Which foreign language is the most easy to learn for native?

>>a language's own strength across borders would actually be more important

Indeed, my testimony: even though some of the HK young people are fearing "language attrition" (no, they just rant about it on fora, so take it with a grain of salt) and the decline of Cantonese, and people often say "these days you must speak better Mandarin to get a good commercial job" or "the mainlander graduates are now competing for local jobs against us".

.... this doesnt change the fact that Mandarin, while being "declared" a national language nationwide (and in Taiwan as well) and a standard language in this territory as well, the dominant language used in daily conversations are NEVER in Mandarin except when people use it for pejorative purposes...

in many government departments, offices, hospitals... very very generally, it's only used to deal with Chinese clients/customers from elsewhere. And at the university, my northern counterparts learn far more English than stick on their native Mandarin, and it's pretty much exclusive to these students..... while many locals wont really get to know them (a minority do), nor have the need to master Mandarin to get promoted, in future, easily in the local companies, etc.

Why wont people do code-mixing for Mandarin, except, largely, for pejorative purposes? It simply doesnt enjoy the status that English has, so, considering the situation of "institutions", I can see a foreign (i.e. of a different country) language, spoken largely by peoples of different cultural and ethnic origins (Anglo-Saxons, and European-descent peoples in general), is having the upper hand against a supposedly "national" language shared by the same ethnic group.

I couldnt be considering this national language from a non-Chinese perspective; but take my word if you want: personally, if a language like this ("supposedly national" and getting more popular ever in many countries) still lets you have some "who cares?" responses, then most probably it isn't really worth you time, either. (Then, by superficial common sense, that's darn hard and impossible as well.)

>>still lets you have some "who cares?" responses

As I see it at university, every Chinese like me, or a real northerner, has to submit to English anyway, so I can imagine "who cares?" responses. Unless you have reached the very high level of fluency I mention, natives of any language... like mine, would just look and see you fail... and they cant really help, because only you can help yourself.

Wouldn't bother about it. The US time is coming to an end, and maybe the western world is falling victim to it's own greed and stupidity. Soon English won't be the most important language you have to learn to get ahead. The East is going to be where the economic power will lie in the future.

Most of my foreign friends who are English native speakers think French and Italian are easy for them, while Chinese are considered difficult. Because the character has so many strokes and the pronunciation is also difficult for them.
However, there are still many English speakers who can speak Chinese well, so it maybe mostly depends on your intelligence and your way of learning.
I think http://www.hellomandarin.com is a good site for English speaker to find course suitable for you.

To native born English speakers Chinese looks as if it would be immensely difficult to learn simply because of the unfamiliar and highly complex looking alphabet made up of all those picturesque characters, but I believe that it is much easier than you would image once you leartn the rudiments.

The study of Mandarin Chinese is gaining popularity at quite an impressive rate among certain sections of the British public and the main reason for this is that more and more Brits are coming round to the conclusion that before too long China will easily become the world's main superpower, at least economically if not militarily - perhaps both, but economically is virtually certain. A discussion on BBC Radio 4 late last night confirmed the high likelihood of this.

The current hiatus of a bizarre situation in the global financial/banking markets can do absolutely nothing to refute these assertions....a clear case of "Look East" instead of "Look West" it seems.

If I buckled down and learned Mandarin Chinese I may well do much better in reading it than writing it, who knows, but as for speaking it - I can't imagiune myself actually sounding Chinese with my Occidental tongue. Can you even imagine speaking Chinese with a Soittish accent? The mind boggles.....

I think Spanish is the easiest language, and Chinese is the most difficult language. Chinese is hard to pronounce well and write correctly. Right now I'm taking a course on http://www.learnchinese.bj.cn , because it's really too hard to learn with the CD or MP3 .

[I think Spanish is the easiest language, and Chinese is the most difficult language.]

Reading and writing Spanish seems very easy, but pronunciation is difficult. When I was experimenting with shadowing, I found that shadowing Spanish was quite a bit more difficult than shadowing French (easier) or German (easiest).

I took Spanish in college, and I know a lot of friends who took it in High School. According to them, Spanish was not so easy (for native English speakers)

Sure, finding cognates is easy, but pointing out cognates [in writing] and actually creating your own intelligible sentences in Spanish for an Anglophone are two very different things.

Spanish is not really easy for the average English speaker.

Spanish is considered easy for students. Spanish classes in US schools are popular primarily because the language courses are viewed as easy. Students take their two semesters required by the university, get a good grade and forget about it.

This has more to do with the way the language is taught in classes rather than the language itself being easy.

Also, when we talk about easy and difficult languages, specify if you mean speaking, writing, reading, pronunciation, etc. I consider Chinese easy to learn to speak but difficult to learn to read and write.

Dutch

I took 6 months of Mandarin in high school, and I have to say that the grammar was really, really simple. The tones were the hard part -- neither hearing them or reproducing them come naturally to a speaker of a non-tonal language, so we were usually getting the sounds of each word right, but the tone all wrong -- which changes the meaning of the word.

My teacher had a degree in Chinese studies, a Chinese wife, and had been speaking Chinese (non-natively) for years, and still he said that it was a long time before he was ever able to get through a phone conversation without hearing "Your Chinese is really good" (meaning it was still obviously foreign).

Our Japanese teacher came in and gave us classes on writing, as kanji is pretty much the same in Chinese and Japanese, and he was a native with beautiful penmanship (or brushmanship). Chinese characters are actually very easy to write once you know the stroke order you are supposed to use. And it was interesting to learn the radicals (parts of the symbols that convey basic concepts like "water" or "child") and what they meant. I never got very far with my studies, as it was a really really early class and I was already a senior suffering from the dreaded senioritis, but I still remember it fondly -- it was a very different experience from taking French or Spanish.

>>A discussion on BBC Radio 4 late last night confirmed the high likelihood of this.

Your posts are as wonderful as usual.

Yet, my stance is still: I shouldn't be saying that my language should be competing with English elsewhere outside both of our countries, but their relative difference in strength is so obvious even in a territory now belonging to China herself. And while everybody has use English every so often in my country, its "potential" competitor (I dont know about your people) is just too weak to speak of.

IIRC, there must be some entrance exams in Mandarin for foreigners to enter an "above-average" university, like PKU and BJ; and while economic indicators (in total terms, NOT average terms) have been so obvious... at least in the academic field, Chinese isn't still a useful language. (Well, to put it bluntly, academic development isn't even comparable to how it is going on in those leading European countries...).

Or to put it even more bluntly: in its newest territory, which once belonged to your country, even my bitter competitors from the North are now struggling with GRE, IELTS, TOEFL... you name it.... to become the future elites of China with university qualifications. If China should be (and yes, I do it happening, or going to happen) your ideal, huge, lucrative economy, ....

well, I just can't see why Chinese should be that important, when it can't even be used in CREATING institutions, CREATING new ideas, new texts (such as literature, political philosophy, pop culture...).... like how English, French, and German had been. I think a language isn't still "competent" just with economic power (and largely in gross terms only, without much "average" strength). A good example would, then, actually be its ancient counterpart - when imperial China was advanced in everything (or, at least, everything, in the eyes of my ancestors who used to be excessively proud of their culture, leading to the sufferings of their descendants then and today) - economy, military (but this is controversial), technology, literature, philosophy...

now, for those of us who still care about our country, we think this new country, after wars, political turmoil, etc, really lacks something like "culture", "respect", "morality", etc. Every time I read news, just like the recent:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

what can I say, except "what a shame"?

Amendment: I should have said PKU and Tsinghua. Both are in Beijing, both are nationwide famous, and yet a few bright would-be entrants chose to study in Hong Kong instead - the primary reason is, no matter they are studying business or sciences, that "Hong Kong is international"; the underlying reason is simple: that's much more helpful for them to pursue further studies in the US (US is more strategic for them) and UK.

Indeed, my very wild guess is: in general (and personally), studying in foreign countries as such would be the way out for most of us (who can afford it). This is a very naturally occurring situation - the most brilliant would-be elites won't even trust the potential of those "most famous, prestigious" universities, and to finish their degrees by writing in English (largely, unless they study elsewhere). In this trend of rapid econ. development and, above all, "brain gain" through "brain drain", I think China is pretty much like Japan 100 years ago... (literally). And in this trend, it would be these elites (not even me) who do the business, rather than budding students of their language.

Just think about ... hm... I personally have been learning English for quite some time... If you count my high school years as well, it's about 10 years, I think. What about you learning mine?

Afrikaans would probably be the easiest due to it's simplified grammar and dutch-derived vocabulary, as well as a large number of english borrowings.

<<To native born English speakers Chinese looks as if it would be immensely difficult to learn simply because of the unfamiliar and highly complex looking alphabet made up of all those picturesque characters, but I believe that it is much easier than you would image once you leartn the rudiments>>
Damian in Edinburgh, what you said is absolutely true. As a native speaker of Chinese, I assure you of that.