language with fewer phonemes

In my view, the right question should be: which language has fewer phonemes? If you ask which language is the easiest, the answer is too subjective and it generally depends on your own mother tongue.

As far as I know it's an Australian language which only has 12 phonemes
Amongst the most common languages I'd say Indonesian, Modern Greek and Spanish.

Hawaiian has very few phonemes (13, I think).

In Europe I'd say Finnish, modern Greek, Macedonian, Spanish, Basque.

Spanish: the easiest language to pronounce. Not to mention its grammar. It has no irregular plural, more or less like Esperanto.

<<Spanish: the easiest language to pronounce. Not to mention its grammar.>>

Spanish has its problems, though -- lots of irregular verbs with lots of tenses, grammatical complications (especially concerning subjunctive), lots of idioms (like many langauges), and that difficult 'rr' sound.

>>If you ask which language is the easiest, the answer is too subjective and it generally depends on your own mother tongue.

Regardless of tone patterns, mine should have a small inventory. Any European language with voiceless plosives, /ts/, /w/, /j/ and their unaspirated counterparts would cover 90% of that inventory, except tones and unaspirated syllable coda.

On the contrary, my semi- one, Mandarin, again regardless of tone patterns, has actually a moderately large inventory, which would help us learn many subtle phonemes of Japanese, French, Russian, Polish and German, etc.

I agree Spanish You learn to read in a week!

I would say Greek

Not even a week, in an hour you could read properly any Spanish text even if you don't know what it means.

In comparison, after a year of study in Japanese, there will still be many texts you can't read or understand.

"In comparison, after a year of study in Japanese, there will still be many texts you can't read or understand"

Is this about Japanese phonetics???

As far as I know amongst Slavonic languages, the one with fewer phonemes should be:

Macedonian and Croatian

Latin languages:

Spanish

Germanic languages:

German or Afrikaans??

<< "In comparison, after a year of study in Japanese, there will still be many texts you can't read or understand"

Is this about Japanese phonetics??? >>

Certainly not. Japanese has pretty simple phonetics for the most part.

Japanese has 65 syllabic combinations, more or less, but it has a few tonal complications.

Hawaiian has only 13 letters, but very long words.

Chinese has a few hundred syllabic combinations, but between 4 and 9 tonal complications.

the most complex thing about Japanese is the writing system, which is adapted from Chinese with additions of genuine Japanese creation. The Chinese characters are not particularly well adapted to the language since Chinese is a monosyllabic language and Japanese has rather elaborate layers of inflection depending on context and other factors.
One native speaker of Japanese confided to me that reading it is quite laborious, since it often occurs that the complete meaning of a sentence is misunderstood on the first read as a result of the fact that the Chinese characters have numerous readings in Japanese and the reader is constantly having to revise the context as they progress in the sentence.

>>Chinese has a few hundred syllabic combinations, but between 4 and 9 tonal complications.

I've read that Mandarin syllabic combinations might be around 1,4xx. But after you get the tones right, everything is fine. Actually, Mandarin tones change so easily that I simply treat it as music to mimic orally. It seems to be evolving into a language without tones.

The language with fewd phonems is American Spanish: five vowels and many letters c-s-z, ll-y, j-s are pronounced with the same sound. This diminishes the phonetic nature of Spanish spelling, but on the other hand some difficult sounds like LL, J and Z are wiped out.