7 Surprisingly Easy Languages to Learn For English Speakers
By Ivy do Carmo
English speakers have an edge on learning a second language. Do you know why? Because the English language is part of the Germanic language family, but it has also been greatly influenced by Latin and French, currently having a lot of its vocabulary originated from them. What does this mean? The result is that it is relatively easier for English speakers to learn a wide range of new languages. However, you may be wondering: what are the easiest languages to learn for English speakers?
Well, in this article we have enlisted 7 easy-to-learn languages for English speakers. However, before we get into that, let’s talk about an important premise: why should you learn a second language if everybody speaks English?
Top Advantages of Becoming a Polyglot
When you speak the most popular and widely-spoken language of the world, it is comprehensive that you may sometimes think that it is unnecessary to learn another language. However, if you think this way, let me be blunt: you are mistaken. There are several reasons why you should bother being bilingual, even if you already can communicate with the majority of the people around the world just with your mother tongue. Here are just three of the reasons why people learn new languages:
You Can Connect on a Deeper Level With More People
Saying that everybody speaks English is just simply incorrect. For example, China has a population of 1.3 billion people, but only around 10 million speak English! You may also be surprised to know that, besides China, there are at least other 12 countries in which less than 10% of the population speaks English. Therefore, if you want to communicate with the whole world, make new friends and bond with interesting new people, it is necessary to learn their language.
You Become Smarter
Learning a new language improves the functionality of your brain, strengthening its cognitive processes, and helps you succeed in other problem-solving tasks. It has been proved that bilingual students excel in standardized tests, like the SAT test. Since your brain is like a muscle and learning a new language is an excellent way of “exercising” it, being bilingual also improves your memory and diminishes the possibility of you developing Alzheimer’s, dementia and other disorders of the mental processes.
You Enhance Your Career Prospects
Everybody knows that there is a fierce competition in the job market these days and that it is always beneficial to have a skill that makes you stand out from other candidates. Hiring bilingual employees is becoming more and more desirable for companies that conduct its business online in the global market. If you can speak a second language, you can have more job opportunities, earn more money and be more valued professionally.
What are the easiest languages to learn for English speakers?
Now that we have made it clear that learning a new language is a worthwhile endeavourment, let’s consider what are the easiest languages to learn for English speakers. The Foreign Service Institute’s School of Language Studies (SLS) ranked the 9 easiest languages and the most hardest languages for English speakers to learn. They divided languages into four categories, from easy to super-hard. Some may be obviously in the easy category, such as Dutch, Danish and Norwegian, because they come from the same language family as English. However, others may be a surprise for you. Let’s now consider 7 of the easiest languages to learn for English speakers:
1) Dutch
It is the third most-spoken Germanic language, after English and German. It has 23 million native speakers in The Netherlands and Belgium, and it is also the official language in Suriname and several Caribbean countries. The Dutch language looks like a combination of English and German and it is probably in the middle between these two languages (while English has only one definite article and German has three, Dutch has two). Many Dutch words are spelled exactly the same as English, but be careful because the pronunciation and sometimes the meaning changes. Nevertheless, we can say that Dutch is the closest language to English ,if you desconsider the Frisian languages. Check out some similar words between Dutch and English: appel (apple), banaan (banana), blauw (blue), groen (green), peer (pear), rood (red), tomaat (tomato) and daten (date).
2) Swedish
Also a Germanic language, Swedish is spoken by around 10 million people in Sweden and Finland. It is a similar language to English because the two languages share hundreds of cognates (kung is king, gräs is grass and mus is mouse, for example) and the SVO sentence structure (subject-verb-object). A word of caution: be careful not to get confused by some Swedish false cognates, such as bra (meaning “good”, not women’s undergarment), full (“drunk”, not satisfied in hungry), kissa (“to pee”, not “to kiss”) and trosor (“panties”, not “trousers”). It has some difficult aspects, such as the nine vowels and the sj-sound, but overall, mastering it will not be too much of a challenge. Check out two sentences in Dutch so you can notice the obvious similarities with English:
De har stulit min bok.
(They have stolen my book.)
De kommer att stjäla min bok.
(They will steal my book.)
3) Norwegian
Another Germanic language, Norwegian is spoken by around 5 million people in Norway and Denmark. What makes Norwegian an easy language to learn is the fact that it does not conjugate the verbs. You just add -e to form the past tense, the auxiliary vil to form the future tense, ville ha to the conditional perfect and -s to speak in the passive voice. Norwegian is also a similar language to English due to the fact that the sentences are written in the same structure. You can verify this in these examples:
Kan du hjelpe meg?
(Can you help me?)
Jeg spiste egg til frokost.
(I ate eggs for breakfast.)
4) Afrikaans
The last Germanic language of our list (German and Danish did not make the cut because of their complex grammar and pronunciation), Afrikaans was once considered to be a dialect of Dutch, but then developed to become a language and it is currently spoken by nearly 9 million people in South Africa and Namibia. Afrikaans is easier than Dutch because it has no nouns genders nor verb and pronouns conjugations. Furthermore, it has only three verb tenses – past, present and future. Take a look at the verb to be in Afrikaans:
Ek is (I am)
Jy is (You are)
Hy is (He is)
Ons is (We are)
Julle is (You are)
Hulle is (They are)
5) Spanish
It is a Romance language and it derives from Latin, as do many English words. This means that Spanish and English share many identical and similar words and that it is quite easy for an English speaker to speak Spanish like a native speaker. A few examples of identical words between the two languages are normal, idea, chocolate, hotel, taxi and perfume. Some similar words are vocabulario (vocabulary), básico (basic), delicioso (delicious) and perfecto (perfect). Although Spanish has some tricky aspects, such as the gendered nouns and the verb conjugation, it is easy to learn in general because of the many cognates and because it is a phonetic language, which means that the words are pronounced the same way that they are written.
6) Portuguese
It is also a Romance language and it is spoken in Brazil, Portugal and some African countries. One of the aspects that make Portuguese an easy-to-master language for English speakers is the high number of cognates with English. Some are perfect cognates, that is, identical words between the two languages, such as chocolate, banana and material. Other ones are quite similar (and here the list is pretty extensive), like diferente (different), exemplo (example), humano (human), música (music), positivo (positive) and televisão (television). Portuguese also has fewer prepositions than English and an easy method for asking question: you do not have to change anything in the sentence, just your intonation. It is interesting to notice that Portuguese speakers use a lot of English words in their daily conversations, such as shopping, jeans, online, internet, ok, hot dog, brother, designer, show, ketchup, etc.
7) French
Also a Romance language, French has lent to English up to a third of its vocabulary. That is why French is the Romance language which shares more lexical common ground with English and it could not be left out of this list. Words such as royal, village, entrepreneur, brunette, chef, fiancé, toilette, menu, cliché and bouquet come from French. English and French also share many perfect cognates and similar words, such as information, table, attention, comfortable, télévision (television), hôpital (hospital) and forêt (forest).
In this article, we have reviewed the benefits of learning a second language and we have considered seven surprisingly easy languages to learn for English speakers. Maybe you are now wondering: if these were the easiest, what is the hardest language for English speakers to learn? Well, according to Foreign Service Institute, the hardest languages are Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean. However, none of them are impossible to master if you persist on your goals and follow this simple recipe of learning a new language: have an effective language learning schedule, expose yourself to the language as much as you can, don’t miss any opportunity to talk to natives and always keep your eyes on the prize. In order to make it easier for you to learn a new language, we’ve create a free language learning guide to help you with your goals.