Question:
Which language is generally considered the easiest for an English speaker
to learn? I'm absolutely HORRIBLE at learning foreign languages and I must
reach at least an intermediate level of one to meet the University of
California undergrad ge requirement. I've heard Spanish is the easiest,
but I had a really hard time with it in high school. The hardest part for
me is processing the spoken word. To my ears, Spanish sounds like a blur.
Way too fast and multi-syllabolic for me.
Answer:
The easiest language to learn is the one a person is most interested in!
Motivation is one of the primary factors in language learning, and
de-motivation one of the major obstacles. Presumably you don't like the
Spanish!
More seriously I heard years ago (and cannot vouch for it) that the USA had
established a list of how many weeks they expected an ambassador would need
to learn each foreign language. The gave the worst a random figure of 100;
a language which took half this time therefore had a figure of 50, and so
on.
Japanese and Chinese were at the top (Japanese 100 - partly due to the
writign system). European langauges were predictably at the lower end,
because an English speaker has a decided advantage with vocabulary.
Spanish was about 23, Italian 27, French 30. I cannot remember where
German was, and I don't think Polynesian languages were included.
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