English is the easiest for me, probably because I started studying English at a very early age and had a long time to learn it.
I started to learn English when I was in third grade of primary school. In China it is a mandatory course, and is considered a main factor in measuring the students’ ability to learn. It is believed that the age of five to eleven is the key era of learning languages. The only foreign language I have learned within that era was English. This ensured that I would apply all my language abilities to learning English. Honestly, I did not enjoy learning English at the beginning, because it is always confusing to start learning a new language.
It took me one week to remember all of the English alphabet. Things got better after a few months, and I could read and write some sentences. When I was in middle school, I could communicate with people in English. Now I am fluent in English reading, speaking and writing. It took me a long time to learn English, but spending time is important in learning languages.
Furthermore, the education policy in my country helped me learning English. According to the Ministry of Education of China, China considers English as one of the main subjects of important tests. High school students are required to master more than 6000 English words. The students and the critics may not approve of the mandatory English learning policy, but it did motivate me and my classmates to learn this language. Somehow it makes English learning easier for me, because at least I do not have to make the choice, and I would not be able to give up learning English.
Another thing that makes English easy to learn is that, compared to other languages, English has a very simple grammar system. English has sixteen tenses and few conjugations (third person singular, past tense, progressive tense). It makes English an easy language for students to master. Comparatively, French has four main moods (indicative, imperative, conditional, subjunctive) that differ from the situations and contexts, and nineteen tenses that each has its own conjugation; Spanish has four main moods (indicative, imperative, conditional, subjunctive) and nineteen tenses with equivalent conjugations; German has four cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative) that serve different roles in one sentence, and a lot of conjugations in prepositions. Many of these grammars are far beyond my understanding. This definitely makes learning English seem much less scary.
As for students who speak other languages, the situations could be different. It depends on what their first language is. English is always taught in European schools as the first foreign language. For those who speak Germanic languages, it could be easy to learn English. Germanic languages, especially German, share numerous amount of prefixes, suffixes, and words with English. Undoubtedly, German and English share spellings in many words. For example, the German words for “student” and “professor” have exactly the same meaning and spelling in English. Although English has words that originate in Latin, Greek or other languages, German forms the core of English spelling ("Flippo," "Hyde," "About Education," "You already know German!-German vocabularies in English"). French and Spanish also have a lot of similarities with English. Actually, French, Spanish, Italian and some other Latin languages share a great similarity, so students can always find out that some words are spelled the same and/or have identical meanings in those languages.In conclusion, English is comparatively a fairly easy language. Its wide usage, simple grammar system, similarities that share with many other languages make it not so unintelligible. Although it may take some time, comparing to other languages, English is not so difficult to learn.
