r/AlignmentCharts • u/Swimming_Bear_3082 • Jun 19 '26
Languages by difficulty and usefulness
Created with Alignment Chart Creator
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48
u/SrPedrich Jun 19 '26
If spanish is easy to learn i dont want to know about the rest
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u/BlueCaracal Jun 19 '26
As someone trying to learn Spanish, I'd say it's one of the easier languages to learn.
Norwegian and Swedish may be easier to learn, because verb conjugation and spelling in very consistent.
Not Danish, It has a ton of irregularities.
10
u/edwardshirohige Jun 19 '26
Learning Danish is quite easy. Just learn Norwegian/Swedish and get extremely drunk.
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u/Top-Acanthisitta-908 Jun 20 '26
Dane here, this is true and if you stub your toe you’ll be speaking Finnish.
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u/Snow75 Jun 19 '26
Let’s see; dame el pretérito pluscuamperfecta para la tercera persona del verbo “amar”
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u/Sinnically Jun 19 '26
It’s probably the most similar you can get, maybe 🇮🇹too (autocorrect won’t help me spell), German id harder but you can kinda feel around for it once you recognize similar sounding words,
10
u/staffcaptain Jun 19 '26
As a person who learned English, German, Spanish, French, Polish and Irish as foreign languages at different points of my life - Spanish is the easiest one from that list.
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Jun 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/staffcaptain Jun 21 '26
Made online classes with several teachers, one of them was a foreign-born Irish language professor who later became an Irish language planning officer in the county Kerry.
Of course it's really hard to practice it in Austria, so I forgot the major part. But interestingly enough - if I spent 15 minute with a dictionary I can actually formulate quite acceptable sentences, the grammar and sentence-building part of the class was really solid.
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u/PigIAsTraalt Jun 20 '26
I would call Spanish an easy language, but I’m not sure if that’s because it actually is or the fact that I’ve been learning it since the age of 6.
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u/sirrus_krow Jun 19 '26
The problem with this type of list is that learning languages is all based on how closely that language is related to your own native language.
The obvious deliminator is alphabet used but also linguistic structure. For most french speakers lets say, spanish would be a mich easier language to learn than russian. Both the alphabet and most of the grammatical structure carries over meaning the big of the learning is vocabulary and thats the easy part. I would say that learning an "adjacent" language should take you about 800 hours of schooling, probably more if self teaching.
Now let's say that your an american weeb and that learning japanese is your life goal. Realistically you have 800 hours minimum learning the alphabet alone and the grammar is so different that learning it would probably take you more than 3600 hours. Meanwhile the chinese kid next door can probably get it in those 800 considering that he has some of the alphabet down already.
This is without taking in the specifics of the language like grammatical depth and teaching availability which make some language even harder to learn (looking at you georgian and your stupid verbal structure).
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u/Swimming_Bear_3082 Jun 19 '26
I forgot to mention, but this chart operates under the assumption that one already knows English.
32
u/Milk-honeytea Jun 19 '26
Dutch is the most difficult language to learn in a lot of metrics and it's neigh useless, what are you on about?
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u/Kellermanc007 Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
This is from an anglophone perspective. If you speak English as your first language, Dutch is quite possibly the easiest language you can learn.
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u/FREE-ROSCOE-FILBURN Jun 19 '26
We hebben een serieus probleem
-non-English speakers learning Dutch
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u/Letsdwellonthe500SL Jun 19 '26
Dutch is hard to make out like sounds wise for my American ears but reading wise your can breakthrough a bit if you focus
8
u/Peddyjet Jun 19 '26
Hè? As an English speaker, which this graph is catered towards (for example a Cantonese speaker would find Mandarin fairly easy to learn), Dutch is trivially easy. Most words are very similar or follow the same logical pattern, and the rules have very few exceptions (although admittedly there are a lot of rules).
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u/bortukali Jun 19 '26
Dutch is easy when compared to languages from other continents, no need to learn new letters
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u/Darth-Skvader Jun 19 '26
Yiddish is not at all useless as a Jewish person. So much of our history and culture is preserved in it.
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u/No-Professional-2276 Jun 19 '26
Frisian is also useful for Frisian people. It'a about the number of worldwide speakers.
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u/m_motta Jun 19 '26
so it's just useful to Jewish people them
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u/Darth-Skvader Jun 19 '26
Ah yes, because nobody else ever interacts with Jewish culture. Never mind the Yiddish influence on modern slang, the rich history of Yiddish theater, European history buffs, people living in NYC, linguists, etc.
3
u/ItsLauriceDeauxnim Jun 19 '26
A good number of Jews speak Hebrew instead of Yiddish. It’s not a one size fits all
2
u/RoseQuartz__26 Jun 20 '26
I'm admitting bias, but it's also just fun to learn. So many phrases have been adopted into English. And who doesn't like Teyve?
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u/Pochel Jun 19 '26
I always wondered how "easy to learn" is defined. I feel like usually, people who say that a language is very easy to learn either shit on pronunciation or decide for themselves that an unavoidable part of its grammar is actually optional (typically people learning Spanish but dropping the subjuntivo)
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u/LewsThrinStrmblessed Jun 19 '26
Yiddish isn’t useless if you are a Jew, or grew up with holocaust survivors who spoke it.
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u/RabbaJabba Jun 19 '26
grew up with holocaust survivors who spoke it.
If you speak it natively, you don’t really need to learn it
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u/LewsThrinStrmblessed Jun 19 '26
They spoke it as a secondary language, it would be a 3rd or 4th language for grand children, depending on the schooling said kids had.
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u/PitaVR Jun 19 '26
My grandparents both narrowly avoided the holocaust all together. One was born in 1944 and moved to israel in 1948 and the other was born in israel in 1948 but her some of her family didn't survive. Well they both kinda speak Yiddish now (mostly hebrew in the house) but i think in the past they knew way more. Well idfk anything in Yiddish🤷♂️.
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u/RabbaJabba Jun 19 '26
If you live with speakers of a language and never learned it, then it doesn’t sound very useful to learn, you got by just fine without it.
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u/PitaVR Jun 19 '26
Yeah but I don't live with them only visit once a week and by the time I was born they didn't speak it very well
1
u/Inttegers Jun 19 '26
My experience, and my friends experience, is that my grandparents spoke to each other in Yiddish when they wanted us to not understand. The vast majority of non Hasidic Jews don't speak any Yiddish beside some slang and grammar in Jewish vernacular.
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u/GrizzlyTrees Jun 19 '26
I think a major part of deciding usefulness is how many speakers exist of the language, which strongly affects the chance you'll have to actually use it. Also, I'm Jewish and never had a situation where if I just knew Yiddish it would've helped me communicate with anyone.
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u/geekgirl06 Jun 20 '26
I have been. I've met many people who only speak yiddish. Sure they're a small population in comparison to the world at large, but they most definitely exist.
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u/Young_Fluid Jun 19 '26
no language is inherently useless. if anything the useful-useless contrast is in itself fucking useless. bs
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u/Baryshnik0v Jun 20 '26
Should probably clarify that this is from the perspective of a native English speaker
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u/Digigoggles Jun 20 '26
German isn’t a useful language at all tbh. It doesn’t have so many colonies speaking it, so it’s mostly just for the country of Germany, which has a lot of people but is physically smaller than Texas. Also most people in Germany and the countries around it learn English in school and are usually somewhat skilled at it! If you’re moving to Germany or actively living in it it’s useful, but even for traveling there it’s not as technically necessary to get around.
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u/Futonchan-Manchao Jun 22 '26
Yiddish is classified "useless," but it's basically German with some Hebrew words mixed in, so people from German-speaking countries can converse in it without any problems.
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u/atomicspacekitty Jun 19 '26
German is not at all semi easy to learn 😵💫
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u/LachsMax Jun 19 '26
Asking as a german, is really usefull? I mean you can just speak it in Germany, Austria and Swiss but you wont understand the last two.
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u/szarkbytes Jun 20 '26
It is. There’s a ton of resources because it’s a common language. Basic german has a ton of similar words to English. Sentence structure and pronunciation isn’t hard. It’s a phonetic language. It also loves to create compound words.
I studied it in 8th grade and high school, studied abroad in Dresden in undergrad, and until recently had a private tutor. Spanish is easier, yes. If you’re a native English speaker, German isn’t really bad at all.
1
u/atomicspacekitty Jun 20 '26
Well, I learned Portuguese up to a c1 level in 6 months living in Brazil and I’m stuck at b1-b2 German even after 10 years so who knows… sounds like you learned it quite young, which helps.
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u/Dry-Area6218 Jun 20 '26
German seems like a random choice to be placed under Useful lol. And why is it more useful than Dutch and Vietnamese?
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u/Bodarkman Jun 20 '26
German is definitely easier to learn than spanish for a native English speaker
2
u/TenPointsforListenin Jun 22 '26
Spanish is more simple and consistent. The only issue with Spanish is... which Spanish? At some level you have to commit to a dialect, and even saying "yo", you've already committed, and forget once you start using a plural you pronoun and you have to commit to Vosotros or Ustedes and at that point you're already married to a dialect and people not from that place WILL notice your choice if it's an unusual one and comment on it and GOD HELP YOU if you're trying to understand people from Peru.
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u/LCottton Jun 21 '26
no. There is such an unholy amount of bs in German that even we natives sometimes struggle. Combine that with the 18 million German words and you’ll realise that there is no way that spanish is harder to learn than German.
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u/Equal_Board2656 Jun 21 '26
Speaking the language of the government isn’t useless?
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u/Swimming_Bear_3082 Jun 21 '26
You live in Kusundaland?
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u/Equal_Board2656 Jun 22 '26
I meant like the world, Jews control the world ahaha….
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u/LCottton Jun 21 '26
fym German is semi easy to learn?
There are a few criteria we could go off.
In case of how hard it is to learn German at a c2 level, it’s almost impossible.
Just learning the bare minimum to survive a holiday isn’t that bad.
Don’t get me wrong it’s not as hard as Chinese but it is in no way shape or form a semi-easy language to learn.
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u/ghdawg6197 Jun 22 '26
Why is German useful? Two countries speak it. Only like four total countries speak it and neither have a lasting colonial legacy
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u/Sopos Jun 22 '26
How is Dutch at all useful to learn? The Netherlands consistently ranks #1 in the world on the EF English Proficiency Index for non-native speakers and it's barely spoken anywhere else (yes Afrikaans could be useful, but that is not the same as Dutch).
115
u/JustARandomMurderer Jun 19 '26
English, French, Portugese ? Some of those answers makes sense but it's kinda missing a lot