When I click on the link to claim the prize and enter my name and email address, I keep getting a message saying "Sorry, there was an error. Please try again later." I have tried with different browsers and devices.
But necessarily. I speak, to varying levels, 8 languages. I'm very passionate about Georgia and the Georgian language but the grammar, especially for verbs, is extremely difficult.
I really hate Esperanto included in these Top easiest languages. It's a made up language, so it's designed to be easy. If we are looking for a made up language, maybe Toki Pona would be better.
4:42 Here is my explanation as an Indonesian speaker. While it is true that we express plurality by repeating words, that is not always the case. This may be confusing for English speakers, but in Indonesian we do not need to change a noun just because it is singular or plural. Usually we just add a number in front of the noun to express quantity. For example, "two bicycles" is simply "dua sepeda", never "dua sepeda-sepeda". That is why we are not confused by words like "kupu-kupu", which is already a reduplication, because we never need to say "dua kupu-kupu kupu-kupu". Moreover, according to the Indonesian dictionary, "kupu" already means "butterfly", even without the reduplication. So, technically, you can express sentences like “butterflies are flying around” by simply saying “kupu beterbangan” and leave it at that, since the verb “beterbangan” itself already indicates that there are many butterflies involved.
In fact, the reduplication (as it seems is the term for this) is not used for expressing a plural but changes the signification of the noun into something more generic. For example, when you want to speak about one person you say "satu orang". If you mention "orang orang", you speak about people in general, or "buku buku" when you speak about all the books (present or not present in front of you) with no precision.
Years ago I fell in love with Italian. I started learning it by myself and it was so enjoyable. I was flying through the manual. I think if you love the language you are learning it's much more easier
@@chocolatecookie8571 not really the point. I was female when I rapidly became fluent in Mandarin (my favorite language); still female when I gave up on French because it just wasn't motivating me.
Can confirm Swahili is incredibly simple to understand and grasp, it’s quickly become my favourite language I’ve ever learnt! Kiswahili ni lugha rahisi sana! Unaweza kukijifunza haraka sana 🫶🏻🇰🇪🇹🇿
Esperanto! Category 0 - hands down, the easiest living language in the world to learn. And it's more useful than one might think. They say if you want to make money, the language to learn is English. But if you want to make friends, you should learn *Esperanto*. And this is absolutely true: I have made hundreds of friends around the world (and met many of them in their home countries, or they have visited mine) all because of Esperanto. Yes, there isn't a single country where the language is official, but there are Esperantists in just about every city and country around the world. This can be a big advantage: you'll never travel alone when you know Esperanto, in just about any foreign country you will have locals who are your instant friends wherever you go. No need to stick to just the tourist traps when local friends can show you the authentic local country & culture!
@@Emjazzuli The vocabulary might be easier for romance speaking people, but overall the language is easier for everyone. Many Japanese people told me how much Esperanto is easier for them than English.
Not counting artificial languages, my vote for simplest is - surprisingly - Hindi. Yes, one large hump at the start: You have to learn the script. But it pays off big-time. Hear a word clearly spoken and you have at least a 95% chance of finding it in a dictionary. See it written and there is an excellent chance you can speak it clearly enough to be understood. - No passive voice - to get passive, just leave out the subject, i.e. to say "I was seen" just say "Saw me." - Only 5 irregular verbs c/f English 100, German 300. So learn the rules for tense, and 5 oddities, and you can decline any verb. - Two genders, but male things are masculine, female things are feminine, almost all abstract nouns are feminine, almost all concrete nouns are masculine. - the script has a massive payoff. Wander around Delhi and you'll soon see that half the signs written in devanagari are actually English! The script is scientifically designed to follow a logical system of sound production. Forgot how to pronounce a letter? Just look where it is in the alphabet and you'll know how to pronounce it! - It is acceptable, indeed more common than not, to mix and match words from any language in a sentence. Forgot a Hindi word? Just bung in the English one. Disadvantages: For an English speaker, although they have many common roots, you have to expect that almost all words are different - a big vocab job ahead. Also, to pronounce (for any language actually) you must give yourself permission to make noises that are not in your native language.
Great video Olly! Thanks to your content I found a way to learn French. After roughly 10 months I am at a lower B1 level. All thanks to your story learning method! I just wanted to make a comment to your point at 3:10. While it is true that many Scandinavians understand the other two languages, we must remember that this requires extremely good listening skills, and an English person learning Swedish will probably not pick up Norwegian and Danish as easy as it might sound. Go out on the streets of Norway or Sweden and ask random natives if they understand spoken Danish. Most people will actually say no. The Scandinavians who immerse a lot in the other two languages mostly have no issues, but a lot of native Scandinavians really struggle with understanding the other two languages. Due to our many dialects a lot of Scandinavians struggle to also understand some people from the same country! I am a native Norwegian in a relationship with a Swede. We understand each other just fine. But whenever we visit her family in Sweden, I have to adjust my Norwegian to a middle road language called "Svorsk" (Swedish with a thick Norwegian accent). Because if I speak to her family in my west Norwegian dialect, they understand nothing. For a person learning Swedish, understanding Norwegian and Danish as well is going to take a lot of time. In order to comprehend Norwegian and Danish, your Swedish listening skills must be superb, close to native level. And for this reason, your target when learning Swedish should be to learn Swedish, and not Norwegian and Danish. However, if you move to Sweden and learn Swedish, and then move to Norway for some reason, you will pick up Norwegian to a good level in no time. Probably less than six months. But if you learn Swedish and expect to understand Norwegian and Danish as well, you might be disappointed. I think we can compare it to Spanish and Catalan. A person from Catalonia can probably understand Spanish just fine. A Spanish person can maybe get by in Catalonia. However if I, a native Norwegian, were to learn Spanish to a B2 level. Would I also understand Catalan? Definitely no. But if I were to move to Barcelona I could probably pick it up easier than a person who speaks no Spanish. My channel is fairly new, but I have already made a video about this exact subject. Check it out if you are interested. As always, thanks for your videos Olly. I'm a huge fan of your content and also the story learning method.
Thanks for the explanation! To be fair, Olly only says "you can also understand Norwegian and Danish too". He doesn't say "spoken Norwegian and Danish". İ for one find it not that difficult understanding written Danish and Norwegian. Even though İ sometimes don't understand a thing when Danes and Norwegians talk. Especially Danish is super difficult to follow. İn fact, this happened to İ several times: İ thought a bunch of people were talking Cantonese or Vietnamese. İ only hear they at first, then İ see those people and they're blond. After listening more closely İ realize that they're Danes. 🙆🏽♀️ The last time this happened is actually less than a month ago.
Please note the hours required in the FSI chart. The 24-30 weeks assumes about six hours of full-time study EVERY DAY for six or seven months. And this is not to achieve fluency but a basic proficiency in the B1-B2 range. I went through the Russian course at Defense Language Institute and the standards are very similar to FSI. After 47 weeks of full time study, the best students were probably B2 and the average students were mid to upper B1.
wow! OLLY RICHARDS!! dankon pro spekti kaj inkluzivi min en via video!!! I am truly humbled and honoured and super motivated to continue my Esperanto learning journey! WOW!❤
It was a pleasant surprise to see Esperanto mentioned here. I speak it, it definitely was much easier to learn than other languages I studied and it was much more useful than I could ever imagine.
@@jlcarrasco In addition to the many benefits you get from learning any language, Esperanto can be useful for many reasons, to get friends from smaller countries like Iceland, Hungary. For travelling there is a service called Pasporta servo where you can get free accommodation while travelling, you often get free guides while visiting various cities, etc.
@@MrPleers same, i have heard people said it made learning other languages easier, but i wonder why not just put that time into actually learning these languages
well old form of Indonesian (classical Malay) were lingua franca in South East Asian region back then even Vietnam knows classical Malay let alone traders
I just came back from those 3 countries- Denmark, Norway, Sweden was fairly easy to understand the languages in writing I bought a book in Swedish and read it
Esperanto also helps learning other languages in general. The most difficult language a person learns is their 1st 2nd language. Esperanto helps in that, since it is easier. Although you still have to put work in. In time you should have developed good study habits. Esperanto additionally helps in learning Agglutinative languages, since word formation is done similarly. Free Word Order as well, you can switch it up to get used to languages that have a different word order. Still waiting for your "Short Stories in Indonesian" and "Short Stories in Afrikaans" Olly. 😉
Yes, although a good chunk of that is that it's dead simple if you speak any of the languages that were used to create it. But, the bigger benefit is that you can skip the step where it sound weird hearing foreign words coming out of your mouth and establish that it's possible to learn a new language so you stop fighting it.
Esperanto is the fastest to learn & builds motivation, concept of multilingual benefits, & good structure to link the other languages that are less logical (eg English, 1 of the most illogical spelling & idioms ;) my 5th & best language (not counting the split from Serbocroatian to 4 different & similar - Slovenian, Bulgarian, Slovak...)
Just for reference..the dude singing 2:28 - 2:32 did not pronounce a single swedish word...that was international jibberish in my swedish ears. Update: OK, he might have gotten the first word "Hej" right, after that it was all "nothingness" as a swede. The attempt was "Hej tomtegubbar, slå i glasen och låt oss lustiga vara! "...he got "Hej" right.
lmao I'm glad to hear that confirmation of what I was thinking- I lived in Sweden for a few years - didn't have too much time to seriously study the language but I learned a semi-decent amount and certainly HEARD it every day, mostly on the bus or the local ICA- and to me it was jibberish and sounded VERY American, not at all Swedish. I guess I at least got to a point where bad, American-sounding "Swedlish" is obvious as being that even to me!
Finally, someone notices that Bahasa Indonesia is such a simple language. But you will notice soon if you come to Indonesia that the people of Indonesia don't speak regular Bahasa Indonesia; there is also much Indonesian slang that is added to the conversation. Learning regular Bahasa Indonesia doesn't help you so much actually, as people in Indonesia think that regular one is too formal and kind of weird to bring it into conversation. That's why we, as the Indonesian itself, feel that our language is hard to understand (especially its poetry). Some of my friends even said that it's easier to get a better score at the English examination compared to Bahasa Indonesia (even though we're not an English-speaking country).
@@timgilligan3885 That's not the best example though. Because the difference between BBC English and Scottish English is the accent (and sometimes a few Scots or Gaelic words here and there, depending on where and who you talk with), while the original comment talks about something more similar to what Finnish has with Standard vs colloquial.
I guess Malaysian accent is kinda closest to standard Indonesian for most part of city in Malaysia (except Northern part of Malaysian had accent that even Malaysian cant even know they spoke).Maybe except few Dutch loanword like Handuk and Kantor
The easiest is the one that you wanna use and study every day - I studied Spanish 2 years in high school, didn’t use it for 1.5 and then took it up again last year in septemer. Now a year later I speak it fluently enough to have coherent conversations without many standstills.
The most astounding thing I learned from this video is that the Esperanto word for "and" is "kaj". Rather than using something that resembles a Germanic- or Romance-language word for "and", Zamenhof decided that Greek--a wonderful but much less widely used language worldwide--would be the source for one of the five most commonly used words?
Well, in the XIX century, educated people in Europe used to learn some classic Greek, as well as Latin. What's funny, is that he didn't take anything else from it that I know of. Maybe some of the affixes are from Greek? I think the plural suffix, -j, could come have come from it.
Be realistic my friend , learning any language is not easy , because there are also different levels of understanding and especially speaking ,in all languages . Ok , it is easy in all languages to learn simple things like ‘ can I have ´ , ‘ I like this ‘ etc etc , but when it comes to giving your opinion and speaking with real native speakers ,that is another question ! I speak as an English person who speaks French fluently , and who has a good knowledge of German and Arabic . NONE OF THE MAJOR USEFUL WORLD LANGUAGES ARE EASY , and each one needs hours of patient learning , listening , reading and speaking ! So let’s be realistic and not give simplistic , media friendly solutions to complex learning situations ! And something else : There are many different language families in the world , and your learning capacity will be effected by which language family you come from and in which language family is the language you want to learn .
Tourist friendly short dialogues are easily learnt but really mastering a foreign language takes time and full immersions. When I write "really mastering" I mean having a spoken and written vocabulary almost as rich as the one you have in your mother tongue
Absolutely, regardless whether the language is considered "easy" for English speakers for example, the hard part about language learning is definitely understanding natives, getting used to a foreign sound system, learning vocabulary. Related languages make it easier to use specific grammar constructions because of their similarities, but you still need a high number of hours spent with the language, regardless of its lexical similarity with your own language
Very true. I am a native Dutch speaker and I speak English, Indonesian , French , Spanish and German. I always hear people talking about how easy Indoneisan is and I guess that’s kind of true if you’re talking survival level and informal conversation. But most foreign speakers of Indonesian make many mistakes but they’ll never realize it until they try something like a formal letter or an academic or literary text. Indonesian are usually too polite to point out errors anyway. Several things said about the language in the video are misleading. Purely phonetic? No, for instance Indonesian has two phonemes represented by the letter e, it also has digraphs, it has a word-initial velar nasal which many people can’t pronounce properly, it has a glottal stop represented by k in some words but not in others… Doubling a word for the plural form does exist but is not appropriate in every context (“two houses” is NOT dua rumah-rumah). There is a considerable difference between the formal and informal register in vocabulary but also in the use of grammatical prefixes and suffixes. I see videos with titles like “guy amazes locals by speaking perfect Indonesian” only to see them address older people with the informal pronoun “kamu” which is kinda rude, no Indonesian would address a person of authority like that, but Indonesians will generally tolerate it in everyday interactions with foreigners. However wouldn’t recommend it if you are talking to a government official in order to get some kind of permit. Try explaining something technical or legal in formal Indonesian, with lots of relative clauses for example, and the “simple suffixes” suddenly aren’t so simple anymore.
You may notice he did not say "Easy languages to learn". He said "Languages you can learn fast". Not the same thing Besides ease is relative. Maybe all of those languages were hard for you and as a native English speaker even Spanish gave me some trouble but a friend I went to high school with found it super easy. And given that Olly's audience is primarily native English speakers I don't think he needs to clarify You may also notice he literally listed the hours on his category chart. Like category 2 takes supposedly 900 hours - I don't think anyone would define that as easy unless we're talking in comparison to other languages. Which he is. So I can't even figure out what your problem is Like you came and wrote this whole paragraph but I can't even figure out what your specific complaint or proposed solution is
Great list. i love that you put Esperanto on here. it is a great language for someone who is just starting off learning other languages. and it is surprisingly useful
With all due respect, "learning" a language is not simply a matter of vocabulary! The grammatical rules of EACH language have their own particularities, and there is also the entire culture that accompanies the language. In Portuguese, for example, you have different levels of language use. From the simplest and most vulgar to the most polished and "elite", including regionalisms. Therefore, if the title refers to "learning" in the sense of simply having a good understanding of the basic rules (such as how to inflect and have a reasonable understanding of agreement, for example) and a vocabulary that covers the minimum possible number of words, yes... perhaps Spanish is considered easy for someone who lives in the US, due to contact with native Spanish speakers, as well as for someone who speaks Portuguese (whether from Portugal or Brazil), since they have a lot in common BUT are still very different languages, rich and full of details. And I haven't even mentioned the famous "false cognates". But as I said, I had no intention of belittling the work (which must have been quite a lot). And congratulations for encouraging learning!
Exactly. People who just go "don't learn grammar, just go for vocab" is a bit delusional in my opinion. Because let's think about a language like a house, the vocab is the bricks and the grammar is the cement that holds all of it perfectly together.
Please make a beginner guide on how to learn indonesian language 🙏 Really interested in this language but can't find where to practice my listening skill and grammar especially.
I don't speak Italian and never studied it. But just by knowing Portuguese and Spanish and being quite alert, I could hold conversations in "Italian", when I was in Rome. Ok, it wasn't really Italian, but we had rather long conversations where we mutually understood each other. Just by figuring some basic stuff like present and past tense conjugation, and plural, and there you go.
Fast is a relative term. It takes hours and hours of intensive study to learn a language past phrase book level. Personally, I stick to my native language and try to speak that as best I can. It's not going too badly, so far.
Than you very much for mentioning my two favourite languages in the video. I love Swedish and keep learning this just for fun, because it is a language of ABBA and Roxette. Kaj mi multege dankas por la menciado de Esperanto! The overview of this language was very positive, and additionally very nice and kind Esperanto speakers were shown as examples. Esperanto can truly help in learning some other European language thanks to its similarities to them. It also can help to overcome the barrier of hesitation when it comes to learning langiages. Way not all people are linguistically gifted if it comes to learning them, since reading rules, grammar nuances or exceptions can discourage to continue the learning. Esperanto in this regard is quite flexible, so that one can learn it playfully remaining free of stress. I can endlessly speak about Esperanto's upsides, but it's really worthy, at least, it brings lots of pleasure.
For Swedish if you want listening experience there is a certain sport Lemont talked about watching where they speak in NOTHING but Swedish. Can't remember what specific sport it was but that is great for input since so many Swedish media in one way or another he was finding English in there. I wish there was something similar with Hindi and many other Indian languages.
There are 3 countries that speak it (+ some Caribean islands) and you can easily communicate with Afrikaans speakers in South Africa and Namibia with it. Also is a good gateway to learning German afterwards.
@@kimashitawa8113All of those countries speak a much more common language aswell. Dutch is beautiful but unless one is marrying into, has deep love for the culture, plans to work, wants to become a dutch citizen; theres not a whole lot of “usage” for the languge. But i personally dont think there needs to be one for someone to want to learn.
@@Dylan-oy3ch That's still at least 2 countries (Dutch is spoken by more people in Belgium than French) I'm still pretty sure it's 3 because isn't Dutch also the biggest language in Suriname?
Thanks for Esperanto - Modern Intercontinental or interplanetary. The astronaut Mark Shuttleworth (South African entrepreneur) flew aboard the Russian Soyuz mission in 2002. While onboard, he communicated in Esperanto as part of his outreach to international audiences. Shuttleworth’s use of Esperanto helped raise awareness of the language in unique & high-profile setting. Esperanto is inter cultural language to understand the world. Esperanto was taught in schools in 1905 in China, Macedonia, Samos... Esperanto gained traction in Japan, especially among intellectuals & students during early 1900s. French schools started teaching Esperanto in 1900s as part of broader movement to promote international communication. Educational institutions in Germany included Esperanto in their curricula during early XX century. Herzberg am Harz, Esperanto Urbo became popular, & flourished economically.
Languages are more than textbook practice. Immersion is extremely helpful. For English speakers, the Germanic languages are difficult to get an immersion experience in because it’s hard to find non-English-speaking people to patiently work with you. So Italian or Spanish are much easier in that sense because there are millions of monolingual speakers to practice with.
Thanks for this video! I was exactly looking for new languages to learn, i want to arrive as quick as possible at 10 and i'm stuck at 7, i seriously don't know what to choose.
I jump around between 13 or more languages and I‘m glad Swedish was first on the list because I can confirm it‘s insanely easy to acquire new phrases. Also, Finding Nemo is really cool to watch in Swedish lol.
Nice video! I am learning German and it isn’t even on the list. That’s not a shocker at all! For a possible next video it would be nice if you could talk about different regional accents in Oklahoma and Arkansas. I live in Oklahoma and where I live we have some twang going on. We use Midwestern and Southern dialect mashed up together. For instance instead of saying “sir-up” we say “surp.” Another example is we elongate the “a” in words too. The word “grandma” sounds like you add an “L” at the end of it. We say “y’all” and drop the “g” in “ing” all the time. I reckon that’d be the influence from the South. For me I say “ope” and that’s definitely from the Midwest. That’s the only thing I can think of. Moving on, I want to learn more about my regional accent because there isn’t one for the Oklahoma and Arkansas region. Oklahoma isn’t in the Deep South but we have a twang going on.
I think German is considered "mid-difficult" mostly for its grammar. Vocabulary and pronunciation is about as difficult as Dutch, probably, but the gender and case system can quickly be a handful.
Toki Pona! It's a tiny language and it's easy to find resources online if you just search. Of course, it's not a "real" language, it's not actually widely used and nobody's a native in it, but it's great for a first foreign language to get your confidence up and learn the basics of language learning you can build upon to learn other, more complex languages. As it's far easier than English, it's also an easy international language to use with basic, everyday stuff. It's also a gateway into conlangs, which are a cool area of study. Honestly though, serious conlangs are boring, "cursed" ones are the way to go.
Great video. Another important thing is (for us whom English is our second language) that the list will vary depending on your mother tongue. For english speakers it's easier to learn chinese than it is for spanish speakers. On the other hand Japanese is a LOT easier for spanish speakers than it is for English speakers, since the vowels in Japanese have the same sound as in Spanish. And that goes for any other language. The closer it is to your mother tongue and the more passionate you are about that language, The more you will enjoy learning it. ❤
Great video and really fun to listen to all these different languages and your explanations. Just one little mistake that bothered me in the Italian bit was that the writing on the screen at 13:48 said "Lo parlo" instead of "Io parlo". But that's probably difficult to fix once the video is out. Otherwise: top notch overview over the easiest languages. Thank you, Olly.
Even the "easier" languages can't really be learnt fast. But I am glad you didn't forget to mention Esperanto. I use Esperanto every single day to communicate with my many friends all over the world and I think many people would benefit from learning Esperanto instead of learning just the very basics of another language. And of course nothing prevents you from learning various languages after learning Esperanto as you might still have some time left for further study after having reached fluency in Esperanto.
02:16 No way Georgian and the Uralic languages are not level 5. No matter what the FS says. The grammar is incredibly difficult. For instance, Russian is MUCH easier to lean than Georgian. I speak both, and there's no comparison. I've also worked in Georgia with many FS officers, and I've never heard one who could actually speak Georgian to any meaningful level.
Similar issues with them putting Danish in Category 1. I can't imagine anyone who's ever actually taught Danish, or learnt it as an adult, agreeing with this. Heck, even Norwegians have trouble understanding most variants of spoken Danish these days, and Dutch speakers have a hard time with it too. Being able to read a book or say something that people will more or less understand doesn't equal "having learnt a language". You need to be able to have conversations if you're learning for work purposes.
I know a few languages to varying degrees. It is amusing to me how easily I pick up "hard" languages. Maybe I just want it more and am prepared to work harder. [Mine in order of attempt are Spanish, Russian, Finnish, German, Japanese, and French. I tried Hungarian before Finnish, but I've forgotten almost everything of that one.]
I think a lot of the languages categorized as "hard for English speakers" may just be figuring in having another alphabet or writing system to learn, of course it's easier to learn Italian when you already know the Latin alphabet, etc. I've worked as a German translator for 15+ years, I enjoyed it more than Spanish, which I took in high school. I am working on Arabic now, because I enjoy it, not because of an alleged difficulty level. But in any language, it's good to get interested in the culture, whether cooking, music, movies, etc. I am watching cartoons on UA-cam in Arabic lately; I recall Olly talking on this channel about people watching dubbed versions of "Friends," and so on! And so many people get into Japanese because they already love Japanese culture and just want to be able to read it and understand anime and movies. Great motivator. I mostly learned French to read original versions of books that were in French, not so much to speak it.
4:42 for translating butterflies you just say kupu-kupu, no need to repeat again because it has plural sense too. Or just say "banyak kupu-kupu" in terms of quantity.
I have Instant Indonesian, Berlitz and Lonely Planet Indonesian phrasebooks, and Indonesian language books. Later on, I will get an Indonesian language subscription from Mango Languages, Babbel, and iTalki.
Swedish also has the benefit of being riddled with compound words. I can't recall off the top of my head, but it's well over 50% off all words. This means that if you learn a set number of base words, you can exponentially expand your vocabulary in very little time. It's also structure in the same way as English is, which helps. For example. The word for fire truck or fire engine is just brandbil, which is a combination of fire (brand) and car (bil) - That's 3 words added to your vocabulary. The word for toy is leksak, which is a combination of play (lek) and thing (sak) - That's another 3 words. As you can imagine, your vocabulary will probably grow pretty fast once you get the hang of it. Wish you luck! 😃
It's arguable whether a compound word is a different word than its part, I guess. Linguists rarely discuss vocabulary, in the matter of how many words a language "has". Just about every single point in defining it could be debated.
I am doing a couple of languages at the same time. I recommend doing languages that interest you rather than just because it is relatively easy. Especially if you have exposure to a language, because the best way to learn a language is through comprehensible input. So if you have exposure, you can just learn over time without putting much effort in it. I am doing Tagalog because I have exposure to it. It is related to Indonesian and there are some similarities, but I still find it difficult. I am a native Dutch speaker. Dutch is a difficult language to learn, the reason it is high on the list, is because it is similar to English. It is also similar to German. Dutch has a lot of exceptions and Dutch people use a lot of expressions. I am also doing German, because it is so similar to Dutch and I learned some German in school, I just want to get better at it. I also had French in school, so I am also trying to brush that up. Furthermore I am doing Esperanto. I tried to learn Esperanto decades ago, but stopped then, now I am just doing the Duolingo course and occasionally watching some comprehensible input on UA-cam. I also started learning Spanish, mainly because Tagalog uses a lot of Spanish vocabulary and for me it is much easier to learn than Tagalog. Finally I started learning some Chinese. I do get some exposure to it here in Asia. So far it seems to be an easy language to me, just reading and writing is difficult. I am also trying to do a local language here in the Philippines. Many locals do not speak foreign languages like Filipino or English. But there is not that much material available in that language and no courses, so I have to rely on my exposure and maybe make my own materials using AI. I am also improving my comprehension of Filipino-English. Filipinos use a lot of Tagalog ways of saying things that do not make sense to people with a background in English or American English. The words are all English, but it doesn't make sense to me sometimes. They actually learn that in school here, and they don't have a clue why foreigners do not understand them. The course I like most is Languagetransfer, so all languages they have are at least on my maybe list. It's a good way to get a quick start with a language. I also do Duolingo. It's not the best way to learn a language, but it's good enough and it's entertaining and good to get a learning routine. They have many languages, but for the smaller languages (like Esperanto and Chinese) it's just a start to get you going. From there you can learn more through exposure.
I was watching a wonderful horror film called dead snow 2, a bit of it is in Norwegian and Icelandic, despite the subtitles, after a while you start to get your ear in and almost don't need the subtitles
I had never heard Swahili before, it sounds amazing! Now I wanna learn it! Edit: Oh, and he forgot to mention that Dutch is also spoken in South America.
When i was in the Netherlands i was amazed how well they speak English. The Norwegians also! The younger folks speak better English than most Americans. When I was in Europe in the 1970's French was the universal language ( so i was told) . The English spoken was with a British accent. For the most part I didn't hear that anymore in my most recent trip. They are speaking with a American accent. Very informative video. Thank you
The american accent is maybe because you can find more movies and videos in that version than in British. Like as you have to put the "british version" in the search to not get american voices as a search result.
A German friend of mine, whose American-accented English was flawless, was offered an insane scholarship to learn Spanish in Madrid. After that she got an offer to teach German and English at a university in Mexico. Her colleagues were a little distant when she first got there, but she's German, so she understands "distant". Then she got into the classroom, and when the students heard her Castilian accent, they threw things at her, called her a whore, walked out, and vandalized her car. That was in the 1980s, so maybe Mexicans are more tolerant of various Spanish accents these days.
Last year I casually studied Norwegian for about six weeks and can understand and read most of what I hear/see. Speaking it, however, not so much. Would need a little more time.
I took Spanish in high school thinking I'd use it, and I never did. Having taken Latin first really helped, and I can also understand Italian without having studied it at all. I watch UA-cam documentaries in Italian, Spanish, French. I can understand written Swedish/Danish/Norwegian and Dutch and Afrikaans just from their similarities with English and German. Still, easiness doesn't work for me as a sole motivator, I guess, which is why I've been getting back into Latin after 30 years of not using it, and have been working on Arabic for the past year. Motivation and interest > easiness, in my opinion, though it's great fun to accidentally be able to understand languages you don't speak.
12:40 Spanish is objectively simpler than Italian (seen from English, of course), even if the differences are minimal: Spanish has fewer phonemes (v.g. Italian makes a distinction between long and short o and e, that Spanish does not), and Italian keeps a couple of grammar features that Spanish lost in the early modern period (compare the Italian sentences "lui l'ha chiamata (he has called her), lui l'ha chiamato (he has called him) lui è stato (he has been), lei è stata (she has been)", grammatically reduced in the Spanish "él lo ha llamado, el la ha llamado, el ha estado, ella ha estado"). I also take it personal to say Italian is closer to Latin, but whatever, both are beautiful languages, not that Portuguese nasal babbling (just joking, love Portuguese too. Great video!)
I'm learning European Portuguese right now and in what I've seen so far is that Brazilian Portuguese might be slightly more easy to learn. Sure you have to get used to the pronunciation but I think it's isn't that hard and plus you only have to learn four different conjugations. Also there are a lot of Brazilian content out there
I’ve tried learning German, Chinese, French, Russian, Italian, Greek, Portuguese, Indonesian, and Dutch… overtime I realized that not only did I not particularly care for any of those languages due to either sound or illogical grammar rules, but also that I gained nothing from talking to individuals in their native languages. I know that a lot of people act like it’s going to give you some totally earth shattering change in perspective, but for me; it wasn’t worth the effort, so I’ll mostly just stick to English and continuing to work towards creating my own language.
I already speak American English, Danish and Swedish as a native speaker due to family connections and where I grew up. I fully understand Norwegian, especially bokmål, although I dont speak it. I teach both English and Danish as second languages. Danish is much harder to learn for English speakers as there is very little melody in the language compared to Swedish and Norwegian. Grammar is relatively easy and there are many words in Danish similar to English, but pronunciation is the real killer for most learners. The Scandinavian languages have three extra vowel sounds that don’t exist in English. I’m probably an A2 to B1 in German, and I’m attempting to learn Persian and West Greenlandic. The latter is by far the hardest. I love the Persian script. It’s like learning a code language.
Olly, I have a video idea. The easiest to hardest Slavic languages to learn. Or the three or five easiest. Or if you want to learn a Slavic language, do you start with one using the Cyrillic alphabet or one that uses the Latin alphabet.
@@tovarishchfeixiao What's interesting is the Western Slavic, that use the Latin Alphabet, are considered harder than the others. I guess that makes Slovene the easiest Latin Alphabet.
Bahasa also has some words that are exactly the same in Hebrew. Having learned some Koine Greek and Hebrew from the Bible, I was flabbergasted to find a few exact equivalents when I was in 🇮🇩 Indonesia.
Svenska är mitt modersmål, men jag pratar flytande svenska, jag studerar även spanska. Swedish is my mother tongue, but i speak fluent English, I’m also learning Spanish. El sueco es mi lengua materna, pero hablo inglés fluido, también estoy estudiando el español.
She's feeling awkward in front of the camera plus has a dialect. We have so many dialects that some can definitely sound a bit weird if you are mostly used to the Stockholm dialect.
I wonder what about English? Isn’t it category 3 or 4 as second language learner? I am Korean American who was born in South Korea in 67 and came to the USA for studies in 91. First few years I had a hard time to speak and write but It was so helpful to speak when I had an American Girl Friend. She help me to improve my speaking and written English skill. I think English as second language put in the category between 3 to 4. As a baby all human being are expose the mother language during pregnancy period and up to 2 to 3 years to start mumble words and short sentence. As language learner everyone need 10000 hours to start speak. 10000 hours divided by 8 hours per day equals 1250 days and it divided by365 equals 3.425 years with rounding. Let me hear from you about this approach.
it depends on your native language if you are west European it should be very easy if you are Korean it could be a lot harder since the vocabulary is so different
As an Indonesian, our language is quite easy because the vocabulary that you need to be fluent is not that much. The language itself is quite young, means that the variations of words is not as much as English for example. pronounciations, I can say one of the easiest as far as I know
Swedish is in the "easy" group, and is spoken in one, small country. Spanish and French are also in the easy group and are spoken in many countries around the world.
I work with a bunch of Filipinos I know a handful of Spanish words and phrases. One day I was feeling terrible and one of my colleagues asked me if I was doing ok, I replied that "no I am feeling very sick" I was feeling so bad that it took me a few moments to realize she actually said "Kamusta ka" which was close enough to "commo esta" that even my through my brain fog my brain took the context and translated it for me.
I've tried a Tagalog lesson and once you get the hang of the suffix, prefix, infix and such that go somewhere on the verb, it was a very interesting and fun lesson. I don't think I would consider it that diffecult. Kinda comparable to Malay/Indonesian in terms of diffeculty. 😅😊
If you're going to bring up conlangs, Toki Pona is like 120 or so words. Most of the difficulty will probably be trying to figure out how to break down your sentences into far simpler ones.
I was somewhat surprised to see Dutch on the list. I'm a native speaker of Afrikaans, which is by some measures basically a dialect of Dutch. And while I have little trouble understanding Dutch, I found the grammar such a nightmare that I could never get the hang of it. So, perhaps a bit bizarrely, I can understand Dutch but cannot really speak it at all.
@@brianvanderspuy4514 I worded my question badly. What I should have asked is: do you speak Dutch/Afrikaans to Dutch people when it really matters or do you resort to English?
@@fintonmainz7845 I lived in the Netherlands for two years, and mostly we just spoke English. It's not that I would mind trying to learn proper Dutch, but the blasted Dutch won't let you practice: the moment they see you struggling, they switch to perfectly fluent English. And if they think you're Spanish, they switch to perfectly fluent Spanish. And if they think you're Chinese, they switch to fluent Mandarin, and so on and so forth. It seems the average Dutchman is fluent in about twenty languages. :-) The result of this was that in two years of living in the Netherlands, I never got the hang of the language. I found that because Afrikaans is so closely related, in some ways this actually made it MORE difficult to learn proper Dutch, because of a tendency to slip back into Afrikaans without even noticing. You can often substitute words and phrases and still be more or less comprehensible, so you don't even notice you got it all wrong. Nowadays I am tempted to argue that Afrikaans IS a dialect of Dutch (don't let my fellow Afrikaners hear me say that; I'll get lynched) and therefore I am perfectly fluent in Dutch, thank you very much. 😀
@@fintonmainz7845 Hmm, I wrote a fairly long answer to this, which the YT software seems to have now disappeared. The long and short of it was that during my time in the Netherlands, we mostly spoke English, which both Afrikaans and Dutch speakers actually mostly understand better than they understand each other's languages. (I did occasionally run into Dutch people, particularly the older folks, who struggled with English, but most Dutch folks speak better English than half of native English speakers.)
Out of all those languages, only Italian can be learned fast (provided you speak French or Spanish). Swedish for instance definitely cannot be learned fast and Norwegian is actually easier to learn for English speakers than Swedish is. 3:00 is Danish, not Swedish.
In my experience, very few native Germanic language speakers will speak to an English speaker in their native languages. You have to already be really, really good for them to stick to Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, etc. If you want practice, you are going to have to pay a tutor in the beginning to intermediate stages.
I fell in love with Spanish when I was 5, watching Sesame Street when they taught the numbers 1-10 in Spanish. I ended up with a Master's degree in teaching Spanish because of that lol.
The thing about Esperanto there's a reason why there are so few native speakers. I think it is simply because it is constructed. Language is inherently chaotic or fluid as one might suggest which is why a constructed one just naturally won't be picked up as much. There are unconscious ways of traditional languages we just naturally gravitate to imo. Now let this not be confused with a simplification or standardization of a language you may already speak, like MLA or Mandarin respectively. The latter was just made standard because it was one of the easiest Chinese languages(or dialects) to learn, with only 4 tones. MLA was created as Arabic tends to be radically different around various regions of Africa and the Middle East. That being said, apparently for a dialect, most are familiar with Egyptian Arabic. It is like the American English dialect of English for English speakers. Given how different Spanish can be at times I am surprised they don't have an MLA but maybe they have something like Egyptian Arabic that is commonly understood.
A large part of the problem with it is that it draws from too narrow a language pool. From what I understand, Lojban is better, but ultimately, there isn't enough push to have one of these ever gain much traction as most of the time the larger languages have no need for another language and the folks speaking less common languages are stuck learning languages to get on with those in areas with more linguistic power. So, the folks most likely to benefit are the ones that are the least likely to have any say in it being adopted commonly. The fact that Esperanto has done so well, is a bit of a miracle in part due to it being created when it was.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade As China takes over the Anglosphere, Esperanto is the most natural choice to become the dominant AUXILIARY language (for every country to learn after their native). No 1 wants imperialist language to dominate, so Esperanto is favourite planned language . Latin was the previous dominant (with force) but now outdated. Lojban had max 1k vs >2mil EO - no comparison. No 1 wants to relearn what works best for now.
1) Esperanto is more chaotic and more fluid than you're giving it credit for. (E.g., The Esperanto community is still arguing over if country names should end in -ujo or -io, there's debates on how much Esperanto speakers should be allowed to verb nouns, etc.) 2) I think we can credit the spread of English in large part because, historically, England was good at building ships, cannons, and rifles and using said tools to start colonies.. Esperanto, on the other hand, has never had an army.
"few native speakers simply because it is constructed"? No, I don´t think so. It would be a sign of weakness if the survival of Esperanto would depend on us esperantists making babies. Some of us may raise children in 2 or 3 languages, but most will do it in the language of where we live. There's nothing wrong with children learning Esperanto in their early or late teens. Native speakers don´t have some special status/authority
@@dimiberberu what the hell do you mean by "imperialist language"? Especially when it comes to Chinese. Because that label would fit english much better.
This is the first time I have heard that Spanish is easy to learn 😱 And Spanish is my native language so... 🤷♀ I wonder what 'learn' here stands for 🤔 Maybe a bunch of sentences to travel or guess what someone is saying
It's basically the fact that it's written phonetically and English has borrowed some Spanish words. Once you get to verbs, it's like being swallowed up by a sinkhole.
It depends what language you’re starting off from. As an English speaker, I’d say Spanish is amongst the easiest. We already have massive exposure to it (in the US at least), it’s completely phonetic, has endless learning resources, & despite English being a Germanic language, it shares WAYYYY more vocabulary with those in the Romance Family. That’s not to say there aren’t difficulties - pronunciation of especially “erre”, the subjunctive, the mountain of conjugations, grammatical differences, etc. But if an English speaker wanted to learn a 2nd language, hands down I’d say Spanish due to the lower level of difficulty. To also piggyback off your statement, we’d have to know what one sees as “learn”. I’d argue though, whatever definition you have of it, Spanish would more than likely be the easier one compared to the other language option.
I agree that in comparison to languages that require the use of grammatical concepts unbeknownst to us, Spanish is more accessible to gain at least the basic foundations.
If we left off the writing system, Japanese is very easy. I know some people are obsessed with pitch accent but you learn it naturally you don’t need to study it much. Japanese is easy to pronounce and the grammar isn’t too hard unless you are going to higher level concepts. Japanese is really only hard in that it takes time to read, write, and speak.
In terms of butterfly in indonesian and plural I assume that they are the same for singular and plural. If it's in singular or plural is determined by context, that's at least one hypothesis of mine.
Have you won your guaranteed prize yet? 👉 storylearning.com/big-autumn-giveaway
Olly you can play Interlingua on Closemaster
Why didn't you add Toki Pona as a bonus easy language?
Bahasa melayu/Indonesia is the easiest.
When I click on the link to claim the prize and enter my name and email address, I keep getting a message saying "Sorry, there was an error. Please try again later." I have tried with different browsers and devices.
The closest language to English is SCOTS.
The easiest language for you is the one you are passionate about.
Nein,Nein,Nein!
But necessarily. I speak, to varying levels, 8 languages. I'm very passionate about Georgia and the Georgian language but the grammar, especially for verbs, is extremely difficult.
So true
i agree
More like it will make you stay at it and more often
1. Swedish/Danish/Norwegian
2. Indonesian/Malay
3. Swahili
4. Dutch/Flemish (in 🇧🇪)
5. Italian
6. Spanish
7. Esperanto
I really hate Esperanto included in these Top easiest languages. It's a made up language, so it's designed to be easy. If we are looking for a made up language, maybe Toki Pona would be better.
You forgot Low German. Its grammar is much easier than the High German one.
@@DanSolo871 Why do you hate it? Have you experienced misuse of it.
@@DanSolo871which european language is easiest plz tell me
@@Mehedihasan-yt6mxdutch
4:42 Here is my explanation as an Indonesian speaker. While it is true that we express plurality by repeating words, that is not always the case. This may be confusing for English speakers, but in Indonesian we do not need to change a noun just because it is singular or plural.
Usually we just add a number in front of the noun to express quantity. For example, "two bicycles" is simply "dua sepeda", never "dua sepeda-sepeda". That is why we are not confused by words like "kupu-kupu", which is already a reduplication, because we never need to say "dua kupu-kupu kupu-kupu".
Moreover, according to the Indonesian dictionary, "kupu" already means "butterfly", even without the reduplication. So, technically, you can express sentences like “butterflies are flying around” by simply saying “kupu beterbangan” and leave it at that, since the verb “beterbangan” itself already indicates that there are many butterflies involved.
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In fact, the reduplication (as it seems is the term for this) is not used for expressing a plural but changes the signification of the noun into something more generic. For example, when you want to speak about one person you say "satu orang". If you mention "orang orang", you speak about people in general, or "buku buku" when you speak about all the books (present or not present in front of you) with no precision.
Years ago I fell in love with Italian. I started learning it by myself and it was so enjoyable. I was flying through the manual. I think if you love the language you are learning it's much more easier
On average women learn languages faster.
@@chocolatecookie8571 not really the point. I was female when I rapidly became fluent in Mandarin (my favorite language); still female when I gave up on French because it just wasn't motivating me.
@@Yarniac I don't shy away from the facts which is that women learn languages faster on average than men.
Can confirm Swahili is incredibly simple to understand and grasp, it’s quickly become my favourite language I’ve ever learnt!
Kiswahili ni lugha rahisi sana! Unaweza kukijifunza haraka sana 🫶🏻🇰🇪🇹🇿
Hongera!!! :-)
Esperanto! Category 0 - hands down, the easiest living language in the world to learn. And it's more useful than one might think.
They say if you want to make money, the language to learn is English. But if you want to make friends, you should learn *Esperanto*.
And this is absolutely true: I have made hundreds of friends around the world (and met many of them in their home countries, or they have visited mine) all because of Esperanto. Yes, there isn't a single country where the language is official, but there are Esperantists in just about every city and country around the world. This can be a big advantage: you'll never travel alone when you know Esperanto, in just about any foreign country you will have locals who are your instant friends wherever you go. No need to stick to just the tourist traps when local friends can show you the authentic local country & culture!
I have never met anyone anywhere who speaks Esperanto, but it sounds easy to learn. Maybe I will try it.
Same for English
Easy for European language speakers
@@Emjazzuli The vocabulary might be easier for romance speaking people, but overall the language is easier for everyone. Many Japanese people told me how much Esperanto is easier for them than English.
Not counting artificial languages, my vote for simplest is - surprisingly - Hindi.
Yes, one large hump at the start: You have to learn the script. But it pays off big-time. Hear a word clearly spoken and you have at least a 95% chance of finding it in a dictionary. See it written and there is an excellent chance you can speak it clearly enough to be understood.
- No passive voice - to get passive, just leave out the subject, i.e. to say "I was seen" just say "Saw me."
- Only 5 irregular verbs c/f English 100, German 300. So learn the rules for tense, and 5 oddities, and you can decline any verb.
- Two genders, but male things are masculine, female things are feminine, almost all abstract nouns are feminine, almost all concrete nouns are masculine.
- the script has a massive payoff. Wander around Delhi and you'll soon see that half the signs written in devanagari are actually English! The script is scientifically designed to follow a logical system of sound production. Forgot how to pronounce a letter? Just look where it is in the alphabet and you'll know how to pronounce it!
- It is acceptable, indeed more common than not, to mix and match words from any language in a sentence. Forgot a Hindi word? Just bung in the English one.
Disadvantages: For an English speaker, although they have many common roots, you have to expect that almost all words are different - a big vocab job ahead. Also, to pronounce (for any language actually) you must give yourself permission to make noises that are not in your native language.
Great video Olly! Thanks to your content I found a way to learn French. After roughly 10 months I am at a lower B1 level. All thanks to your story learning method!
I just wanted to make a comment to your point at 3:10.
While it is true that many Scandinavians understand the other two languages, we must remember that this requires extremely good listening skills, and an English person learning Swedish will probably not pick up Norwegian and Danish as easy as it might sound. Go out on the streets of Norway or Sweden and ask random natives if they understand spoken Danish. Most people will actually say no. The Scandinavians who immerse a lot in the other two languages mostly have no issues, but a lot of native Scandinavians really struggle with understanding the other two languages. Due to our many dialects a lot of Scandinavians struggle to also understand some people from the same country!
I am a native Norwegian in a relationship with a Swede. We understand each other just fine. But whenever we visit her family in Sweden, I have to adjust my Norwegian to a middle road language called "Svorsk" (Swedish with a thick Norwegian accent). Because if I speak to her family in my west Norwegian dialect, they understand nothing.
For a person learning Swedish, understanding Norwegian and Danish as well is going to take a lot of time. In order to comprehend Norwegian and Danish, your Swedish listening skills must be superb, close to native level. And for this reason, your target when learning Swedish should be to learn Swedish, and not Norwegian and Danish. However, if you move to Sweden and learn Swedish, and then move to Norway for some reason, you will pick up Norwegian to a good level in no time. Probably less than six months. But if you learn Swedish and expect to understand Norwegian and Danish as well, you might be disappointed.
I think we can compare it to Spanish and Catalan. A person from Catalonia can probably understand Spanish just fine. A Spanish person can maybe get by in Catalonia. However if I, a native Norwegian, were to learn Spanish to a B2 level. Would I also understand Catalan? Definitely no. But if I were to move to Barcelona I could probably pick it up easier than a person who speaks no Spanish.
My channel is fairly new, but I have already made a video about this exact subject. Check it out if you are interested.
As always, thanks for your videos Olly. I'm a huge fan of your content and also the story learning method.
Thanks for the explanation!
To be fair, Olly only says "you can also understand Norwegian and Danish too".
He doesn't say "spoken Norwegian and Danish".
İ for one find it not that difficult understanding written Danish and Norwegian. Even though İ sometimes don't understand a thing when Danes and Norwegians talk.
Especially Danish is super difficult to follow.
İn fact, this happened to İ several times: İ thought a bunch of people were talking Cantonese or Vietnamese. İ only hear they at first, then İ see those people and they're blond. After listening more closely İ realize that they're Danes. 🙆🏽♀️
The last time this happened is actually less than a month ago.
That time chart is Fu*k@d. Who can spend 25 hours per week on this? 8, maybe. So triple the number of weeks listed in this silly chart.
They aren't separate languages for nothing!
Please note the hours required in the FSI chart. The 24-30 weeks assumes about six hours of full-time study EVERY DAY for six or seven months. And this is not to achieve fluency but a basic proficiency in the B1-B2 range. I went through the Russian course at Defense Language Institute and the standards are very similar to FSI. After 47 weeks of full time study, the best students were probably B2 and the average students were mid to upper B1.
I've actually saw those charts thinking I was mentally slow af 😂😂 Gosh that's a relief!
wow! OLLY RICHARDS!! dankon pro spekti kaj inkluzivi min en via video!!! I am truly humbled and honoured and super motivated to continue my Esperanto learning journey! WOW!❤
It was a pleasant surprise to see Esperanto mentioned here. I speak it, it definitely was much easier to learn than other languages I studied and it was much more useful than I could ever imagine.
I'm curious how was it useful
@@jlcarrasco In addition to the many benefits you get from learning any language, Esperanto can be useful for many reasons, to get friends from smaller countries like Iceland, Hungary. For travelling there is a service called Pasporta servo where you can get free accommodation while travelling, you often get free guides while visiting various cities, etc.
@@jlcarrasco Wondering the same thing. I'm 53, but I never met someone who speaks it. And I traveled a lot in my life.
@@MrPleers same, i have heard people said it made learning other languages easier, but i wonder why not just put that time into actually learning these languages
John McWhorter(linguist) suggested that colloquial Indonesian would be an ideal universal language of the world.
yup. Bahasa melayu/Indonesia is the easiest language to learn and master.
@@nsevv colloquial malay is so much more complicated than colloquial indonesian.
At least it definitelly would be more optimal than English.
well old form of Indonesian (classical Malay) were lingua franca in South East Asian region
back then even Vietnam knows classical Malay let alone traders
My aunt is from 11:52 Utrecht, she actually got me started on learning Nederlands alongside her daughter/my cousin.
I just came back from those 3 countries- Denmark, Norway, Sweden was fairly easy to understand the languages in writing I bought a book in Swedish and read it
Esperanto also helps learning other languages in general. The most difficult language a person learns is their 1st 2nd language. Esperanto helps in that, since it is easier. Although you still have to put work in. In time you should have developed good study habits.
Esperanto additionally helps in learning Agglutinative languages, since word formation is done similarly.
Free Word Order as well, you can switch it up to get used to languages that have a different word order.
Still waiting for your "Short Stories in Indonesian" and "Short Stories in Afrikaans" Olly. 😉
Yes, although a good chunk of that is that it's dead simple if you speak any of the languages that were used to create it. But, the bigger benefit is that you can skip the step where it sound weird hearing foreign words coming out of your mouth and establish that it's possible to learn a new language so you stop fighting it.
Bahasa melayu/Indonesia is the easiest.
Esperanto is the fastest to learn & builds motivation, concept of multilingual benefits, & good structure to link the other languages that are less logical (eg English, 1 of the most illogical spelling & idioms ;) my 5th & best language (not counting the split from Serbocroatian to 4 different & similar - Slovenian, Bulgarian, Slovak...)
I'm wanting to get back into language learning, I'm thinking this is the way I'll go.
Esperanto menciita :D
Just for reference..the dude singing 2:28 - 2:32 did not pronounce a single swedish word...that was international jibberish in my swedish ears. Update: OK, he might have gotten the first word "Hej" right, after that it was all "nothingness" as a swede. The attempt was "Hej tomtegubbar, slå i glasen och låt oss lustiga vara! "...he got "Hej" right.
lmao I'm glad to hear that confirmation of what I was thinking- I lived in Sweden for a few years - didn't have too much time to seriously study the language but I learned a semi-decent amount and certainly HEARD it every day, mostly on the bus or the local ICA- and to me it was jibberish and sounded VERY American, not at all Swedish. I guess I at least got to a point where bad, American-sounding "Swedlish" is obvious as being that even to me!
@@kalevipoeg6916 The language melody was 'fairly' successful, though...
Finally, someone notices that Bahasa Indonesia is such a simple language.
But you will notice soon if you come to Indonesia that the people of Indonesia don't speak regular Bahasa Indonesia; there is also much Indonesian slang that is added to the conversation. Learning regular Bahasa Indonesia doesn't help you so much actually, as people in Indonesia think that regular one is too formal and kind of weird to bring it into conversation. That's why we, as the Indonesian itself, feel that our language is hard to understand (especially its poetry). Some of my friends even said that it's easier to get a better score at the English examination compared to Bahasa Indonesia (even though we're not an English-speaking country).
Yes. Colloquial is difficult.
Yeah! You can understand BBC English well but you would be totally lost in parts of Scotland!
@@timgilligan3885 That's not the best example though. Because the difference between BBC English and Scottish English is the accent (and sometimes a few Scots or Gaelic words here and there, depending on where and who you talk with), while the original comment talks about something more similar to what Finnish has with Standard vs colloquial.
@@tovarishchfeixiao Agree with this as an Indonesian, it's easier to understand indian accent much more than the british accent
I guess Malaysian accent is kinda closest to standard Indonesian for most part of city in Malaysia (except Northern part of Malaysian had accent that even Malaysian cant even know they spoke).Maybe except few Dutch loanword like Handuk and Kantor
I knew that either Indonesian or Malaysian would be on here. Super simple!
most my former workmate were working here master Malay/Indonesian about 3 months
The easiest is the one that you wanna use and study every day - I studied Spanish 2 years in high school, didn’t use it for 1.5 and then took it up again last year in septemer. Now a year later I speak it fluently enough to have coherent conversations without many standstills.
Hey Olly, thanks for your videos! They are very good. What languages do you speak currently?
Learning dutch and already learnt italian and spanish. I 100% agree with you
How is that possible?
The most astounding thing I learned from this video is that the Esperanto word for "and" is "kaj". Rather than using something that resembles a Germanic- or Romance-language word for "and", Zamenhof decided that Greek--a wonderful but much less widely used language worldwide--would be the source for one of the five most commonly used words?
Well, in the XIX century, educated people in Europe used to learn some classic Greek, as well as Latin.
What's funny, is that he didn't take anything else from it that I know of. Maybe some of the affixes are from Greek? I think the plural suffix, -j, could come have come from it.
Be realistic my friend , learning any language is not easy , because there are also different levels of understanding and especially speaking ,in all languages . Ok , it is easy in all languages to learn simple things like ‘ can I have ´ , ‘ I like this ‘ etc etc , but when it comes to giving your opinion and speaking with real native speakers ,that is another question !
I speak as an English person who speaks French fluently , and who has a good knowledge of German and Arabic . NONE OF THE MAJOR USEFUL WORLD LANGUAGES ARE EASY , and each one needs hours of patient learning , listening , reading and speaking ! So let’s be realistic and not give simplistic , media friendly solutions to complex learning situations !
And something else : There are many different language families in the world , and your learning capacity will be effected by which language family you come from and in which language family is the language you want to learn .
Tourist friendly short dialogues are easily learnt but really mastering a foreign language takes time and full immersions. When I write "really mastering" I mean having a spoken and written vocabulary almost as rich as the one you have in your mother tongue
Absolutely, regardless whether the language is considered "easy" for English speakers for example, the hard part about language learning is definitely understanding natives, getting used to a foreign sound system, learning vocabulary. Related languages make it easier to use specific grammar constructions because of their similarities, but you still need a high number of hours spent with the language, regardless of its lexical similarity with your own language
Very true. I am a native Dutch speaker and I speak English, Indonesian , French , Spanish and German. I always hear people talking about how easy Indoneisan is and I guess that’s kind of true if you’re talking survival level and informal conversation. But most foreign speakers of Indonesian make many mistakes but they’ll never realize it until they try something like a formal letter or an academic or literary text. Indonesian are usually too polite to point out errors anyway. Several things said about the language in the video are misleading. Purely phonetic? No, for instance Indonesian has two phonemes represented by the letter e, it also has digraphs, it has a word-initial velar nasal which many people can’t pronounce properly, it has a glottal stop represented by k in some words but not in others… Doubling a word for the plural form does exist but is not appropriate in every context (“two houses” is NOT dua rumah-rumah). There is a considerable difference between the formal and informal register in vocabulary but also in the use of grammatical prefixes and suffixes. I see videos with titles like “guy amazes locals by speaking perfect Indonesian” only to see them address older people with the informal pronoun “kamu” which is kinda rude, no Indonesian would address a person of authority like that, but Indonesians will generally tolerate it in everyday interactions with foreigners. However wouldn’t recommend it if you are talking to a government official in order to get some kind of permit. Try explaining something technical or legal in formal Indonesian, with lots of relative clauses for example, and the “simple suffixes” suddenly aren’t so simple anymore.
You may notice he did not say "Easy languages to learn". He said "Languages you can learn fast". Not the same thing
Besides ease is relative. Maybe all of those languages were hard for you and as a native English speaker even Spanish gave me some trouble but a friend I went to high school with found it super easy. And given that Olly's audience is primarily native English speakers I don't think he needs to clarify
You may also notice he literally listed the hours on his category chart. Like category 2 takes supposedly 900 hours - I don't think anyone would define that as easy unless we're talking in comparison to other languages. Which he is. So I can't even figure out what your problem is
Like you came and wrote this whole paragraph but I can't even figure out what your specific complaint or proposed solution is
Being realistic doesn't sell.
Great list. i love that you put Esperanto on here. it is a great language for someone who is just starting off learning other languages. and it is surprisingly useful
Thanks for this epic video Ollie!
Glad you liked it!
With all due respect, "learning" a language is not simply a matter of vocabulary! The grammatical rules of EACH language have their own particularities, and there is also the entire culture that accompanies the language. In Portuguese, for example, you have different levels of language use. From the simplest and most vulgar to the most polished and "elite", including regionalisms. Therefore, if the title refers to "learning" in the sense of simply having a good understanding of the basic rules (such as how to inflect and have a reasonable understanding of agreement, for example) and a vocabulary that covers the minimum possible number of words, yes... perhaps Spanish is considered easy for someone who lives in the US, due to contact with native Spanish speakers, as well as for someone who speaks Portuguese (whether from Portugal or Brazil), since they have a lot in common BUT are still very different languages, rich and full of details. And I haven't even mentioned the famous "false cognates". But as I said, I had no intention of belittling the work (which must have been quite a lot). And congratulations for encouraging learning!
Exactly. People who just go "don't learn grammar, just go for vocab" is a bit delusional in my opinion. Because let's think about a language like a house, the vocab is the bricks and the grammar is the cement that holds all of it perfectly together.
Hi Olly. Interesting video. Have you thought about a video on Irish/Scots Gaelic? Would love to see one please. 👍
🙏🙏🙏
Please make a beginner guide on how to learn indonesian language 🙏
Really interested in this language but can't find where to practice my listening skill and grammar especially.
I don't speak Italian and never studied it. But just by knowing Portuguese and Spanish and being quite alert, I could hold conversations in "Italian", when I was in Rome. Ok, it wasn't really Italian, but we had rather long conversations where we mutually understood each other. Just by figuring some basic stuff like present and past tense conjugation, and plural, and there you go.
Fast is a relative term. It takes hours and hours of intensive study to learn a language past phrase book level. Personally, I stick to my native language and try to speak that as best I can. It's not going too badly, so far.
As an English-as-a-second language learner, I confirm Dutch sounds to me like English used to... Plus a flemgh.
It sounds like German with a really weird accent to me, haha. Or somewhere between German and English.
@@AmyBalotAs a Dutch person I first started realising just how much Dutch is in between English and German, when started learning German. 😅😊
Than you very much for mentioning my two favourite languages in the video. I love Swedish and keep learning this just for fun, because it is a language of ABBA and Roxette.
Kaj mi multege dankas por la menciado de Esperanto! The overview of this language was very positive, and additionally very nice and kind Esperanto speakers were shown as examples.
Esperanto can truly help in learning some other European language thanks to its similarities to them. It also can help to overcome the barrier of hesitation when it comes to learning langiages. Way not all people are linguistically gifted if it comes to learning them, since reading rules, grammar nuances or exceptions can discourage to continue the learning. Esperanto in this regard is quite flexible, so that one can learn it playfully remaining free of stress. I can endlessly speak about Esperanto's upsides, but it's really worthy, at least, it brings lots of pleasure.
For Swedish if you want listening experience there is a certain sport Lemont talked about watching where they speak in NOTHING but Swedish. Can't remember what specific sport it was but that is great for input since so many Swedish media in one way or another he was finding English in there.
I wish there was something similar with Hindi and many other Indian languages.
4:28 that was a beautiful song. Now I need to listen to the full version.
Even closer to English than Dutch is Frisian. Definitely not as useful (Dutch isn’t very useful on its own though)
There are 3 countries that speak it (+ some Caribean islands) and you can easily communicate with Afrikaans speakers in South Africa and Namibia with it.
Also is a good gateway to learning German afterwards.
@@kimashitawa8113All of those countries speak a much more common language aswell. Dutch is beautiful but unless one is marrying into, has deep love for the culture, plans to work, wants to become a dutch citizen; theres not a whole lot of “usage” for the languge. But i personally dont think there needs to be one for someone to want to learn.
Regardless how close and easier Frisian is to English, the lack of resources make it extremely difficult to learn.
@@Dylan-oy3ch That's still at least 2 countries (Dutch is spoken by more people in Belgium than French)
I'm still pretty sure it's 3 because isn't Dutch also the biggest language in Suriname?
There are several cities near me (in the Midwest) where Dutch and Friesian are widely spoken and most people there learn them as their first language.
i got so happy when i saw italian! i’m trying to learn it for 6 months now
Hello from Indonesia! I am an Esperanto speaker. Thanks for making this video 🙋🏻
Thanks for Esperanto - Modern Intercontinental or interplanetary. The astronaut Mark Shuttleworth (South African entrepreneur) flew aboard the Russian Soyuz mission in 2002.
While onboard, he communicated in Esperanto as part of his outreach to international audiences. Shuttleworth’s use of Esperanto helped raise awareness of the language in unique & high-profile setting.
Esperanto is inter cultural language to understand the world.
Esperanto was taught in schools in 1905 in China, Macedonia, Samos... Esperanto gained traction in Japan, especially among intellectuals & students during early 1900s.
French schools started teaching Esperanto in 1900s as part of broader movement to promote international communication.
Educational institutions in Germany included Esperanto in their curricula during early XX century. Herzberg am Harz, Esperanto Urbo became popular, & flourished economically.
I would have never assumed that about Swahili. Super interesting vid!
Glad you liked it!
Languages are more than textbook practice. Immersion is extremely helpful. For English speakers, the Germanic languages are difficult to get an immersion experience in because it’s hard to find non-English-speaking people to patiently work with you. So Italian or Spanish are much easier in that sense because there are millions of monolingual speakers to practice with.
Thanks for this video!
I was exactly looking for new languages to learn, i want to arrive as quick as possible at 10 and i'm stuck at 7, i seriously don't know what to choose.
I jump around between 13 or more languages and I‘m glad Swedish was first on the list because I can confirm it‘s insanely easy to acquire new phrases. Also, Finding Nemo is really cool to watch in Swedish lol.
Nice video! I am learning German and it isn’t even on the list. That’s not a shocker at all! For a possible next video it would be nice if you could talk about different regional accents in Oklahoma and Arkansas. I live in Oklahoma and where I live we have some twang going on. We use Midwestern and Southern dialect mashed up together. For instance instead of saying “sir-up” we say “surp.” Another example is we elongate the “a” in words too. The word “grandma” sounds like you add an “L” at the end of it. We say “y’all” and drop the “g” in “ing” all the time. I reckon that’d be the influence from the South. For me I say “ope” and that’s definitely from the Midwest. That’s the only thing I can think of. Moving on, I want to learn more about my regional accent because there isn’t one for the Oklahoma and Arkansas region. Oklahoma isn’t in the Deep South but we have a twang going on.
I think German is considered "mid-difficult" mostly for its grammar. Vocabulary and pronunciation is about as difficult as Dutch, probably, but the gender and case system can quickly be a handful.
Toki Pona!
It's a tiny language and it's easy to find resources online if you just search.
Of course, it's not a "real" language, it's not actually widely used and nobody's a native in it, but it's great for a first foreign language to get your confidence up and learn the basics of language learning you can build upon to learn other, more complex languages. As it's far easier than English, it's also an easy international language to use with basic, everyday stuff. It's also a gateway into conlangs, which are a cool area of study. Honestly though, serious conlangs are boring, "cursed" ones are the way to go.
Great video. Another important thing is (for us whom English is our second language) that the list will vary depending on your mother tongue.
For english speakers it's easier to learn chinese than it is for spanish speakers. On the other hand Japanese is a LOT easier for spanish speakers than it is for English speakers, since the vowels in Japanese have the same sound as in Spanish.
And that goes for any other language. The closer it is to your mother tongue and the more passionate you are about that language, The more you will enjoy learning it. ❤
Great video and really fun to listen to all these different languages and your explanations. Just one little mistake that bothered me in the Italian bit was that the writing on the screen at 13:48 said "Lo parlo" instead of "Io parlo". But that's probably difficult to fix once the video is out. Otherwise: top notch overview over the easiest languages. Thank you, Olly.
Every language has its own hand gestures, even you are using hand gestures as you are speaking. This is natural, it adds depth in our everyday speech.
🖐️ 🖐️ 🤚 ✋ 👌
Even the "easier" languages can't really be learnt fast. But I am glad you didn't forget to mention Esperanto. I use Esperanto every single day to communicate with my many friends all over the world and I think many people would benefit from learning Esperanto instead of learning just the very basics of another language. And of course nothing prevents you from learning various languages after learning Esperanto as you might still have some time left for further study after having reached fluency in Esperanto.
02:16 No way Georgian and the Uralic languages are not level 5. No matter what the FS says. The grammar is incredibly difficult. For instance, Russian is MUCH easier to lean than Georgian. I speak both, and there's no comparison. I've also worked in Georgia with many FS officers, and I've never heard one who could actually speak Georgian to any meaningful level.
Similar issues with them putting Danish in Category 1. I can't imagine anyone who's ever actually taught Danish, or learnt it as an adult, agreeing with this. Heck, even Norwegians have trouble understanding most variants of spoken Danish these days, and Dutch speakers have a hard time with it too. Being able to read a book or say something that people will more or less understand doesn't equal "having learnt a language". You need to be able to have conversations if you're learning for work purposes.
that fsi ranking is quite bad anyway they put everything they don't know much about in level 4 and why is German its own rank anyway
Finnish learner here, and I agree; the grammar is diabolical. But I love the language anyway.
@@corinna007I'm learning finnish too, in a matter of vocabulary the language is easy, but then you put all the grammar there and you're in hell.
@@rdklkje13 person: where do we put danish on here?
fsi: Just put in Category 1, for both english and danish being germanic.
Awesome clip. Enriching to see how native speakers articulate their own language.
I know a few languages to varying degrees. It is amusing to me how easily I pick up "hard" languages. Maybe I just want it more and am prepared to work harder. [Mine in order of attempt are Spanish, Russian, Finnish, German, Japanese, and French. I tried Hungarian before Finnish, but I've forgotten almost everything of that one.]
vov russian and finish are very hard languages I couldn t dare to touch those beast languages 😂
I think a lot of the languages categorized as "hard for English speakers" may just be figuring in having another alphabet or writing system to learn, of course it's easier to learn Italian when you already know the Latin alphabet, etc. I've worked as a German translator for 15+ years, I enjoyed it more than Spanish, which I took in high school. I am working on Arabic now, because I enjoy it, not because of an alleged difficulty level. But in any language, it's good to get interested in the culture, whether cooking, music, movies, etc. I am watching cartoons on UA-cam in Arabic lately; I recall Olly talking on this channel about people watching dubbed versions of "Friends," and so on!
And so many people get into Japanese because they already love Japanese culture and just want to be able to read it and understand anime and movies. Great motivator. I mostly learned French to read original versions of books that were in French, not so much to speak it.
4:42 for translating butterflies you just say kupu-kupu, no need to repeat again because it has plural sense too. Or just say "banyak kupu-kupu" in terms of quantity.
Indonesia mentioned rrraaahhh 🇮🇩 🦅🗣️🔥
I have Instant Indonesian, Berlitz and Lonely Planet Indonesian phrasebooks, and Indonesian language books. Later on, I will get an Indonesian language subscription from Mango Languages, Babbel, and iTalki.
Hi Olly are you planning on making a short stories in Indonesian?
I love learning Esperanto, it is surprisingly fun!
Swedish also has the benefit of being riddled with compound words. I can't recall off the top of my head, but it's well over 50% off all words.
This means that if you learn a set number of base words, you can exponentially expand your vocabulary in very little time. It's also structure in the same way as English is, which helps.
For example.
The word for fire truck or fire engine is just brandbil, which is a combination of fire (brand) and car (bil) - That's 3 words added to your vocabulary.
The word for toy is leksak, which is a combination of play (lek) and thing (sak) - That's another 3 words.
As you can imagine, your vocabulary will probably grow pretty fast once you get the hang of it. Wish you luck! 😃
It's arguable whether a compound word is a different word than its part, I guess. Linguists rarely discuss vocabulary, in the matter of how many words a language "has". Just about every single point in defining it could be debated.
Watching this video to fantasize about an easier life as I am currently studying Polish 🥲😂
Good luck with that! I have Polish relatives and I still gave up on Polish after a short time.
After learning some Russian and Czech, and already having been familiar with Spanish and French, I took one look at Polish and thought, "no way".
polish is about as hard as Swahili.
😭
I am doing a couple of languages at the same time. I recommend doing languages that interest you rather than just because it is relatively easy. Especially if you have exposure to a language, because the best way to learn a language is through comprehensible input. So if you have exposure, you can just learn over time without putting much effort in it.
I am doing Tagalog because I have exposure to it. It is related to Indonesian and there are some similarities, but I still find it difficult.
I am a native Dutch speaker. Dutch is a difficult language to learn, the reason it is high on the list, is because it is similar to English. It is also similar to German. Dutch has a lot of exceptions and Dutch people use a lot of expressions.
I am also doing German, because it is so similar to Dutch and I learned some German in school, I just want to get better at it.
I also had French in school, so I am also trying to brush that up.
Furthermore I am doing Esperanto. I tried to learn Esperanto decades ago, but stopped then, now I am just doing the Duolingo course and occasionally watching some comprehensible input on UA-cam.
I also started learning Spanish, mainly because Tagalog uses a lot of Spanish vocabulary and for me it is much easier to learn than Tagalog.
Finally I started learning some Chinese. I do get some exposure to it here in Asia. So far it seems to be an easy language to me, just reading and writing is difficult.
I am also trying to do a local language here in the Philippines. Many locals do not speak foreign languages like Filipino or English. But there is not that much material available in that language and no courses, so I have to rely on my exposure and maybe make my own materials using AI.
I am also improving my comprehension of Filipino-English. Filipinos use a lot of Tagalog ways of saying things that do not make sense to people with a background in English or American English. The words are all English, but it doesn't make sense to me sometimes. They actually learn that in school here, and they don't have a clue why foreigners do not understand them.
The course I like most is Languagetransfer, so all languages they have are at least on my maybe list. It's a good way to get a quick start with a language. I also do Duolingo. It's not the best way to learn a language, but it's good enough and it's entertaining and good to get a learning routine. They have many languages, but for the smaller languages (like Esperanto and Chinese) it's just a start to get you going. From there you can learn more through exposure.
I was watching a wonderful horror film called dead snow 2, a bit of it is in Norwegian and Icelandic, despite the subtitles, after a while you start to get your ear in and almost don't need the subtitles
I had never heard Swahili before, it sounds amazing! Now I wanna learn it!
Edit: Oh, and he forgot to mention that Dutch is also spoken in South America.
It would be great if you added a dutch course to story learning.
When i was in the Netherlands i was amazed how well they speak English. The Norwegians also! The younger folks speak better English than most Americans.
When I was in Europe in the 1970's French was the universal language ( so i was told) . The English spoken was with a British accent. For the most part I didn't hear that anymore in my most recent trip. They are speaking with a American accent. Very informative video. Thank you
The american accent is maybe because you can find more movies and videos in that version than in British. Like as you have to put the "british version" in the search to not get american voices as a search result.
A German friend of mine, whose American-accented English was flawless, was offered an insane scholarship to learn Spanish in Madrid. After that she got an offer to teach German and English at a university in Mexico. Her colleagues were a little distant when she first got there, but she's German, so she understands "distant". Then she got into the classroom, and when the students heard her Castilian accent, they threw things at her, called her a whore, walked out, and vandalized her car. That was in the 1980s, so maybe Mexicans are more tolerant of various Spanish accents these days.
Wow, I was able to understand about half of the sentences in Esperanto in this video!
Last year I casually studied Norwegian for about six weeks and can understand and read most of what I hear/see. Speaking it, however, not so much. Would need a little more time.
I took Spanish in high school thinking I'd use it, and I never did. Having taken Latin first really helped, and I can also understand Italian without having studied it at all. I watch UA-cam documentaries in Italian, Spanish, French.
I can understand written Swedish/Danish/Norwegian and Dutch and Afrikaans just from their similarities with English and German.
Still, easiness doesn't work for me as a sole motivator, I guess, which is why I've been getting back into Latin after 30 years of not using it, and have been working on Arabic for the past year. Motivation and interest > easiness, in my opinion, though it's great fun to accidentally be able to understand languages you don't speak.
12:40 Spanish is objectively simpler than Italian (seen from English, of course), even if the differences are minimal: Spanish has fewer phonemes (v.g. Italian makes a distinction between long and short o and e, that Spanish does not), and Italian keeps a couple of grammar features that Spanish lost in the early modern period (compare the Italian sentences "lui l'ha chiamata (he has called her), lui l'ha chiamato (he has called him) lui è stato (he has been), lei è stata (she has been)", grammatically reduced in the Spanish "él lo ha llamado, el la ha llamado, el ha estado, ella ha estado"). I also take it personal to say Italian is closer to Latin, but whatever, both are beautiful languages, not that Portuguese nasal babbling (just joking, love Portuguese too. Great video!)
I think Spanish is the easiest Romance language imo
@@sebastien4908 I also think that, and I have a Excell table to back it up hahaha, but then again I'm biased, since it's my native language.
Italian and Romanian are the two closest languages to Latin. :))
I'm learning European Portuguese right now and in what I've seen so far is that Brazilian Portuguese might be slightly more easy to learn. Sure you have to get used to the pronunciation but I think it's isn't that hard and plus you only have to learn four different conjugations. Also there are a lot of Brazilian content out there
@@jmwild22 No they're not, you silly.
I’ve tried learning German, Chinese, French, Russian, Italian, Greek, Portuguese, Indonesian, and Dutch… overtime I realized that not only did I not particularly care for any of those languages due to either sound or illogical grammar rules, but also that I gained nothing from talking to individuals in their native languages. I know that a lot of people act like it’s going to give you some totally earth shattering change in perspective, but for me; it wasn’t worth the effort, so I’ll mostly just stick to English and continuing to work towards creating my own language.
I already speak American English, Danish and Swedish as a native speaker due to family connections and where I grew up. I fully understand Norwegian, especially bokmål, although I dont speak it. I teach both English and Danish as second languages. Danish is much harder to learn for English speakers as there is very little melody in the language compared to Swedish and Norwegian. Grammar is relatively easy and there are many words in Danish similar to English, but pronunciation is the real killer for most learners. The Scandinavian languages have three extra vowel sounds that don’t exist in English.
I’m probably an A2 to B1 in German, and I’m attempting to learn Persian and West Greenlandic. The latter is by far the hardest. I love the Persian script. It’s like learning a code language.
Olly, I have a video idea. The easiest to hardest Slavic languages to learn. Or the three or five easiest. Or if you want to learn a Slavic language, do you start with one using the Cyrillic alphabet or one that uses the Latin alphabet.
You will have to learn the alphabet either ways. lol
Because even the latin alphabet won't be anywhere close to how english uses it.
@@tovarishchfeixiao What's interesting is the Western Slavic, that use the Latin Alphabet, are considered harder than the others. I guess that makes Slovene the easiest Latin Alphabet.
14:42 I could watch these few seconds all day!
Which is easier to learn out of Spanish and Italian for a native English speaker?
Bahasa also has some words that are exactly the same in Hebrew. Having learned some Koine Greek and Hebrew from the Bible, I was flabbergasted to find a few exact equivalents when I was in 🇮🇩 Indonesia.
Svenska är mitt modersmål, men jag pratar flytande svenska, jag studerar även spanska. Swedish is my mother tongue, but i speak fluent English, I’m also learning Spanish. El sueco es mi lengua materna, pero hablo inglés fluido, también estoy estudiando el español.
0:35 That is the most weird Swedish I have ever heard - and I don't even speak Swedish myself, but understand it quite well.
She's feeling awkward in front of the camera plus has a dialect. We have so many dialects that some can definitely sound a bit weird if you are mostly used to the Stockholm dialect.
Indonesian is my choice as I am dabbling in it everyday.
Will u ever go to Indonesia to use it?
@@nbayern7000 Since Indonesia is projected to be in the top 5 or 6 economies by 2050, I plan to be there for business at some point.
Surprisingly interesting!
I wonder what about English? Isn’t it category 3 or 4 as second language learner?
I am Korean American who was born in South Korea in 67 and came to the USA for studies in 91. First few years I had a hard time to speak and write but It was so helpful to speak when I had an American Girl Friend. She help me to improve my speaking and written English skill.
I think English as second language put in the category between 3 to 4.
As a baby all human being are expose the mother language during pregnancy period and up to 2 to 3 years to start mumble words and short sentence. As language learner everyone need 10000 hours to start speak.
10000 hours divided by 8 hours per day equals 1250 days and it divided by365 equals 3.425 years with rounding.
Let me hear from you about this approach.
English is relatively easy. There are no genders or declensions, verbs are simple and it’s everywhere. The spelling is a but mad though.
Sorry, it probably is a category 3 or 4 for you as a Korean. Ignore what I said
1250 days is 3.422 years rounded to the nearest thousandth.
@@FebruaryHas30Days check your division. It is 3.42465753
it depends on your native language if you are west European it should be very easy if you are Korean it could be a lot harder since the vocabulary is so different
As an Indonesian, our language is quite easy because the vocabulary that you need to be fluent is not that much. The language itself is quite young, means that the variations of words is not as much as English for example. pronounciations, I can say one of the easiest as far as I know
Swedish is in the "easy" group, and is spoken in one, small country. Spanish and French are also in the easy group and are spoken in many countries around the world.
The Swedish at the beginning was familiar enough to me that I thought it was Norwegian Bookmal, at first.
The Esperanto-speaking baby at 19:21 is now an engineering student and a world traveller.
As a Scots speaker i can pickup dutch very well
hii olly !!!
how many could you speak out of these 7 ? how were you able to do that
Indonesian and Spanish are the easiest world languages for Filipinos like me to learn.
Are there a lot of Spanish speakers in the Philippines still?
I work with a bunch of Filipinos I know a handful of Spanish words and phrases. One day I was feeling terrible and one of my colleagues asked me if I was doing ok, I replied that "no I am feeling very sick" I was feeling so bad that it took me a few moments to realize she actually said "Kamusta ka" which was close enough to "commo esta" that even my through my brain fog my brain took the context and translated it for me.
@@BarcaFan1899 only a very few thousands speak Spanish as their first or second language, including former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
@@BarcaFan1899 Thousands of words from filipino's languages are Spanish words.
I've tried a Tagalog lesson and once you get the hang of the suffix, prefix, infix and such that go somewhere on the verb, it was a very interesting and fun lesson. I don't think I would consider it that diffecult. Kinda comparable to Malay/Indonesian in terms of diffeculty. 😅😊
If you're going to bring up conlangs, Toki Pona is like 120 or so words. Most of the difficulty will probably be trying to figure out how to break down your sentences into far simpler ones.
I was somewhat surprised to see Dutch on the list. I'm a native speaker of Afrikaans, which is by some measures basically a dialect of Dutch. And while I have little trouble understanding Dutch, I found the grammar such a nightmare that I could never get the hang of it. So, perhaps a bit bizarrely, I can understand Dutch but cannot really speak it at all.
But can they understand you?
@@fintonmainz7845 I don't know. Some Dutch folks say they don't struggle to follow Afrikaans, while others say they don't understand a word of it. :-)
@@brianvanderspuy4514 I worded my question badly.
What I should have asked is: do you speak Dutch/Afrikaans to Dutch people when it really matters or do you resort to English?
@@fintonmainz7845 I lived in the Netherlands for two years, and mostly we just spoke English. It's not that I would mind trying to learn proper Dutch, but the blasted Dutch won't let you practice: the moment they see you struggling, they switch to perfectly fluent English. And if they think you're Spanish, they switch to perfectly fluent Spanish. And if they think you're Chinese, they switch to fluent Mandarin, and so on and so forth. It seems the average Dutchman is fluent in about twenty languages. :-)
The result of this was that in two years of living in the Netherlands, I never got the hang of the language. I found that because Afrikaans is so closely related, in some ways this actually made it MORE difficult to learn proper Dutch, because of a tendency to slip back into Afrikaans without even noticing. You can often substitute words and phrases and still be more or less comprehensible, so you don't even notice you got it all wrong.
Nowadays I am tempted to argue that Afrikaans IS a dialect of Dutch (don't let my fellow Afrikaners hear me say that; I'll get lynched) and therefore I am perfectly fluent in Dutch, thank you very much. 😀
@@fintonmainz7845 Hmm, I wrote a fairly long answer to this, which the YT software seems to have now disappeared. The long and short of it was that during my time in the Netherlands, we mostly spoke English, which both Afrikaans and Dutch speakers actually mostly understand better than they understand each other's languages. (I did occasionally run into Dutch people, particularly the older folks, who struggled with English, but most Dutch folks speak better English than half of native English speakers.)
Out of all those languages, only Italian can be learned fast (provided you speak French or Spanish). Swedish for instance definitely cannot be learned fast and Norwegian is actually easier to learn for English speakers than Swedish is. 3:00 is Danish, not Swedish.
In my experience, very few native Germanic language speakers will speak to an English speaker in their native languages. You have to already be really, really good for them to stick to Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, etc. If you want practice, you are going to have to pay a tutor in the beginning to intermediate stages.
I fell in love with Spanish when I was 5, watching Sesame Street when they taught the numbers 1-10 in Spanish. I ended up with a Master's degree in teaching Spanish because of that lol.
Where would Catalan fall in this list (for native English speakers)?
Indonesian and Malay are so easy to learn though, it is phonetic, hence I can relate it to Swahili and the Bantu languages I speak
Hungarian. I learned it without any effort. :)
The thing about Esperanto there's a reason why there are so few native speakers. I think it is simply because it is constructed.
Language is inherently chaotic or fluid as one might suggest which is why a constructed one just naturally won't be picked up as much. There are unconscious ways of traditional languages we just naturally gravitate to imo.
Now let this not be confused with a simplification or standardization of a language you may already speak, like MLA or Mandarin respectively. The latter was just made standard because it was one of the easiest Chinese languages(or dialects) to learn, with only 4 tones. MLA was created as Arabic tends to be radically different around various regions of Africa and the Middle East. That being said, apparently for a dialect, most are familiar with Egyptian Arabic. It is like the American English dialect of English for English speakers.
Given how different Spanish can be at times I am surprised they don't have an MLA but maybe they have something like Egyptian Arabic that is commonly understood.
A large part of the problem with it is that it draws from too narrow a language pool. From what I understand, Lojban is better, but ultimately, there isn't enough push to have one of these ever gain much traction as most of the time the larger languages have no need for another language and the folks speaking less common languages are stuck learning languages to get on with those in areas with more linguistic power. So, the folks most likely to benefit are the ones that are the least likely to have any say in it being adopted commonly. The fact that Esperanto has done so well, is a bit of a miracle in part due to it being created when it was.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade As China takes over the Anglosphere, Esperanto is the most natural choice to become the dominant AUXILIARY language (for every country to learn after their native). No 1 wants imperialist language to dominate, so Esperanto is favourite planned language . Latin was the previous dominant (with force) but now outdated. Lojban had max 1k vs >2mil EO - no comparison. No 1 wants to relearn what works best for now.
1) Esperanto is more chaotic and more fluid than you're giving it credit for. (E.g., The Esperanto community is still arguing over if country names should end in -ujo or -io, there's debates on how much Esperanto speakers should be allowed to verb nouns, etc.)
2) I think we can credit the spread of English in large part because, historically, England was good at building ships, cannons, and rifles and using said tools to start colonies.. Esperanto, on the other hand, has never had an army.
"few native speakers simply because it is constructed"?
No, I don´t think so. It would be a sign of weakness if the survival of Esperanto would depend on us esperantists making babies. Some of us may raise children in 2 or 3 languages, but most will do it in the language of where we live. There's nothing wrong with children learning Esperanto in their early or late teens. Native speakers don´t have some special status/authority
@@dimiberberu what the hell do you mean by "imperialist language"? Especially when it comes to Chinese. Because that label would fit english much better.
This is the first time I have heard that Spanish is easy to learn 😱 And Spanish is my native language so... 🤷♀ I wonder what 'learn' here stands for 🤔 Maybe a bunch of sentences to travel or guess what someone is saying
It’s relative to how hard other languages are and also your native language.
It's basically the fact that it's written phonetically and English has borrowed some Spanish words. Once you get to verbs, it's like being swallowed up by a sinkhole.
No es fácil 😂no se de que esta hablando
It depends what language you’re starting off from. As an English speaker, I’d say Spanish is amongst the easiest. We already have massive exposure to it (in the US at least), it’s completely phonetic, has endless learning resources, & despite English being a Germanic language, it shares WAYYYY more vocabulary with those in the Romance Family. That’s not to say there aren’t difficulties - pronunciation of especially “erre”, the subjunctive, the mountain of conjugations, grammatical differences, etc. But if an English speaker wanted to learn a 2nd language, hands down I’d say Spanish due to the lower level of difficulty. To also piggyback off your statement, we’d have to know what one sees as “learn”. I’d argue though, whatever definition you have of it, Spanish would more than likely be the easier one compared to the other language option.
I agree that in comparison to languages that require the use of grammatical concepts unbeknownst to us, Spanish is more accessible to gain at least the basic foundations.
If we left off the writing system, Japanese is very easy. I know some people are obsessed with pitch accent but you learn it naturally you don’t need to study it much. Japanese is easy to pronounce and the grammar isn’t too hard unless you are going to higher level concepts. Japanese is really only hard in that it takes time to read, write, and speak.
In terms of butterfly in indonesian and plural I assume that they are the same for singular and plural. If it's in singular or plural is determined by context, that's at least one hypothesis of mine.
I understand a bit Swedish, similar to German and also Norwegian