Easiest language

What would be the easiest language a English speaker could learn?

I am asking because I would like to start out with a easier language before I move on to the harder more time consuming ones. Mostly because I have heard that as you learn more and more languages it gets a bit easier as you go.

There are about 5 that I am interested in learning as a end result:
German
Dutch
French
Spanish
Italian

But am willing to start anywhere really. I have basic French from primary school but it has for the most part left me totally. No training at all in the others, but have spend time in countries speaking all of them, more so Italian than any others.

Also any thoughts on timing for learning these? I had figured around 3 years being that 3 of them are very close, and the 2 others are very close also.

And advice at all is very welcomed.

Cheers!

Scots

lojban

toki pona

Allnoun

CHinese

I knew posting here would give some shit responses, but come on, I took the time to write up a rather well put question. I would at least like one or two well put answers beyond some pathetic "teehehehe lojban" bullshit.

Dude, Itallian is by far the easiest. I took a few years of it in high school and was blown away by its similarity to English. That being said I much prefer Mandarin, just more fun to learn.

If you ever studied the grammar concepts of your own language, then it should help you anyways. All languages have their own grammar quirks you have to learn anyway, but sure, european languages are closer to english than e.g. asian languages.

My advice would be to just start learning the language you want immediately. All americans overestimate language-learning.

>>7
You have a problem with lojban?

Italian, easiest shit on the planet.
I live in italy so i had to learn it.
Well, yeah, it's pretty easy but italy sucks ass.
No, seriously, i'm not kidding. this place is awful, there are old men everywhere. EVERYWHERE. This is the oldest nation on the world. There are almost no young people (and by young i mean < 25 y.o.)

After that, spanish. not as easy as italian but yet kinda simple. Just don't get into grammar. that shit's gross.

You should go with German if you can put up with the genders and their insane consequences. It's very similar to English.

I hated French, and I forgot most of it just like you did.

We could choose between French and Spanish as our second foreign language. Those who chose Spanish liked it.

Out of your list, Dutch is _definitely_ the closest language to English.

mexicano

Dutch is the closest to English, followed by German (60% lexical similarity) and French (27%). However, Dutch and German are both entirely useless outside of the little block of Europe from which they originate.

Italian has the most regular and straightforward grammar of the lot, which is why most people consider it easy. But in relation to English, it's the least similar of all. It's also totally useless outside of Italy.

Thus you have French and Spanish, which are in terms of difficulty pretty much identical. So it's a toss up over whether you like burritos or croissants.

Or you could man up and pick a language that will actually test you, like Mandarin or Japanese. Saying "I'll do it laaater" is bullshit, and you never will unless you start today.

>>15
>However, Dutch and German are both entirely useless outside of the little block of Europe from which they originate.


lolno

>>15
>Dutch is the closest to English, followed by German (60% lexical similarity)
>followed by German (60% lexical similarity)
>German (60% lexical similarity)

lolwut.jpg

Ich glaube, dass du eine riesige Schwuchtel bist. Ich möchte dein Gesicht vergewaltigen.

Please show me the 60% in this sentence that are similar to English.

>>17
Does your sentence contain 100% of the German language?

>>17
>>18
Those stats are probably from Wiki, made by Ethnologue. They use a certain set of words, and see if they can find words with similar form and meaning in the other language.
For example Russian also has a 24% lexical similarity to English acording to them (lulz)

Esperanto

>>19
This is not unlikely at all, I don't know why you use the "lulz" at the end of your sentence.

>>21
Because it's bullshit.

>>22
No it's not. There's a large amount of Greek and Latin radicals in Russian that are also present in English. Also, French loanwords to both languages and finally straight from English loanwords. 24% lexical similarity, if not accurate, seems close enough.

Russian and English are both IE languages and have fundamental similarities like water and boda (too lazy to use cyrillic)

>>17

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages

Enjoy the massive chart showing words that are almost exactly the same across all germanic languages.

Additionally many of the common germanic roots have been modified through phonological changes over time like the german consonant shift and are hard to recogniz.

When it comes down to it a 60% similarity in lexicon is totally believable if not a modest estimate.

>>25
>implying that 34 exemples of basic words in wikipedia mean that there is actually 60% lexical similarity.

MEXICAN!

>>24
вода
It's voda.

To all you others:
Words that are similar enough to be understood and interpreted by an amateur linguist are counted in lexical similarity. Anyone who has studied any of a Germanic language along with English can easily tell that ich is i, du is you, etc. It doesn't have to be perfect, you idiots.

>>28
Actually, "du" is cognate to "thou" which is only archaic in english now.

There's a recurrent pattern in the morphology that "th" becomes "d" as in English "thanks" and German "danke"

So, there. And I knew to pronounce it as "v" btw. I just didn't care!

>>29
I actually did realize the du/thou, I feel stupid for not mentioning it. Nevertheless, your post reinforces that the lexical similarities are there.

>>26
implying lexicostatistics is still seen as valid by anyone

>>16

Name a single country that doesn't share a border with Germany where German or Dutch will stand you in better stead than English or Russian.

French is really easy if you know spanish.

>>22

why is this bullshit?  its obviously got similarities fuckhead, get over it..

water is voda
bank is bonk
tea is chee
business is bizenyes
professor is profeyessor
music is moozeyk
hamburger is gamboorger

and then it gets just as many words from other languages as well.. like magazin is the word for store.

every language has at least 20percent interchangability with english( or at least one other language), unless its spoken by a bunch of niggers in a tribe on an island in the middle of nowhere. each language has to have these similarites, whenever japan invents something new we adopt their word, same with russia whenever they got out of the soviet era, whenever we make new phones and shit, they adopt our language. to not have at least maybe a 10% similarity with english or some other language would be to say that this country is completely out of the loop.

russian and english are just as interchangeable as french is with english. i don't see why that is such a big deal. but

>>22 your an idiot.

>>32
Namibia!

>>34
>your an idiot
>your

Language pro detected.

>>36
your an idiot
your
QUOTE PRO DETECTED.

>>1
mayan writtings

I can only tell you about French, German and Dutch:

>German
In and by itself not a terribly complicated language to learn, but I'd advise against it because of the rather tricky grammatical subtleties. Also, relatively useless compared to the effort required.
>Dutch
Probably the hardest out of the bunch. While Dutch might be the closest language to English still alive, it has seemingly arbitrary grammatical rules and is downright fucking useless.
(Fun fact: actually, the closest 'language' to English is Frisian, a dialect from a Dutch province - but don't let the Frisians hear that: they insist on it being a genuine language.)
>French
I'd say this would be the easiest. French is a pretty easy language to learn if you know English, and the grammar is also quite simple - you can thank the fucking Romans for that.

>>34
Historically speaking, it would make more sense for English to be similar to French than it would make to be similar to Russian. Dunno if that's still the case, though.

French is fuckin difficult trust me, i can say that because im french

>>36

English is not my native language, sorry, I actually tend to use punctuation too much and not enough capitalisation in most cases so that is a very weird error for me to have.