wanting to learn a second language is their any one considered easier to learn than another?
967617
Spanish, easy on the tongue, flows like a song, very easy to pick up, and is only second to the US, all over the world. Will definately not be a waste of time. I Took french all through high school, can't remember a word because its used very little here.\nSpanish on the other hand is as important as english. It is my third laguage, truly a wonderful language to learn and easy too.\nGood Luck
1169522
u can learn portughese!! it's pretty similar to spanish!! // italian sounds good too/ FRENCH  it's like HARD GURL!! so stick to those 2!!:)
872493
The language that's easier is dependant on what your native language is. If your native language is English, French will be easier than German by a little bit. And French is also one of the more popular "official" languages used in international relations and business. In addition, many important international papers are published in English and French. Lastly, many graduate programs (depending on the field, of course) demand that you have at least a reading knowledge of French (of course, some demand German. Some demand both, or neither...)\n\nSo I'd recommend French. \n\nSomeone here mentioned that German is similar to Polish. It is not.
1061853
I can't say one is easy than the other for sure, but I'd recommend french if your field is the arts, but spanish if u want flat useability. Also, as a tip, to help with fluency and vocabulary watch movies in whatever language you choose (Alot of DVDs have other language tract besides English) Start off with english subtitles, then subtitles in ur forign language, then none at all with just the audio in the language. Trust me, it helps alot. Personally I'm in French and love it.
602295
I learned Spanish when I was in my thirties, and it has opened up my world immensely. With every new language I learn (Portuguese and Hebrew are next on the list, and I already speak English, French, and German), I can communicate with so many more people, thus increasing understanding.\nI have worked in milieux where I have spoken French (a bank in Montreal), Spanish (midwifery training in Texas), and now German (serving the German-speaking immigrant population as a midwife), and it is challenging and thrilling to work and live in a language other than my mother tongue.\nI thank my parents at every opportunity for exposing me to languages at a young age - it is an inestimable gift.\n\n(also, of all the languages I have learned, Spanish is by far the easiest!)
229258
i want 2 learn it, but so far its hard, so i got a program and spanish for dummies.  how ever i found the only way to really learn it is through experience.
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
835677
I used to think that about myself.  As a matter of fact, I tried learning Spanish in High School when I was 16.  I failed first-year Spanish.  I thought I was not capable of learning a foreign language until I was about 40, and my oldest daughter began taking Spanish in High School.  At that time I realized that I still remembered quite a bit of Spanish, even though I failed the course, and there were 24 years between the two events.  \n\nI tried an experiment.  I began teaching myself Esperanto (I had heard it was the easiest language on earth to learn).  I'm now fluent in Esperanto, and have gone back and studied Spanish and German to the point of being, more-or-less conversational.\n\nAnyone can learn a foreign language, some just learn faster than others.  Different methods work with different people.  You may be someone who can only learn through immersion.  Keep looking at different course methods.  Go to your local public library and try out different types of courses.  You may find one that works for you.\n\nIf you "really want to learn French" don't give up.
67520
Whoa!!!\nSome incredible answers...\n\nJapanese is definitely the easiest language you can learn to speak. Writing comes from Chinese, so if they are saying it's hard just because of the characters, then Chinese has at 50 times more characters.\n\nChinese/Mandarin is not correct. Mandarin is Chinese. There are many dialects of Chinese, but characters are the same when written, no matter what dialect. Sounds may take a while to learn, but grammatically Mandarin is easy, compared to some other languages.\n\nRussian is very hard. They have an alphabet, but it is different than Latin alphabet. Grammatically, there are many things that are hard to learn. It is the hardest language I can speak (I can speak 4 fluently and learning 3 more), but not the hardest language to learn in the world.\n\nTurkish, rather easy, has a Latin alphabet, with few letters missing such as x, q and w, and has few extra letters. There are no dipthongs in Turkish, unless . There are also no gender, so he/she/it are all the same word, and no irregular nouns or verbs, which makes Turkish very, very easy.\n\nEnglish, in my opinion, is the easiest of the European languages. Unlike Romantic languages, it only has one definite article, and 2 undefinite articles. Some other features of English also make it easy.\n\nSome people agree that Hungarian is the hardest language, but I don't have any experience speaking it so I cannot say.\n\nMalayalam, which is spoken in Southern India, might be hard to learn. They have an alphabet, but it is very confusing, especially to a beginner. The language is aggluginative, which means you can add multiple suffixes to a word and make it much longer. Sounds are hard to make, because they are rolled out of your tongue, similar to other Indian languages.
1075578
Spanish is easier than French or English.
784080
It's going to depend on which languages you want to learn.  If the languages you want to learn are European in origin, I have a suggestion.  \n\nWhen I was in High School, I wanted to take a foreign language course, and I had to choose between Spanish and French. I chose Spanish, but for various reasons, I failed it. For the next 24 years I was under the impression that I couldn't learn a second language.\n\nThen when my daughter was taking Spanish in High School, I found that I still remembered quite a bit of it, and began to rethink my impression about my linguistic ability.\n\nOne day I read that Esperanto was the easiest language on earth to learn. I began learning it as an experiment to see if I really could learn a foreign language. Now I'm fluent at it, and have gone on to learn Spanish (I finished the 3 Pimsleur's Spanish courses in 1 year), and moved on to German. Later I learned a little Polish (to take a business trip to Poland) and studied Mandarin Chinese (just because a friend told me about the free course work on chinesepod.com).\n\nKnowing Esperanto first, helped greatly in my other linguistic experiences, but the thing that surprised me the most was that there is a culture around Esperanto that is alive and vibrant, with Music and Literature (both translated and original). Esperanto is my favorite of all the languages, and the easiest to learn of all my language experiences.\n\nPope John Paul II has called Esperanto the "New Latin".  \n\nThis article on Wikipedia is a very interesting article about the benefits of learning Esperanto before other languages.\n\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto
1176259
Everyone says English but it might depend on what your first language is. If you speak German as a first language for example, you might find English (a Germanic language) easier to pick up than if you spoke Japanese as a first language. Ultimately, no language is any more or less difficult to learn than any other. It depends entirely on the person learning it (their experience learning other languages, how they are taught, why they are learning, etc.).
124397
I would see if there were any classes near you that you could attend. Maybe a local community college? It is easier and more fun to learn a new language with others than to try to do it by yourself.
308199
Just know that English is one of the hardest languages to learn! So if it is your second language- than you are already ahead of the race...
188315
Spanish is the easier language to learn. It is spelled phonetically and pronunctiation is very easy to learn. There are Spanish speakers on every continent, I believe.\nFrench is more difficult to learn, but advantageous if you are going to a country where it is spoken.
131062
Hmmm I can speak of french as I'm french. It's said to be a quite hard language and it really is, lots of exceptions in grammar, many problems of tenses. Well it's also known as a beautiful language and maybe it comes from the fact it's difficult.\nSpanish is close to french I think complexity is quite the same or slightly easier (I've learned it for 3 years). It's a nice language that sounds good, like there's sun in their language :)\nChinese is much more simple regarding tenses and grammar (my girlfriend is chinese) but one very hard thing is they have sounds we don't, they make difference between two sounds just from the tone where we don't really hear any difference, I think it's a question of habit. Of course the writing is also harder, there's a way to write with normal letters too...\n\nRegarding usefulness I think chinese is a language that will be interesting in the few next years as China is opening more, french can be interesting too and I think french can provide a better population coverage than spanish if you choose between those two...\n\nSo good luck in your learning and I hope I provided interesting inofmrations to guide you in your choice :)
498921
If you're worried about the difficulty then choose German, it is a much easier language based on its roots and the fact that it is also a Germanic language like English, but it depends really on your interests, and your career goals.