Learn Chinese With Software

Teach Yourself the Easiest Language in the World

Posted by on Jan 20th, 2010 | no comments home title

Deciding which language is easiest or hardest to learn is a regular discussion between speakers of different languages. Some will point out how languages with phonetic spelling like Spanish and Italian are easier. However those languages tend to have a complex verb system with hundreds of verb stems to memorize. On the other hand languages like English which are not phonetic have a relatively simple verb system that can be quickly learnt.

However all natural languages are hard to master. Granted learning Chinese will take a little more effort than learning Portuguese, especially if your mother tongue is of Indo-European origin but in both cases it will take time and a lot of effort before you are fluent.

That is not necessarily the case with the easiest language in the world to learn, Esperanto.

Esperanto is an artificial language, created by L.L Zamenhof, a polish oculist. It was designed to be an international second language that could be used as lingua franca without any country or culture exercising dominance over another. Zamenhof laid down the fundamentals of Esperanto in his book “Fundamento de Esperanto” in 1905.

Since then Esperanto has become the most successful of artificial languages, with an estimated 100,000 speakers in 83 countries, over a 100 periodicals are printed in the language and there are 50 national Esperanto Associations and 22 international professional associations that use Esperanto.

What makes Esperanto so easy to learn?

Here are the top 5 reasons.

1.) Familiar vocabulary.

Esperanto is especially easy to learn for speakers of European languages because its words are derived from roots commonly used in European languages.

2.) Spelling is phonetic.

No need to check your dictionary to see how a word is spelt, something that even native speakers have to do with difficult words, everything is spelt as it sounds.

3.) Nouns have no gender.

If you have ever tried to learn Spanish, French, Latin or any other Romance language you will have no doubt battled with trying to learn when a noun is masculine, feminine or even neutral. Words like computer are female, while car is male, not the most logical system to have to memorize. With Esperanto this is not a problem, all words are genderless.

4.) Verbs are all regular and are not inflected.

Often learning verb tenses, moods and stems is the hardest part of mastering a language. Esperanto has no irregular verbs and have only one form for each tense, no nasty verb ending to learn for each person or number.

5.) Nouns, adjectives and adverbs have a characteristic ending.

This ending makes them immediately recognizable. Nouns end in -o, adjectives in -a and so on.

These are just a few of the simple rules that make learning Esperanto a much easier and less frustrating chore than learning any other natural language.