French and Japanese, which one is easier to for beginner?
917709
Go with French it so easy i con speak a little and it all come from movies and a book.And by movies i mean LITTLE MERMAID!LOL!jk.But ya french is so easy if you are willing to learn.
391899
I assume by Chinese you mean Mandarin.  If that is the case, then Mandarin should be your choice, although it is more fun to curse in Cantonese.
955704
Since you already speak and write English, I strongly recomend Japanese. Japan is at the fore-front of software, electronic, etc. break throughs. If you can speak and write Japanese, you will be golden and many new opportunities will open up for you. If you moved to Japan, of course, they make accomodations for people who speak English, but if you spoke Japanese it would make things a lot easier and you would be a lot more desirable in their job market. Especially since you already speak English.
1158561
Try Michel Thomas CDs. French is a hard languge to learn, but these will make you start speaking straight away and give you confidence. Bon chance.
937685
JAPANESE.      \n\nThe textbook 'Japanese for busy people' is a good start.  Also people usually starting by learning Hiragana script, I found it more useful to start with katakana as it is used mainly for 'borrowed words'.  It makes reading a menu easy.
593593
The 'Alliance Francaise' has a good reputation around the world. I'm French and I know many people who have learned Franch with this organisation: they were satisfied and their French is very good indeed!\nStill, the quickest method to learn a language is to spent a few months in the country.
129931
French! It's the language of love, plus everyone I know want's to learn to speak Spanish. Spanish is a beautiful language, however, I've had some... not so good experiences trying to learn to speak it. Plus,I just was to mix it up a bit you know?
914421
Yes, it needs to be from the perspective of your native language. For example, Portugese is much easier for a Spanish speaker to learn than it is for and English or Chinese speaker to learn.\n\nJapanese is often pointed to as the most difficult language for English speakers to learn. This is because it differs from English on several significant scales:\n\n- Family Relationship: There's a "family tree" (and also a wave diagram) of the Indo-European languages, based on what languages developed from others and somwhat on where they came in contact and had significant exchanges. It's generally assumed that you'll have an easier time learning a language that's near your branch on the family tree. Japanese is not even ON this tree.\n\n- Vocabulary: Languages that share similar vocabulary are often considered easier to learn. Japanese contains many loanwords from English, but this is not the same thing as having authentically similar vocabulary related to the languages being, um, related. The vast majority of Japanese vocabulary sounds nothing at all like any words you already know. This makes memorization of vocabulary much harder.\n\n- Writing system. Japanese has a very simple phonetic (speech sound) system and a very straightforward way to "spell" words that makes it almost impossible to misspell or mispronounce a word. HOWEVER, they ALSO have over 2,000 "kanji" that one must know to be literate, and no text for adults is written in the easy simple phonetic alphabets, it's written with the super complicated kanji. Each kanji is a "pictogram" that is an extremely abstract picture of a concept. Each kanji has multiple pronunciations and meanings, which you must guess from the context or the other kanji it appears with in combination words. It takes Japanese students all of compulsory education (through highschool) to learn all of these kanji, and THEY already know the meanings of the spoken words in Japanese. YOU must learn the meaning and pronunciation in addition to the crazy complicated lines.\n\n- Syntax, for at least three reasons:\n1. Word order. This is true for many languages, not just Japanese, but I'll mention it because it's just one more difficulty. English is an "SVO" language- we say "The boy eats the cake." Japanese, however, is an "SOV" or "verb-final" language: in their word order, one would say "The cake eats the boy." You run into different structures when constructing more complicated sentences, too.\n\n2. Particles. There are little grammatical speech helpers in Japanese that don't conceptually translate well to English. I guess other languages have this too, but it's just one more complication to the extremely foreign syntactical structure.\n\n3. English and Japanese are on opposite ends of the Low Context ------- High Context continuum. English is Low Context. This means that it is IN MY SPEECH that I tell you who is doing what when where why how with definite articles and other relevant grammatical markers, and you'd better not leave anything out! Japanese, however, is extremely High Context. This means that the Japanese sentence for "I killed him" is exactly identical to the sentence that means "they killed her," "you killed me," "his brother killed my aunt," "that dog killed the president," and "Aaron Burr killed President Lincoln." Knowing which of these sentences is dependent entirely on context: have you just mentioned your aunt, or are you viewing a news report, in essence what are you talking about? However, I personally think this makes Japanese a comfortably ambiguous, gentle, and forgiving language, and actually makes it EASIER to communicate in.\n\nThis said, I have taken three years of Japanese, and it was incredibly interesting, and not too terribly hard. All humans have the same kinds of brains, so we are n
21651
I personally reccomend the Rosetta Stone language education software. It's specifically designed to teach people fast. My father was at conversational italian after an hour a day for six months, and was reading and writing it by the end of the year. I'm going to get a copy before I go to Japan. It comes in almost every language, too.
588378
For an English speaker, I would say Spanish is by far the easiest of the four to learn.  If you speak other languages, the answer might be different.\n\nLatin is particularly hard because of the declension of nouns.  French pronunciation is sometimes difficult (especially the nasal vowels).  German isn't too difficult, but the sentence word order (verb at the end or verb second) is unnatural for English-speakers (I'd put it in second place among the languages you listed).
13153
I'd say Mandarin Chinese. Not only do you have to learn words ... inflection is also key ... and there are four inflections you can put on any word/syllable. And some of the words are best pronounced in a sing-song sort of tone. \n\nJapanese is definitely easier because it is not so heavily dependent on inflection. \n\nFrench, Spanish and German are all a piece of cake compared to Mandarin Chinese.
718991
Try Michel Thomas's audio CDs, He does French, and he is very very good. I'm using it myself, it isn't free, but it is the easiest and best way to learn a language. No memorizing, no homework, no books, no work, just listening.\n\nCe Bonn!
471743
The easiest way to learn any language bar non is by making a friend who is fluent in the language you want to learn and knows very little of your language (or will agree to speak mostly in their native tongue). I know of this from experience. I was fluent is Italian and had moderate French knowledge when I moved to Japan 5 years ago due to my husband being in the military. I knew not ONE word of Japanese. I bought books, Cd's, DVDs, PC programs etc and  learned close to nothing as Japanese is an EXTREMELY difficult language to learn. Then, once I made a Japanese friend who spoke close to NO English, I started picking up so fast it was unbelievable. I am now FLUENT in Japanese and it took all of 6 months. I could get myself around in about 1 month. Many people had recommended this to me and now tried and true I recommend it to you. There are a couple of ways to find friends for such as well. Finding language exchange partners on-line is easy or visiting local colleges culture clubs which most members are second language English generation. Good Luck on your endeavor!!
656739
No, it is not complicated.  You can start with a program how to learn it. it will help so much to practice with someone who understand it.  Watching french programs or movie is also a good source to help.\n\n'la bonne chance à vous, vous l'aimerez.'\nGood luck to you, you will love it
878860
you might try learnig to spell JAPANESE first- just a thought
745127
French is a splendid choice - as it is understood and spoken in most European countries where English is still hardly known !\nSince you already know Spanish, it will be quite easy to learn French - as they both have a lot in common.\n...As far as accent goes, you are the best judge : Does your spoken Spanish reek of an English accent ? Then, your French might too. \nBut if your Spanish sounds like the 'real thing', it means that you do have an ear for phonetic accents - and can easily learn to converse with a good French accent, if you make up your mind to...\nBest of Luck, friend.
1137370
It depends on your ability to learn a language. For everyone saying spanish and french are so close to english actually german is closer as english is a germanic language NOT a romance language ( look it up, oh and i speak 6 languages and have a masters in linguistics so my answer is sound). Just because German would be the closest to english does not mean it is therefore the easiest as the grammar might be offputting to many people. In fact i found russian easier. So it really depends on you personally. A few things might contribute to the ease of a particular language such as, your exposure to it and your ability to retain large amounts of information and apply them. My suggestion is whatever the language you would like to learn just immerse yourself in it: Books, movies, videos etc. Now linguistically some languages are suppose to be easier to learn than others, for example spanish and french are considered categoy 1, german either a 2 or 3, russian a 4 and chinese, hungarian, finish and arabic 5.... but i found french harder than russian..so it really is up to you.