Is learning a foreign language ever easy ? Yes. If you are five and move to another country ……
But what about for the rest of us who are no longer five, and need to be polite when travelling for business or for pleasure ? I think that the answer is yes, language learning can be easy provided you don’t want or need to learn too much.
The key to successful language learning in my mind is not to set the goalposts too high. It is rather like running. Even if you run twice a week, you don’t necessarily want to be able to run a marathon, or have any intention of running a marathon or maybe you never could run a marathon. You might just want to maintain a level of fitness. I think the same can be said for language learning. I find languages fascinating and enjoy dabbling with them, but that doesn’t mean I feel duty-bound to get good (or maybe I can’t anyway). I’m a programmer and have no particular aptitude for foreign language learning, but I like to learn a few words here, a few words there type of thing.
Let’s get back to the goalposts. If you decide to learn ten words in a foreign language before visiting the country, you know that you will manage to do this. Learning a foreign language for your purposes has now been redefined to learning ten words. Conversely if you decide to attain conversational fluency, unless you are an exceptionally talented individual you will fall far short of your goal, and quite probably give up in disgust.
I think that there is far to much emphasis on this completer-finisher thing with regard to languages. For the majority of us, language learning should be easy and fun. Of course, I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for becoming fluent in other languages, I’m just saying that for most of us it isn’t practical or necessary.
I like travelling but I don’t have the time or aptitude to learn too much of any particular foreign language. So I learn, or dabble and enjoy it. I set goals that work for me and are usually to learn about hundred words whenever I visit a new country. I’ll learn the words you need to be polite, the numbers, greetings and a few general phrases. Doing this always results in a better holiday and I enjoy it.
It is also far easier to start learning a foreign language than to finish. In other words the better you are the slower it can be to improve, because you are becoming stuck with grammar, making sentences, learning less common words etc. If you are only trying to learn a few foreign words and phrases you will enjoy a faster rate of progress, have more fun, and don’t have to spend to much time on any given language.
Minority languages are particular candidates for this approach, because often you don’t need to use them to communicate and they are by their very nature not widely used.
A good example is Catalan which is spoken in the north-east of Spain by about 10 million people, almost all of whom are bilingual (also speaking Spanish). There is no need to learn Catalan to travel around this area of Spain, if you already speak Spanish, but it shows respect for the local culture and it is interesting.
The intention of learning only a few hundred words in a language, and then stopping, isn’t the usual approach to language learning, but it can be a very rewarding and entertaining activity. Linguata helps.
Frank Middleton
http://www.articlesbase.com/education-articles/easy-language-learning-53530.html
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What’s an easy language to start learning?
ANYTHING except Spanish
I am so sick of that language
And no Asian languages, their alphabets are usually quite a bit different
I would like to learn French, because I am in Canada and in Canada you learn French in school so it might make it easier lol
Though, other than school I don’t know when I’d use it, also I don’t like French that much
Anyway, is Swedish a hard language to learn?
I’d really like to learn a Scandinavian language, they seem easy
SIGN LANGUAGE i took it and passed my AIMS with a 90% and higher
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Asian language is HUGE
Asian language has Indo Europeans= Iranian- Hindi- Pashto to name a few and some Central Asian Indo European languages
Asian Languages also have Meditereanean languages like Hebrew and Arabic and Assyrian
Asian also have Malayo Polynesians like Malay, Indonesian, Tagalogog < HAWAIIAN, Fijian, Maori etc
Asian also Chinese- Japanese
For you, since you dont like this and dont like that you should study English sisters language, German or Dutch
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Don’t go for a language because its easy. pick one that will suit your needs. Im studying japanese because I love watching anime and I like japanese food.
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Italian
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Pig Latin. Example; igPa atinLa
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You should learn Japanese. I know you said no asian ones but its really easy to learn and thats coming from an 11 year old. Well, good luck finding one.
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Scandinavian languages are not at all easy. Finnish has 14 cases! If you want easy, learn Swahili or Afrikaans (basically 16th century Dutch). Afrikaans has very little grammar and is easy to pronounce.
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swedish is pretty easy. the grammar is not to different from english. and about that one person saying that Scandinavian languages are hard because finnish is hard is wrong. finnish is a totally different language family then english and swedish (finnish=finno-ugric/ swedish and english= germanic). if you study hard swedish should only take about 5 mounths to speak fluently.
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my brain. me grandpas a swede. ive learned swedish.
There are many ignorant answers on here. I’m half Swedish, and can speak a pretty good amount. It’s pronunciation can be tough but grammatically it’s MUCH closer to English than Spanish, French, or German.
Like English it doesn’t have the overdone verb conjugating of Spanish. Ya pratar lite svenska- I speak a little Swedish. Du pratar lite svenska- You speak a little Swedish.
So there’s no verb conjugating for the person, which I prefer. Take another example
Yag har tre ägg
I have three eggs
Han har tre ägg
He has three eggs
Can you believe how similar the languages are? I wouldn’t have ever thought that they’d be this close till I started learning it.
It’s actually shockingly similar to English at times. Colours for examples
red-röd (the ö is pronounced inbetween eh and uh, kind of like the vowel in bird if you drop the r, I hope that makes sense.it’s hard to describe)
green-grön
blue-blå (for å try to sound out a broad a like in "father" but round your lips, it should be a roundish a sound)
white-vit
You just see similarities to English everywhere. är means are or is (you don’t pronounce the r, it sounds like the word air spoken with an English accent) and alot of basic words are shared too.
milk-mjölk (pronounced like myeh-lk)
house-hus
dog-hund
day-dag (dah)
middag-midday or afternoon
nat-night
If you break it down, you start seeing crazy similarities, like yours is din. What does that sound like? Thine. Du-Thou Din-Thine
My Grandpa was American, and when he was stationed in Sweden he fell in love with the place and moved there. Apparently he picked up the language in three months. My mom’s American boyfriend who lived in Sweden with her for 2 years? She said he could talk in two months.
Spanish feels completely foreign once you realise how much closer English is to the Germanic languages.
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