Many of us are fascinated by the idea of learning new languages , because being able to interact with other cultures and communicate with people from other countries enriches us enormously. But learning languages is not easy, and although there are individuals who absorb new languages as if they had a gift for it, most of us have to work hard to master a language that is not our native tongue.

If you want some tips on learning languages,
in this article you will find a list that will be very useful to you, but it will also be useful to know which are the easiest and the most difficult languages to learn .

The difficulty of being a polyglot

Not all languages are equally easy to learn, and it can be said that
when acquiring a new language the difficulty is relative . On the one hand, a person’s motivation and willingness to learn is a determining factor, so is living in the country where that language is spoken natively and, logically, it will always be easier to learn a new language if it is similar to our mother tongue. For example, if we speak Spanish and want to learn Italian or Romanian.

Assuming that our reference language is Spanish , below you can find out which of the languages with a well established and cohesive number of speakers and more than 5 million speakers are easier and more difficult for you.

Easiest languages to learn

For Spanish speakers,
the following languages are the least difficult:

1. Catalan

Catalan is a language spoken along much of the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula, as well as in the Balearic Islands and some areas of France. Interestingly, the family of languages from which it originates, the Occitan-Romanic languages, is more widespread in the latter country than in Spain. However,
the influence of the official language in the whole kingdom of Spain has made it very easy for all Spanish speakers to learn.

2. Italian

Italian is a relatively easy language to learn for Spanish speakers, and not only because of the great influence its culture has had on Mediterranean countries. Italian is also rooted in Latin, providing great ease in learning the vocabulary, as it is familiar to Spanish speakers.
This language is easy to read for those who speak Spanish, except for some phonemes and double letters . The similarities are also evident in the construction of the sentences.

3. Portuguese

Portuguese is mainly spoken in Portugal and Brazil . This language is a first cousin of the Spanish language, and it should not be forgotten that the territory of Portugal shares a peninsula with Spain. That is why they share great similarities and, in fact, it is similar to some languages such as Galician, spoken by the inhabitants of Spain.

4. French

French is a language
widely used both in France and in many other countries around the world. This beautiful language shares an alphabet and many words with Spanish. Spanish speakers find learning French very easy and very useful because it is an important and widely used language in Europe.

5. English

Although English is not the easiest language to learn for some people, it is one of the most accessible languages and therefore is the most widely used language in the world and is spoken by more nationalities. One of the reasons why English is easy to learn is because there is a great deal of training available in this language and the British and American influence is very great around the globe.

On the other hand,
a lot of his vocabulary is based on Latin-rooted words , something that does not happen in other Germanic languages such as German.

6. Romanian

Romanian is, like Spanish,
a romance language , so both are related. However, the latter has acquired many everyday words from Slavic and Hungarian languages. It retains much of the grammatical structure of Latin, although the articles can be complicated to learn.

7. Greek

Historically we have always been influenced by the Greeks, and although today’s Greek civilization is far from the context in which characters like Aristotle, Socrates or
Plato, we share many terms of our vocabulary with Greek. We may have serious difficulties in reading or writing it, but when speaking it the sounds of vowels and consonants are similar to those of English .

8. Afrikaans

The Afrikaans
is known to be something like an easy version of Dutch , and is a language spoken in South Africa and Namibia. It actually has many words that are similar in spelling and meaning to English and Dutch. Although from the point of view of job opportunities it will not interest many people, it is a relatively easy language to learn.

9. Russian

Russian is one of the most widely spoken languages in Europe, and there are so many cultural elements generated in this language that finding material to learn it is easy. In addition, the sounds on which its pronunciation is based resemble those of Spanish, and its vocabulary is heavily influenced by Latin.

10.Malay

Although most of its speakers are concentrated in a part of the planet far away from Spain, curiously the Malay language is easy to learn . The reasons for this are that its grammar is relatively simple, its sounds are easy to reproduce and, being an agglutinating language, part of the vocabulary can be memorized simply by adding suffixes and prefixes to others that are already known.

More difficult languages

As for the difficulty,
the most complicated languages to learn are :

1. Hindi

This is the fifth most spoken language in the world due to its spread throughout the societies of India, a highly populated territory. In addition, it is capable of bringing to mind anyone who has Spanish as their mother tongue. Not only is its structure totally different from the Latin alphabet, but its pronunciation is not at all similar to that of Spanish.

2. Yoruba

This language is spoken by some 22 million people, mainly in Nigeria, Togo and Benin. Its relationship with Spanish is practically nil, since
is part of the Nigerian-Congolese languages .

3. Korean

Korean is the official language of North and South Korea and is spoken by more than 80 million people around the world. It is one of the most complicated languages to learn.

4. Arabic

The Arabic language was first spoken during the 6th century. This language, which is used in a wide range of territories,
extends from the Middle East to the western tip of the Maghreb . Most of its spoken varieties are unintelligible and are said to constitute a sociolinguistic language.

5. Zulu

Zulu is spoken by about 9 million people, especially in South Africa. One of its most striking features is
the use of “clicks” of language used as consonants , something that also happens in other languages of the African continent.

6. Tamil

In a similar way to Hindi, this language is so different from Spanish in all aspects that it is difficult to find useful elements in Spanish to learn it: neither pronunciation, nor vocabulary nor grammar have much to do with it.

7. Thai

The Thai language is the official language of Thailand, and belongs to the Tai-Kadai language family, where almost half of its words are derived from Pali or Sanskrit. The Thai language
is basically tonal and analytical and is known for its complex orography .

8. Finnish

Finnish is one of the most difficult European languages to learn for a Spanish speaker, among other things because it does not even belong to the group of Indo-European languages. This means that
our language is more closely related to Persian than to what is spoken in Finland .

9. Hungarian

Hungarian is the official language of Hungary, spoken not only in Hungary but also in Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia and Romania. It belongs to the Uralic language family, just like Finnish.

10. Chinese (Mandarin)

It is the most widely spoken language in the world with about one fifth of the world’s total population speaking Chinese, mainly in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan and Singapore. This language is considered one of the most difficult to learn, as the alphabet is completely different from ours and
its writing system is essentially based on the memorization of thousands of elements.