The Easiest Language to Learn for English Speakers Revealed

What is the easiest language to learn? It’s a tricky question with more than one answer because what’s easy to learn for native English speakers may be extremely hard for, let’s say, native speakers of Hindi or Arabic languages. So it usually depends on the learner’s native language.

That’s why we’re focusing only on native English speakers and the languages that are easiest to learn for them. But with so many options, choosing one can be a bit challenging. You may pick one and try to learn it for a while, only to realize it’s just too difficult for you. Or, you may spend days or weeks analyzing plenty of languages to see whose grammar and vocabulary are the most similar to English and hope it’s the right choice.

To help you avoid wasting time and effort researching the world’s easiest language or analyzing language after language until you end up with the wrong one, we’ve selected a few languages that English speakers tend to pick up very quickly.

What are the easiest languages to learn for English speakers?

We didn’t choose just one language because it’s individual. While the first one on the list is the easiest to learn for many people, it’s the second or third for others. That’s why we’re sharing with you five easy languages you can consider learning if you’re an English speaker.

1. Norwegian

For many people, this is the easiest language to learn if you’re an English speaker, and there are many reasons why we share the same opinion. For starters, it shares a lot of vocabulary with English, such as “milk” and “melk” or “tea” and “te,” both being Germanic languages.

When it comes to Norwegian grammar, it’s pretty simple. The sentence structure is the same as the one in English, so it shouldn’t confuse any English speaker. Sentences in both languages start with a subject, followed by a verb and an object.

For example, “I speak Norwegian” would be “Jeg snakker Norwegian” where “jeg” is the subject “I,” “snakker” is the verb “speak,” and “Norwegian” is the object “Norwegian.” Although there are exceptions, mastering the word order should be easy.

In terms of pronunciation, certain sounds may be challenging for you to pronounce. However, the intonation is similar, with plenty of patterns being identical to English. Moreover, the Norwegian alphabet is the same as the English one, with three extra letters Å, Ø, and Æ.

2. Swedish

Being a Scandinavian language like Norwegian, Swedish is the most logical option to come after our first choice. Once again, it belongs to the Germanic language family, so many words are similar to English. For example, “tough” and “tuff,” “discriminate” and “diskriminera,” or “fake” and “fejka.”

When it comes to grammar, Swedish has simple rules and a similar sentence structure to English. For example, verbs keep the same form regardless of the person performing them. Also, they have a single present tense form, so if you need to use, let’s say, “går” or “go,” you’d use the same form when referring to the first, second, or third person singular or plural.

Swedish has four more vowels than English, which may cause slight confusion when pronouncing them. But once you master some unique sounds like “sje,” you’ll realize it’s quite a melodic language.

3. Spanish

Even though Spanish and English have rather different pronunciations and grammar rules, they have many similarities. Although they come from separate language families, they still share many words, especially those derived from Latin or Greek. For example, “biology” and “biología” or “air” and “aire.”

In terms of grammar, Spanish has plenty of grammar rules and exceptions, as well as more verb tenses than English. But, they are simple to learn because most align with each other.

Spanish, as well as English, uses the Latin alphabet, which is a huge advantage. The Spanish one has one more letter, “ñ,” but 19 fewer individual speech sounds, meaning you’ll have fewer speech sounds to learn than in English. The pronunciation is quite straightforward as letters have only one corresponding sound, unlike English, where one letter can have more than one pronunciation.

4. Portuguese

Just like Spanish, Portuguese is a Romance language, so it has a lot of words derived from Latin. English has them as well, so both languages share a number of similar words, such as “interested” and “interesado” or “violence” and “violencia.”

As Indo-European languages, their grammars are similar in a few aspects. For example, the sentences follow the same word order - subject, verb, object, and the plural of nouns are formed by adding a single -s at the end of the word. Also, nouns that are uncountable in English are also uncountable in Portuguese.

5. Dutch

Last but not least, Dutch is another Scandinavian language that English speakers can learn rather easily. Coming from the same language family, they share many words. In fact, many Dutch words are spelled the same as in English, making them easy to recognize and learn.

Still, you must be careful when pronouncing them, as they may have different pronunciations. Also, many cognates can cause misunderstandings if you’re not aware of them. The Dutch sentence structure isn’t the same as the English one, so you’ll need to learn a few rules.