppercase sometimes, but somwhere else you write the same words lowercase. worst thing is when you have an english keyboard on your notebook and join a german forum, then there is always some smart ass coming out after 5 mins: "stop writing ue, ae or oe, use the damm umlaut!"...

I agree that German is one of the easiest languages to learn though I won't say that it is the easiest coz I haven't really tried learning it. As for Spanish, our country has Spanish colonizations so most of our words come from Spanish origin and it won't be hard to learn Spanish coz we also had that in our college lessons. As for German, I still have to check if I will learn it easily coz it seems hard to listen to it and much more, to write it?

@Helen

yes, try and learn German, Andre and I will be more than happy to help you in writing and grammar. It is not that difficult, although most people seem to have trouble with the gender of the subsantives, so the spoon is male, the fork is female and the knife is neutral.

Why me? I haven't made any comments in this thread? I guess you mean no-brakes who seems to have some struggle with rules ;-)

i have look at many languages and i wouldnt say german is easy , spainish, Italian  and French is by far the easiest from my point of view.

depends on what your mother tongue is...

No one can deny the role of English. In my opinion, E is the easiest language to learn. If you come to Vietnam,you will fine Vietnamese is more diffifcult than English. That is really a challenge for anyone

http://www.vietexplorer.com We bring you to the real Vietnam!

overall english is the easiest to learn, but if you speak english, then the list that i made above is the easiest.

Hm. Many people who only speak english speak it so bad that even I shudder.

Andre

Travel Photos

Not everyone lives in an English speaking country. Remember your English 10 years ago....

I don't think I'm capable of really learning another language.  I took a year of Spanish and I found it extremely difficult.  I'll just stick to English.

I remember my Filipino (most of them with Chinese blood) grades 1-3 pupils. They keep on telling me that English is very easy just because they speak it often at home and in school. However, their grades in my English subject is not really that good. Why? Because most of us think that if we know how to speak the language, it is already very easy. This is in a way, true but if you really know the real rules to follow, then sometimes you'd really shudder (as andre termed it), at other English people's English. :)

The Italian Giovanni Trapattoni who was Coach of Bayern München Football Team (before he took over Italy National Squad), is remembered and loved in Germany for an emotional outburst in broken German during the legendary press conference of March 10th, critizing the teams attitude ("haben gespielt wie Flasche leer" - played like bottle empty) and ending his speech with "Ich habe fertig" (I have ready).

People in Germany have loved him since that day and even took over his "new" grammar in daily language, and Trapattoni can still earn money with that speech appearing in TV commercials (e.g.for beverages: "not bottle empty".) Here is a link and the speech is subtitled....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqp64q7kHmw

The question as to which language is easier to learn really depends:
German may be easy if you already know English, because it is closer to English
from a grammatical standpoint than any of the other languages.

Italian is easy from a speaking standpoint, but from a grammatical standpoint, it
has a lot of exceptions, and there are so many rules for needing to be precise.
Grammatically, French and Spanish are a lot easier.

If you know, let's say, Japanese, and wanted to learn one of the above, I would
say probably Spanish is the easiest of them all.

Larry

Makes sense. According to Sunflower your languages are related, so maybe its easier for you to learn Spanish. Before going to Peru I learned a few phrases of Spanish and I often thought it sounded a bit like Italian.

Andre

Travel Photos 

The thing with people who speak english is that we take everything for grantage, person speaking a different language would study english more indepth and will more likely have a better grammer. German Close to english /easier for english speaker, come on are you having a laugh.

That's right, Callis!

I come from an Asian country and we learn English by the book so whenever we see Americans not writing (usually it is in writing that we know how good or how bad their grammar is) we tend to criticize and of course we don't expect them to have these kinds of mistakes as they must be proficient in their own language. One tip that I have learned, when taking an International Language Test, e.g., TOEFL, IELTS, re: speaking exams, -- try to be interviewed by an American or a foreigner, not by a fellow Filipino because Filipinos are more particular with your grammar and the way you speak the language.

I find German easy to understand at a basic level. I can pick up words I have never heard, guess their meaning, and it is often right. The grammar is a different story though. I'll tell you one thing, it's a lot easier than Vietnamese!

I agree I think German is easy to learn. But I guess it is because my grandmother spoke German and we grew up with it.

Spanish is extremely easy to learn.

Many many words are the same as in English.

And many words in Spanish can be used for multiple English words. English seems to have

A LOT of specific words for every situation where Spanish can be very broad. Also, according

to my French friends, the French & Spanish can understand each other- if you look at their written words', they are very similar a lot of times...though, the way they are said is different...

I remember trying to learn Japanese when at school. I never could get around it. We had some Japanese students stay in our home and even then I could not get used to the language. But I do remember them saying that English was the hardest language for them to learn.

I speak about four and teach two, and what I find is that English is a relatively easy language to learn to speak., not to write.  We have too many odd phonetic clusters that don't follow hard and fast rules. However, there are no feminine and masculine objects to worry about, and you don't have to change the ending on objects when you change cases. In Czech for example, the same word can end in "a" or "ou", etc. depending on whether it's in the objective, nominative, etc. case. Added to which, there are more cases than in English or in French.

English is hard for most Asians, because we have so many words, and because we have things they don't have at all.  Many Asian languages have no tenses.  None have articles.  When you hear an Asian say, "Me go post office yesterday" they are making a word for word translation from proper speech in their own language.

 Supposedly the two easiest languages to learn to speak are Afrikaans and Bahasa Malaysia/Indonesia.

So from that I take it it is easier to learn a language that is closest (or related) to your own language.

It would probably be next to impossible for me to learn any Asian language.

Languages that are easy to learn for me, might be very hard to learn for others. 

Good question!

I think while there are numerous differences in complexity between languages, there are major "thinking" hurdles for most people to overcome no matter what language they attempt to learn - as most languages speak in many different contexts. I can't imagine becoming fluent in another language! Good on you those who do

If you know a language that is really close to another, sometimes that is all you need.  I met a lot of Italians traveling in Latin America, because it's easy for them.  They just speak Italian, and the person they are talking to speaks Spanish, and it works.

 I've spoken French to an Italian-speaking person, and it can work if it is a simple thing you want.

On my experience, it is much easier to learn other languages when you get along and live for a time with the people who speak it. I learned some dialects, easily understand what's the meaning and pronounce them right when you see the native people in normal life. Of course English is one of the easiest, only hard to understand when hearing them in different accents.