Is English the easiest language to speak in your opinion?

[mareebaybay]

I think English is the easiest language to speak. I love English because of how easy the words are and learning it is also easy as well. Is English the easiest subject in your opinion?

[Dame6089]

It is hard to say. As a native speaker, I obviously think that it is easy to speak. Still, I could see how speakers of other languages could find it difficult.

Take a language like Japanese for example where there are no plurals. In Japanese, they use context to understand if you are talking about "one apple" or "many apples". I could see how a Japanese speaker would think that English over complicates it.

[Czarownica]

English has some pretty crazy pronunciation if you ask me. I love English, but I definitely prefer writing in it than talking in it. The "th" sound and all the crazy vowel sounds you guys have are driving me maaaad!

I still think it's a really pretty language. Just not at all that easy to speak.

[Pawski]

I wouldn't say it's easy at all. There are SO many rules and odd situations where something isn't right.

Do you lay down or lie down? Jim and me are going to the store or Jim and I are going to the store...

Not to use prepositions at the end of a sentence: "Are you coming with?" <WRONG>

In the few other languages I've tried to learn; German, Spanish, and Russian - they seem to be more straight forward with their ruling.

[rebel]

It certainly is easy to speak. Now at what level it is being spoken is a whole different question.

The media now-a-days popularises it so much that it is almost impossible for a teenager, or even a kid, not to know, at the very least, a few words. I believe that English is in the air and everybody can learn, the basics, if not proper English, with time.

[MissPotato]

Definitely. I'm from the Philippines. And here's a story I often tell: When I was in high school, I almost flunked out of the honors class because of low grades in Filipino (my native tongue) but had A+ in English. It just comes naturally to me. To this day, I use it more often than any other language (even my own!)

[sidney]

I think it depends on which country you were born and raised in. In my country which is the Philippines, English is quite prevalent and commonly used in our culture and even in our local media, so naturally, people that were born and raised here are quite familiar with the language due to exposure. Of course in other countries this won't be the case where most people aren't fluent in English, like China for example.

[SpiralArchitect]

Well because English as a language is so commonly used that people with different native languages are often exposed to it. It's partly because of the spread of elements of the so called western culture in the world but because of that people are more easily exposed to English than any other language. That's why I suppose people feel that it is an easier language to speak.

[Baburra]

I think language is only easy if you grew up with it. To anyone trying to learn a completely different and foreign language, it will always be a difficult endeavor. That said, I do think English has a certain simplicity to it, so I might agree to some degree that English might be one of the easier languages to pick up, although it's still highly subjective, I think.

[jodig]

I don't think that can be said. Every language is received differently by the receiver, according to his native tongue and the other languages he already speaks. In linguistics, that is the subject of the stratum (layer) theory.

In a few words, this theory implies that whenever you learn a new language, it is built upon the one that you already speak, so the results are different!