What would you say is the easiest language to learn with a different alphabet?

Question

And how would it rate in difficulty with all languages.

(Different alphabet eg: Greek or Russian)

And explain why it would be easiest. This question is in English so obviously it is for an English person to learn.

Answer 1

I'd say Spanish, As i picked it up very easily, french is also very similar to spanish, both are relatively easy.

Answer 2

From my own experience: (in order of "easiness")

1. Modern Greek: the alphabet is not all that hard to learn - most people already know at least one or two Greek letters - although not all the letters are pronouncd as you might expect from the pronunciations we give them in Maths -and all Greek words are pronounced as spelt, unlike English. Greek grammar is not all that complicated to learn. Disadvantages: although many Greek words wil look familiar because they have found their way into English - Greek has not borrowed nearly as many words from other languages such as English as other Western European languages have. This means that there is a lot of vocabulary to learn.

2. Serbian: is written in Cyrillic script but can also be written in Latin script (due to historical factors from what used to be Jugoslavia). It is written as spelt/spelt as written and the Cyrillic script is not hard to learn - although it has a few "false friends" - for example, what looks like a "B" is pronounced like a "V" in addition, once you have learned Serbian, you can also communicate with Croatians, Bosnians and Montenegrans. Disadvantages: although Serbian is by far the easiest of the Slavic languages - and far easier than Russian, Bulgarian and Ukrainian, the other languages that use the Cyrillic script, it is nonetheless a Slavic language and contains the features that often confound English speakers; noun cases (not too hard) and verb aspects (many English people find these quite baffling).

Hindi, Gujerati, Punjabi and Bengali: I have placed these together as I consider them to be of similar level of ease/difficulty: they all use different - though related - writing systems but North Indian alphabets are surprisingly easy to learn. Their grammars are not as daunting as you might expect as, surprisingly, these languages are related to Western European languages; And, of course, Indian languages "borrow" a lot of English words, particularly in conversation. Disadvantages: a number of sounds that Westernersfind hard to master and an extensiveand unfamiliar vocabulary.

Persian/Farsi: Farsi is an amazingly easy language to learn to speak; its major disadvantage is that it is written in Arabic script which is notoriously hard to read; it does not write short vowel sounds and different consonant sounds are often distinguished by a series of dots that you need a magnifying glass to count!!

Urdu - Urdu is more or less the same language as Hindi so the grammar is not daunting- but it is written in a notoriously illegible version of Arabic script.

Arabic/Chinese/Japanese: if you are looking for "easy", don't go there!!!

Answer 3

I may be Greek, but I have studied other languages and find that Greek is the easiest, or Turkish. But yes Greek I would say.  

Answer 4

French, because a lot of the letters sound just like english letters, so it is easy to learn

Answer 5

It's a tie between Greek and Russian. Both have equally difficult alphabets. Greek is easier to pronounce while Russian is a little tougher (at least to me).

Answer 6

Greek. I've never studied it but I know a lot of the letters just from having studied maths and science in school. Plus it doesn't have as many letters as in the Russian, Urdu or Japanese alphabets.

Answer 7

I would vote for Persian:

1) The sounds are very simple (only 6 vowels, while English has 14 vowels), and the only Persian sounds which are not present in English are /X/ (the same sound as the German "ch", or Dutch "g"), /q/ (pronounced almost similar tothe  French /r/), and /j/ (the same as "j" sound in French).

2) Many words have the same roots as the Latin words, therefore they are pronounced very similarly. For example, "father" is /pedar/, brother is /baraadar/, daughter is /doxtar/, 2 is /do/, eight is /hasht/, bad is /bad/, God is /xoda/, and many more.

3) Persian speakers (Iranians mostly) are very eager to help others learn Persian, so you can find many helpful Native-Persian penfriends).

4) The word order in the sentence is not as strict as English sentences, but the verbs are conjugated.

And so on so forth! You will find out how easy it is as soon as you start learning it. The only problem you will face is the alphabet letters (and some grammatical points which are difficult for new learners. The same problems exist in all human languages.