Hello,
I’m a student at the school of foreign languages which attends lessons in my city. There are four languages available, certainly combined, like English+Italian, English+German, and English+French. So In the second grade also the third language is added, and I study English+Italian+German. To be honest, as it’s stated above, it depends on the person and the country as well. For example, I’m an Albanian. Here in the past, during the years 1925 to 1939, we were influenced by Italian culture. This situation went on for years and during the communist regime many people used to illegally listen to Italian radios and many seniors may speak Italian a little nowadays. After the communist regime many people migrated to Italy, and the influence became more distinguish. There was a period during 1999 to 2003 or 2005 when people used to listen so much to Italian music and watch Italian films. Also our language contains many Italian words, and it appears easy to many people to learn Italian here. But I myself find difficult learning French and German because they didn’t have any impact here and the grammar is a bit different. Honestly, when I first started to learn French, I got headache and I left the course.
Then there’s English. English in my opinion is good for those people who are able to memorize so much, and for those who love it. I’m one of them and I have to say that the grammar is easy, there aren’t so much tenses like in Italian. But there is an endless number of Idioms and phrasal verbs and it is supposed that a large number of words to have two or more synonyms. So here’s where the difficulty begins. I think English is great for first levels, but when you study upper ones, the work doubles.

Hello there,
I stumbled upon this thread earlier, but didn't have the time to answer. So I'm bringing this up again out of the depth.
I have to agree that German is a kind of more difficult language. But currently I am in a Latin course for a couple of years now, and I must say that it's more difficult, especially because of the ending-letters of a word. Because the ending of the word declares the tence, singular/plural, the person, etc.

In my opinion, Nederlands is echt makkelijk to leeren voor mij (Dutch is really easy to learn for me).
If you want to see what learning Dutch is like, you might check out http://www.taalthuis.com and find out yourself how difficult or easy it is for you.
Many Dutch people also speak English and German pretty good, which is quite impressive! And many eastern-Europeans I met could express themselves in German pretty good, especially those from Czeck Republic, Slovakia and Poland.

Yes, shurely.
Because if somebody compares a language, It must be compared from grammar, phonology, or orthography. There are various methods I notice. This article was only by grammar side of languages.
But yes, Latin is difficult. But new languages are easier, tham Latin, for example those, which was created from Latin: Italian, Spanish, or Romanian.

I don't recall this thread, I must've missed it first time around.

@Afrim, interesting stuff, I didn't know that about the language in albania.
@Arabic, the problem with those created universal language thingies, like esperanto is practically nobody actually speaks them accept in dedicated communities. Esperanto has gone out of fashion I think precisely for that reason, in that back in the ninenties it was just a sort of status symbol more than a practical language and a way for people to prove how modern and cultured they were (there's fun made of this in the British scifi comedy tv and book series Red Dwarf).

Anyway, to an extent the arguement of language similarity based on similar origin, grammar etc seems vaguely true, a Dutch friend of mine did tell me she found English easy and said it was because it was linguistically closest to dutch (though whether this is true or just her opinion I'm not sure). however also I agree with Assault freak, things are often highly individual. If you have like my brothered watched a lot of subtitled Japanese things, you will naturally absorb some of the language, just as you would if you say lived in a place where more than one language was spoken, I have a cousin who's wife is Estonian and their sun who was about four when I last saw him spoke English and Russian pretty equally and switched between the two quite casually.

Despite the supposed French influence on English, I found, and in fact still find French a horribly difficult language, both in it's pronunciation and emphasis, and in it's down right crazy spelling! Indeed it is quite odd, I came back from a week in Austria speaking actually quite a bit of German, just from learning how to order food in restaurants, buy things in shops and say I was from England, (the majority of the Austrians where I was spoke   extremely good English but I did appreciate learning the language).

I also came back from Griece when I was a teenager knowing a few words of modern Griek, particularly because the Grieks seemed to appreciate the fact that I'd made an effort, but I've not once learnt any French despite going to France several times and despite whilst in France people often seem to understand English but do not actually speak it, ---- not sure why this is, or even if it is all of France or just the bits I saw, though it's a fairly common experience that people I know who have been to France have had. One French chap I met who I discussed this with, (he was a Doctor of Archaeology), actually said the French education system was so theoretical, that people in France who learnt English actually never got any chance to practice it at school, they were just first presented with the grammer and word list. I don't know if this is true, or if any of our French members could confirm it but it was an interesting thought.

Apart from French though, I did spanish at school which I found not too hard, the concepts with the different tenses were not difficult for me to understand albeit that I was learning in secondary school so the pace was slower, and have been learning conversational Italian which again I find relatively easy, basically so that i am a more effective singer in the language, although it's structure is far less rigid than spanish and remembering all those irregular verds is a pest  (in Spanish it always seemed far easier to just learn the rules annd apply them), particularly sinse I don't unfortunately italian on a frequent bases.
I could probably make myself understood, and cope if I had to order in a restaurant, go shopping, do the touristy things, and according to people I've sung or spoken to mmy pronunciation  is fairly convincinn, but I don't find myself completely natural in the languaage or able to   converse without extensive pauses and rememberings by me of what word or  tense applies, though according to my teacher I've not done too badly.

What I particularly like is that given that my teacher is from genoa, I learn a lot of the culture and about life as well as language, plus she gives me the most amazing Italian imported coffee! .

What I did find interesting is that when my parents, and to an extent I first met my teacher we believed her to be a slightly abrupt rather commanding lady because of the way she spoke. she would say things like "You come on wednesday", or "Go and sit down and I will make the coffee"

These sound almost rude in English, given that in English we'd usually phraise such things as requests, or add the word please to be polite, eg, "come back on wednesday please" or "If you sit down I will bring you some coffee" and originally we assumed my teacher was a rather foreceful lady. Funnily enough though, it turned out as I got to know her that is not the case at all, and when I learnt the Italian it turns out Italians have a very different method of Politeness, don't use please casually, and indeed to actually give! orders would need a totally different imperative tense, something which doesn't exist in English.

Even   though my teacher has for the  last 40 or so years beenmarried to an Englishman, and obviously lived over here, she still has sort of an Italian manner of speech which as I said gave the wrong impression of her personality in a slightly different cultural context which I found quite interesting.

@Paddy, unfortunately I've not heard much spoken Dutch, which is somewhat ironic given that I've technically been working voluntarily for a Dutch organization for the last eight years, sinse Sander and Richard are Dutch and the game accessibility Special interest group is based in Holland.

With German I found the basic conversational bits not too hard to understand, though as I said I mostly just picked it up as I went along, but trying to sing in German I find difficult sinse poetry obviously is a very different beast, plus when singing your pronunciation needs to be extremely clear, and some of the German gutterals and vowel sounds I found very hard to get my tongue around.

With the rolled r, it is not the norm in English at all the way it would be in Spanish or Italian, and indeed it always gets up my nose when you hear singers singing English songs with a rolled r and over emphasized, artificial diction.  A miner rolled r (though far less than in something like Spanish), is occasionally used by people who consider themselves upper class or at least are attempting to sound that way, but mostly you'd be thought pretty pretentious for trying it and it's largely fallen out of fashion, even for people who do speak good English.

There are of course some Scotish accents where a rolled r, even an extreme rolled r is fairly  natural,  Silvester Mccoy has made it something of his trade mark, or I should say his trarararararade mark .(btw, hope that came out in whatever screen reader your using. Though as I said for British English unless you were specifically trying to speak like the queen it's not generally used anymore.

Yes, I agree.
But, I know, what languages are very easy to learn.
When You wrote about British English, I remembered to, for example Patwa in Jamaica, which is creole of Jamaica and this caribbean English have some features of British languages too.
So, I must say, that creoles, or pidgins are very easy to learn.
And if some people know about It, those languages were created from another languages. This is a great examples, how a new languages are created.
Also, do You heard about Esperanto? This is a great example, because there are many words from Romance languages and romance languages were created from Latin. There are many constructed languages to communicate with anothers, for example Neoslavic.
I wrote about It, because I am from Slovakia and every people from Slavic nations, such as Croatians and Russians can understand of this language, because there are many words from Polish, Czech, Russian, Croatian, Bulgarian and many languages.

Hello,
As far as I know, Spanish and French are easy to learn, and this is certainly the same thing with the English language, Arabic is one of the difficult language as I know, but it's my native language, so I personally fluent in it and English, and these are the only languages I know, in addition to some words and sentences and conversation methods in some different languages.

Yes, ofcourse.
But, also french orthography is difficult and grammar is easy.
Orthography is writing.

Yes, as the name and r suggests, he's Indian.

Sometimes. It depends upon the region of scotland and how thick the person's accent is, in people like Silvesta mccoy as I said the  rolled r is very pronounced, but at other times you don't hear much of it.