Learning another language can be hard, but knowing mastering one language can help with others, what are the easiest languages to learn for Spanish speakers?
Well, it is safe to assume that you already know English well enough and you are now looking to expand your horizons a little bit by learning even more languages. As you can see from the title, today we will be talking about languages that will be much easier to learn for Spanish speakers. To be honest, there isn’t the easiest language to learn in the world. However, there are languages out there which share similarities with Spanish, when it comes to vocabulary and grammar. So, as a Spanish speaker getting the hang of those languages will be much easier for you. Similarly, there really isn’t the hardest language in the world either, although many people consider Mandarin to be it, but people who are native speakers of languages of the same branch as Mandarin will find Mandarin to be much easier to learn. While talking about learning new languages, one might think “is English the easiest language to learn?” But we will not talk about English on this list, as it is obvious you already know English well enough since you are reading this article. If you are a native English speaker, then you should definitely check out the 11 Easiest Second Languages to Learn for English Speakers.
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Spanish falls into the Romance branch of languages, and all Romance branch languages are derived from a dialect spoken by the common people in the Roman Empire. So naturally, it will be much easier for you to learn other languages in the Romance branch. There are quite a few languages in the Romance branch. However, we are not going to cover all of them, as some are not spoken by many people. We will primarily be focusing on languages that will allow you to connect with a greater number of people and we will also be focusing on a lexical distance of languages from Spanish. If you are wondering what lexical distance is, don’t worry, we’ll get to that too.
To find out the easiest languages to learn for Spanish speakers, we sought help from various websites like How to Learn Any Language, FluentU and About World Languages. We also put Google’s trusty search engine through its paces for additional information as well. After we had all the necessary data at hand, we had to come up with a good way to rank our findings. Well, to be honest, the only viable way we can rank how easy it is for a native speaker of Spanish to learn other languages is through lexical distance or linguistic distance. By definition, linguistic or lexical distance refers to how different or similar one language is from another. The closer one language is to Spanish, the easier it will be for a native Spanish speaker to learn that language. However, difficulty does not only depend on Linguistic distance alone, as there are a lot of other variables at play here, like the person’s level of skill and prior exposure to other languages. But, for the purposes of this article we will stick to linguistic distance alone. This map will show you a visual representation of linguistic distance of all major language branches. So basically we ranked the easiest languages to learn for Spanish speakers based on its linguistic distance from Spanish.
Without further ado, let’s get the list of easiest languages to learn for Spanish speakers started.
7. Romanian
Romanian is the most distant language from Spanish in the Romance branch of languages. So in theory, it would take the most effort for a native Spanish speaker to learn Romanian among all the other languages that share similarities with Spanish. Over 24 million people spread across two countries speak Romanian. However, the biggest demographic of Romanian speakers are from Romania itself.
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