5 of the Easiest Euro Languages to Start
There are dozens of languages that exist in Euro, Below is the easiest Euro languages to learn.
We profiled each of the languages we’ll mention into the following categories:
- Speaking: This is based on the ease with which learners are able to pick up this language in short period of time.
- Grammar: Used as a criterion when ranking a given language as easy, medium, or difficult to acquire.
- Writing: In many languages, learning to speak first and write later makes the journey easier. Other languages are equally easy to speak and write. This item spells out the easiest languages to write alongside the most difficult. As with speaking, easy, medium, and difficult were used to qualify each language.
We’ve decided to rank the order of the languages from easiest to hardest to learn.
1. Spanish
Grammar: Very Easy
Speaking: Very Easy
Writing: Easy
Overall: Very Easy
As English speakers, Spanish pronunciations are one of the easiest to learn.
Overall, Spanish has a shallow orthographic depth — meaning that most words are written as pronounced. This means that reading and writing in Spanish is a straightforward task.
With only ten vowel and diphthong sounds (English (20)), and no unfamiliar phonemes except for the fun-to-pronounce letter ñ. This makes learning how to speak Spanish the easiest out of the bunch, and may give you the best return on investment.
2. Italian
Speaking: Easy
Grammar: Easy
Writing: Medium
Overall: Easy
Italian is the most romantic languages. Luckily its latin-rooted vocabulary translates into many similar Italian/English cognates, such as foresta (forest), calendario (calendar), and ambizioso (ambitious).
Like Spanish, many of the words in Italian are written as pronounced. Moreover, the Italian sentence structure is highly rhythmic, with most words ending in vowels. This adds a musicality to the spoken language which makes it fairly simple to understand, and a spunky language to use.
3. French
Speaking: Medium
Grammar: Medium
Writing: Medium
Overall: Medium
Welcome to the International language of love. Despite how different French may appear at first, linguists estimate that French has influenced up to a third of the modern English language.
This may also explain why French’s Latin derivations make much of the vocabulary familiar to English speakers (edifice, royal, village). There are also more verb forms (17, compared to the English 12) and gendered nouns (le crayon, la table).
But it’s not all easy.
Pronunciation in French is especially difficult, with vowel sounds and silent letters that you may not be used to in English.
4. Portuguese
Speaking: Medium
Grammar: Medium
Writing: Medium
Overall: Medium
With the Brazilian economy ranking 6th in the world, Portuguese has become a powerful language to learn. One great element of the language is that interrogatives are fairly easy, expressed by intonation alone (“You Like This?”) If you can say it in Portuguese, you can ask it. What’s more, in Brazilian Portuguese, there’s one catchall question tag form: não é.
The main difficulty with the pronunciation is the nasal vowel sounds that require some practice.
5. German
Speaking: Difficult
Grammar: Medium
Writing: Medium
Overall: Difficult
For many English speakers, German is a difficult language to pick up. Its long words, four noun case endings, and rough pronunciation gives your tongue quite the work out each time you speak.
German is recognized as a very descriptive language. A good example is how they use the noun by combining the object with the action at hand.
Example: das Fernsehen — the television, combines the words fern, far, andsehen, watching, lit. far-watching.
On the other hand, German can be a fun language to learn and its use of grammar is considered to be quite logical, with many overlapping words in English. Just watch out for the exceptions to the rules!
