I do agree that there's a lot of difference between Irish and English in terms of vocabulary, but once you get past that hurdle I think the grammar is in principle easier than that of German. In my opinion, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese have pretty much the same level of difficulty, since they use practically the same "system" I guess Portuguese may actually be considerably harder because words are rarely pronounced the way their are written, while in the other 2 languages, they are usually pronounced as they are written.
I know!! I speak English and Spanish, and some Russian. I've also dabbled in Polish, and was complaining to a Pole about Portuguese. You know how much easier Portugese would be if the spelled it the Polish way?!?!
Polish has its challenges, but spelling is not one of them, not on the order of, say, French! Or Portuguese. You'd think as someone who knows Spanish I'd take easier to the Portuguese spelling over the Polish, but nooooooo Just curious, to all of you who find Norwegian easy, do you feel the same about the spoken dialects?
But that they struggle with the spoken language. The short answer for me is "sometimes" -- it greatly depends on the dialects. What makes Norwegian easy compared to other languages I've studied French, German, Spanish, Dutch is its grammar, it's lack of verb conjugation, its many similarities to English, and it's more or less intuitive pronunciation caveat: I'll admit that skj, kj, and rs words take a lot of effort to re-train the brain. No disagreement from me! Yes spoke norwegian can be sometimes hard to decipher with some dialects but I'm yet to have a proper conversation in Norwegian.
The same might be said for dialects in English too. I find the Jamaican dialect very difficult to understand as well as certain African dialects.
Americans can sometimes find certain British and Irish dialects difficult too. For the most part, I agree with you. However, I believe Italian may be harder than Portuguese, and Swedish is definitely easier than French in my opinion. I am not studying Ukrainian, irish, or Danish so I don't have an opinion on those. I believe german is harder than dutch:. I wasn't too sure whether to put Swedish before or after the romance language.
Their grammar is quite easy and similar to ours but we share so much vocabulary with French and Italian and Spanish pronounciation is very simple unlike Swedish. I'd never heard of alison. I'll check it out! I probably would have agreed with you a few months back but after starting Norwegian I realize how ridiculously easy their grammar is. They also have a lot of vocabulary in common with us and pronunciation is simple.
Is Norwegian that much easier than Swedish? I wish I'd known that about 40 days ago when I didn't know which Scandinavian language to pick so I went with Swedish. Is it the pronunciation? The grammar? They're pretty similar. Swedish plurals are a little harder and the pronunciation is a little more difficult at least to me , but the difference is negligible. And let's not forget- by learning Swedish, you're learning a language that people actually speak!
Good point. Now I remember, the dialect thing is what put me off Norwegian. It's not a massively more simple than Norwegian but yes the grammar and pronunciation are a lot more straightforward.
As well as that it is the most mutually intelligible of all the Scandinavian languages. Swedes and Danes often have difficulty understanding each other but both can converse far more easily with Norwegians. On the other hand, Swedish has more speakers and it is also a beautiful language.
I think that even though some languages are actually more complex than others little or no match between spelling and pronunciation, irregular plurals, cases, more verb tenses and moods etc , most depends on the learner's native language I'm Italian, so other Romance languages are easier for me to grasp than, let's say, German, but the latter may be easier than Spanish or Italian for native speakers of languages like Swedish or Danish.
From the perspective of an English speaker or from a sort of neutral perspective, maybe the perspective of a child learning its first language? Personally I find the latter question much more interesting, but I couldn't find any answer on the web. My intuition is that irregularity makes a language harder to learn. Based on that intuition I would rank them as follows from easiest to hardest.
Designed to be as regular as possible. New words can be built from suffixes. That makes it pretty easy. I don't know this language well, but its grammar seems very regular so far. On one hand Turkish would be easy, because it's agglutinative, so you can create new words.
On the other hand there are vowel harmony rules that need to be learned. Simple to pronounce and very regular. Only two genders. Of these, I find Spanish the easiest, because it has the simplest writing system. French has the hardest. For speaking, I think they are all about equally difficult. Both languages belong to big countries with huge populations, rich cultures, and interesting histories.
Polish and German are two Central European languages spoken by very big populations in Poland and Germany. But German is also spoken in countries like Austria, Switzerland, and other countries. German is — as the name suggests — a Germanic language. Okay, you might have figured out as much, but what you might not know … Read more. French and Italian are two related languages belonging to the Romance branch of Indo-European languages. If you were to learn one of them, however, which one would be easier?
Italian is simpler for an English speaker in … Read more. Forgot your password? Upload your cv. Apply in 1 click. The 8 easiest languages to learn for English speakers is often debated amongst multilingual people.
Language learning is on the up and more popular than ever. As a result, the UK and other native English speaking countries like us, fall short of their European cousins when it comes to multilingualism. Being English myself, I feel like there is a kind of unspoken assumption that language learning is just too difficult a goal to achieve.
Well, native English speakers - fear not. It is not as difficult as you think to escape the grasps of monolingualism. In fact, it has become easier than ever with the huge increase in online resources available. Becoming multilingual is a great, and potentially free, way of increasing your employability and can help you have that edge over your competition when trying to find a job abroad. As the world is becoming more globalised each day, many companies are looking to relocate abroad in order to expand into new markets.
Therefore, it is vitally important that they employ native speakers in order to communicate effectively with clients. If you have a big desire to learn your English writing or find writing global help, check expert writing reviews , as a trusted customer service. For some, the desire to learn languages is always there, but they often find it is a very time consuming and difficult process. But with over 7, languages worldwide, are you really content with just speaking one? If they can learn English so easily then Swedish must be an easy language to learn for English speakers.
Swedish, just like English, is a Germanic language. Both languages follow the same Subject-Verb-Object word order which should come as a big help to English speakers. To make things even easier, verb forms are normally constant, making it again very similar to English.
Compared to Latin languages where you have to conjugate a verb for every person and tense, Swedish verbs are a doddle. One of the three Germanic languages on this list, it should be easy for English speakers to get to grips with the basics of Dutch. Many people cite it as being somewhere between English and German, making it one of, if not the easiest languages to learn for English speakers.
The language has 23 million speakers , in the Netherlands, regions of Belgium, Suriname, and even parts of the Caribbean. There is an abundance of jobs for Dutch speakers , so learning the language will increase your employability. Dutch has also had a strong influence on how the English language is today, with a considerable amount of vocabulary coming from Dutch, more so than most other languages.
Be cautious though, as many are pronounced differently even though they look the same. The Dutch as a people tend to be very forthcoming in their language learning — take note of fellow Anglophones! Partly, this is due to the similarities shared between Dutch and other languages, and the fact that the English language is ever-present in their lives, through film and music in particular.
As a result, they are not very resistant to adopting English words into their language. For English speakers this can be handy at times, as if you are missing a word in a sentence you can often add the English equivalent and most would understand. Like Swedish and many other Scandinavian languages, Norwegian is one of the easiest languages to learn for English speakers.
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