The 10 Easiest Languages For an English-Speaker to Learn

Are you ever thought, “I think I’ll learn a new language today” only to change your mind and microwave a burrito instead? I think we’ve all been there. But it’s a new day, so it’s time to give it another try. To make your life easier, we’ve picked 10 languages that are the easiest for an English-speaker to learn. When compiling this list, we took into consideration three factors: how similar the language is to English, the practicality of learning the language, and its overall easiness. Nothing scientific. This article is just for fun, guys.

1. Spanish
There are a lot of obvious reasons why Spanish tops the list. First, it’s the most popular second language spoken in America, which means it is useful to learn and it would be fairly easy to find somebody to practice the language with. Furthermore, it’s the foreign language that most high schoolers choose to learn. Plus it’s the native language of 21 different countries, including our neighbor down south. The one thing going against Spanish is that it is not in the same immediately family as English, but nonetheless the similarities make it really easy to learn if you put in the effort.

2. Italian
Italian makes the list because it’s very similar to Spanish. It is spoken by around 65 million people in the world, so as long as you have Skype or are lucky to live in a New York City neighborhood with Italian immigrants, you shouldn’t have any trouble finding somebody to practice. As a bonus, it’s so much fun to pronounce food in Italian!

3. Portuguese
Now that Brazil is the world’s 9th largest economy – and as a result seeing new job opportunities – Portuguese is becoming a very important language to learn. If you already know Spanish somewhat, you can easily learn Portuguese. In fact, the two languages are so similar that native Portuguese speakers can often understand Spanish even if they have never learned it!

4. French
French is a language that remains strong due to French people’s pride and their stubbornness and unwillingness to learn English in contrast to the rest of their counterparts on the European Continent. But in fairness, the ladies also find it sexy, even that weird guttural “spitting” sound, apparently. While it is in the Romance language family along with Spanish and Italian, it is not as easy to learn. For instance, their use of silent letters puts English to shame. In addition, while English has 12 different verb forms, French has 17. There are plenty of good French movies out there and you shouldn’t have any trouble finding a native French speaker online.