Languages

[powerboy]

Disregarding our own language that we speak. But which language is the easiest to learn? Or you feel is that it would be easy to learn?

To me it is Spanish and Sign Language. Yes I am wanting to learn them both

[linguist]

for me it was spanish, but that was mostly because i grew up speaking it to some extent anyway. italian was fairly easy, too, because it's pretty similar to spanish. for non-indo-european languages, the easiest for me was probably q'anjob'al, one of the mayan languages.

[Boozy]

Apparently, native English speakers usually find German to be easy to pick up. I don't speak a word of it. I speak English and French only.

Several friends who speak Spanish as a third language have told me that Spanish is easy to pick up once you've learned French (or vice versa).

[Greenday]

I learned Spanish as my second language. I'd have to say, it wasn't that bad.

[ArenaBoy]

Easiest to speak? Japanese. I'm not kidding. Unlike with French or English there isn't a lot of complexities to worry about. For example. Watashi ni tabemashita. (Means I just ate) The only reason it sounds intimidating is that they speak at a monotone rate and it's a rhythm language. It also helps if you associate the language with certain things.
It's the writing system of Japanese that gives learners a headache. There's 4 systems: one for basic words (Hi, hello, good morning), one for foreign words (Cheeseburger), one for just about everything else, and an English based system called Romaji. Roman letters basically.

After I learned Japanese I found that I can pick up any language easily.

My next language? I'm looking at Italian and German and as of late I'm leaning towards Italian. I'm setting myself up for a headache though for school, I'm taking French and Japanese at the same time.

(Linguist, Italian and French have some similarities too along with Spanish. Il is a male possessive in French and Italian. )

[AFPheonix]

Italian, French, and Spanish are all Romance languages. They are birthed from Roman Latin. So oftentimes, if you learn one, you kind of have a leg up on the others.

[linguist]

very true, phoenix. although i wouldn't recommend studying two related languages at the same time; it can get confusing. i was studying italian while taking a spanish lit class, and often ended up confusing myself, since even though they are similar, they are just different enough to matter.

catalan, another romance, is lots of fun. it's got spanish lexicology, italian phonology, and french morphology.

euskara is lots of fun too. it's a linguistic isolate; that is, it's not related to any language spoken currently.

[AFPheonix]

Ah yes, I brushed up against Catalan when I got to visit Barcelona in 1996. Really funky :) Good thing the people there could either speak English or Spanish or else I'd have been screwed.

[ThePhoneGoddess]

Italian, French, and Spanish are all Romance languages. They are birthed from Roman Latin. So oftentimes, if you learn one, you kind of have a leg up on the others.

Yes, they are all descended from Vulgar Latin, which was separate from Classical Latin. Vulgar Latin was the language of soldiers, merchants, and settlers, which is why it spread out into the far reaches of the Roman Empire. Also descended from Vulgar Latin are Romanian, Albanian, and Portuguese.


English is descended from the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons, but was heavily influenced by the Old French spoken by the Franks when they conquered England. So English is structured like a Germanic language---our pronouns sound Germanic, our verb conjugations are Germanic-style, and we put adjectives before nouns instead of after them, as Romance languages do. But many of our descriptive words, as well as legal and administrative terms, are descended from Old French. And not only that, but during the English Renaissance, writers 'borrowed' lots of classical Greek words, which became part of the everyday language. That's why English has parallel vocabularies, and is such a rich---albeit difficult to learn---language.

And here endeth the language lesson of the classics obsessed TPG.