Easiest language to learn

>>>French's reputation as being very complex, is completely undeserved; the reality is just the opposite. Someone in another thread commented that french is "the most simplified language in the romance family", because its the least inflected, and I completely agree. I think its the orthography that gives this impression; but this is an illusion.

Despite the multitude of mute letters, once I have some transcriptions, things become very clear - guys, how have you learnt your native language, English? Did you hear before you read, and did you read only? When I think carefully, it is indisputable that the Chinese (chinois) doesn't even have an alphabet whatsoever, and how did I listen and learn to speak? I simply had no rules to follow.

I've been suffering from English spelling - and now French spelling, but a deep orthography to decode and one to encode aren't exactly the same. French has after all quite a few rules (and so patterns) to follow, the most consistent being the stress. English is similar in some ways, with the most consistent being the schwa rule (always unstressed).

>>>If you learn a language very distant from your own and you speak English natively, you will think most of the romance languages are a piece of cake compared to bears like Japanese and Mandarin. I really love IE languages no.

I think it isn't very scary for people to say "Ugh" when you're aspiring to learn any given X. What's much scary is for them to say you are being x-phile, _nerdy_ or even learning to become a traitor. This could happen to some Japanese learners.

<<I wonder who invented that Spanish is easy.>>


Thats a good question.

Xie,

I understand why a person from China would think this about Japan. I still hear a lot of Han-Nichi (against the Japanese) sentiment. I think that there are cultural barriers to learning languages in the United States and it sounds as if something similar may be happening in Hong Kong.

And of course, some people are a little suspicious of polyglots.

"Must be a spy."
"Must have a girl in every port" "Must be a prostitute"

Other people just hate languages and don't want to talk about them, so they say anything to change the subject or make it "dirty" or "suspicious"...

<<I wonder who invented that Spanish is easy.>>

Easy at beginner level, usually yes. So many people's first impressions may be that it's easy. But it gets more complex as you reach intermediate and advanced. It is easier than many others, but it isn't a piece of cake either.

It gets more complicated like any other languages.

It always seemed that French and Spanish were about equally hard. Both seemed to me substantially more difficult than English. For me, learning English was as easy as falling off a log (although I have to admit I've enver actially fallen off one of those floating logs into the river.)

<It always seemed that French and Spanish were about equally hard.>


To me, french phonetics, and orthography are more difficult, but the grammar is much easier. I found french grammar to be jokingly easy in comparison to spanish; it lacks the complexities that make spanish tricky.

>>it lacks the complexities that make spanish tricky<<


What do you mean by that Guest...?

English is easy to learn to read, but to understand spoken language is impossible, because English has no pronunciation - only grunting and mumbling

<<What do you mean by that Guest...? >>



A few of the major differences that make french easier than spanish:


1) Unlike Spanish, french is only a moderately inflected language, that depends on subject pronouns; it has fewer tenses/moods than spanish, and most inflections are pronounced the same ( although written differently). This makes conjugation much easier, because there are far fewer.

2)The subjunctive mood, is much more difficult in Spanish. Its highly used, after many different conjunctions, to express uncertain, unlikely or impossible situations - and knowing when to use it is difficult. In french, the subjunctive has more limited use, and generally only following the word 'que'.

3) There are two verbs for "to be" in spanish, and learning when to use which is tricky. French uses 'être' for everying.


...

>>>Other people just hate languages and don't want to talk about them, so they say anything to change the subject or make it "dirty" or "suspicious"...

Guess what, I've once come across a language forum that shares a lot of copyrighted learning material (typically Chinese products; a few from abroad, like ripped films, like the American series "Friends" for learning Am English). There the Japanese board reads something like: If you know both yourself and your enemy, you can come out of hundreds of battles without danger. It follows that: let us learn the language of our enemy and destroy it!

Awfully ultra-nationalistic, but that's that, many morons in the .cn domains keep on bashing everything Japanese - I'm rather pessimistic about the future. I don't really see people bashing most other things.

That said, back to our topic... people usually don't complain much. Well, they are keep on reciting words and the web, besides comments by morons, is full of plagiarisms about language articles (pretty like: 1000 Rules of English grammar). I've rather seen quite a few HK kids complaining about conjugations and declensions. A lot of such kids keep on bashing French and German (I'm afraid Russian isn't even named for its relative obscurity), but there are few successful Spanish learners. May it be true that, once you get over the basics, the easy parts (like of Spanish) are done? There's so much oral stuff and prose you must understand to reach light-bulb moments, and mutilating a new language to just conjugations, scattered words in isolation just won't work, imo.

If you learn a language very distant from your own and you speak English natively, you will think most of the romance languages are a piece of cake

I let you imagine how much is a piece of cake for Romance speakers to learn english or the germanic languages

so do you think that english is an english language to learn for latin speakers?

My experience is only that once you learn a very, very hard language (subjective, yes, but...), then some other "hard" languages don't seem so difficult anymore.

Chinese,i mean the gramma...