According to the U.S. State Department who groups languages for the diplomatic service, the “easiest” languages for English speakers, are the ones usually requiring 600 hours of class work for minimal proficiency. In this case they’re the Latin and Germanic languages group. However, German itself requires more time, 750 hours to be exact, because of its complex grammar.

English is also considered easy because it has no cases, no gender, no word agreement, and arguably has a simple grammar. The language is everywhere and can be heard, absorbed and used anywhere. It has short words, and verbs change only in the third person. Native speakers are very forgiving of mistakes as so many people speak it as a second language. This makes English one of the easiest foreign language to learn.

Italian is easy to learn as well since it has no cases, with easy clear pronunciation, its vocabulary is derived from Latin; therefore the vocabulary has congruences throughout the Indo-European Latin influenced world.

Spanish is one of the easiest foreign languages to learn. Much of its vocabulary is similar to English, and written Spanish is almost completely phonetic. It is closely similar to Italian, and therefore is also easy because its grammar and pronunciation are relatively easy, also ubiquitous, everywhere. French is not difficult to acquire since most of its words are also in the English vocabulary. The availability to use and study French also make it seem an easy language to learn.

Esperanto is also easy. It is written phonetically, as in Spanish. It is a constructed or invented language and therefore has an advantage over natural languages when it comes to ease of learning. We recently translated an HCG diet guide from English to Esperanto and it was extremely fun and rewarding. The results are available on that site. One disadvantage to Esperanto is the small number of speakers compared to natural languages like English, French, and Spanish. One advantage is the friendliness that people show when they find you know a language that is special to them.

Factors to be considered: other factors can make a language easier for you personally to learn and therefore you should consider them to help you decide. These are as follows:

1. Similarity to your mother tongue: a language closely related to your own, and shares many grammatical and vocabulary common ground should be easier, because you get free advantage. For example, a Persian speaker might find Arabic easier to learn than Spanish, even though Arabic is considered to be a hard language to learn.
2. Passion towards learning: If you’re enthusiastic, any language could look easy, or at least fun to learn. This in return makes memorization easier, and allows for quick improvement.
3. Resources available to you: With the right tools, you can make quick progress and therefore quick results. That includes audio lessons, grammar and vocabulary resources, practice with the natives and so on and so forth.

The Hindustani language, an Indo-European language, includes both Hindi and Urdu. It has an enormous number of consonants and vowels, making distinctions between phonemes that an English speaker will have difficulty hearing. Words often have clipped endings, further complicating comprehension. Hindi uses many Sanskrit loans and Urdu uses many Persian/Arabic loans, meaning that a large vocabulary must be mastered.

Learning a new language can seem like a daunting task. However, as it is with all types of learning, there are certain techniques and practices that will help you learn the language faster and more efficiently. Here are 10 of the best practices that aspiring programmers can use to quickly start programming in a new language.

The following methods can help to learn a new language quickly:

1. Make a time commitment for learning: So often we think that we can learn a new language spending half an hour a day over the course of a week. While this approach will eventually work, it’s not nearly as effective as blocking out a day or two where you don’t have anything else planned other than learning the language. Learning in large, uninterrupted chunks is the best way to really soak in the language.
2. Small learning sessions over the course of the week aren’t that productive for learning a language, as a good portion of the time is spent just getting back up to speed on what you previously studied. The review itself might take half of the time scheduled each day.
3. Find a cheat sheet: Cheat sheets are some of the most useful bits of information we can have at our disposal while learning a language. Cheat sheets are not only useful references, but they also give you a quick overview of patterns and commands that help define the language. Just by glancing at a cheat sheet, you can quickly pick up on the syntax of the language, which makes understanding the language easier down the road.
4. Gather all relevant material: here are tons of resources out there for learning languages. Some will sit well with you, others won’t. Gathering lots of information is a good way to take a “holistic” approach to learning, and one that will help you quickly identify writing styles and resources that you understand better than others. Finding a decent programming book is also a good idea, but many times if you’re just trying to find beginning information about a language, your best bet is to hit Google and start collecting information.
5. Understand the documentation: Too often people try to skim the information presented in the “getting started” documentation. Quickly skim the basics of the programming language, and hop straight to the tutorials and example applications. While tutorials are awesome aides in understanding the language, they don’t prepare for expanding on the language like the basics do. You have to crawl before you can walk.
6. Let the information settle and take a break: It makes sense that once you’ve done the gathering of materials, reading and understanding the basics, to dive right into piecing together a demo application. Yet, in order for proper learning to happen, you have to let the information marinate in your mind over the course of a few hours. Do something recreational, fun, or totally unrelated to let your mind subconsciously grapple with what it’s learned.