– Norway. There are two written forms of Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk), but don't let that intimidate you. It's still surprisingly easy for English speakers to learn Norwegian. One of the most obvious reasons Norwegian is an easy language to learn is its shared vocabulary with English.
1. Norwegian. This may come as a surprise, but we have ranked Norwegian as the easiest language to learn for English speakers. Norwegian is a member of the Germanic family of languages — just like English!
Of these, Spanish and Italian are the easiest for native English speakers to learn, followed by Portuguese and finally French.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
The closest language to English is one called Frisian, which is a Germanic language spoken by a small population of about 480,000 people. There are three separate dialects of the language, and it's only spoken at the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.
Kawishana is the rarest language in the world.
The easiest languages for English speakers to learn are: Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, and French. The US State Department lists these languages as Category I languages. This means they are similar to English culturally and/or linguistically.
Sumerian can be considered the first language in the world, according to Mondly. The oldest proof of written Sumerian was found on the Kish tablet in today's Iraq, dating back to approximately 3500 BC.
Officially recognized languages are often mistaken for official languages. According to the online reference Wikipedia, half the countries of the world have official languages. Some have only one official language, such as Albania, France, Germany and Lithuania.
These include China, The Gambia, Malawi, Colombia, Swaziland, Brazil, Russia, Argentina, Algeria, Uganda, Yemen, Chile and Tanzania.
1. English (1,452 million speakers) According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-native speakers. Like Latin or Greek at the time, English has become the world's common language.
Closest Major Language: Dutch
Like Frisian and English, Dutch is another West Germanic language that developed from Proto-Germanic. Because of this, Dutch possesses many words and phrases similar to English and has a similar grammatical structure.
English is the primary natively spoken language in several countries and territories. Five of the largest of these are sometimes described as the "core Anglosphere"; they are the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
The Chinese language has a unique structure and pronunciation system that is vastly different from English. Chinese is made up of tens of thousands of characters, each with its own meaning, and often multiple pronunciations. This makes the language extremely difficult to learn, especially for non-native speakers.
The language features grammatical rules that are often broken, an alphabet that can confuse people who are used to a character-based system, and spelling and pronunciation irregularities that perplex even native speakers.
Japanese has a reputation for being one of the world's hardest languages, and for good reason. Japanese has not one but three scripts you need to learn. Hiragana and Katakana, used mainly for writing foreign and Japanese words respectively, are phonetic, both containing 46 characters.