Which language is easier for a native English speaker to learn?

Pronouncing German will be easier. French grammar will be easier.

It depends, OP.

As a Canadian, I'd say French but that's only because I hear it fairly frequently and it wouldn't be hard for me to immerse myself in French if I wanted to.

English vocabulary comprises 29% French, 29% Latin, 26% Germanic, and 6% Greek. Combine French and Latin however. Read your history - 1066 Norman invasion and conquest.

I’m curious to see the results OP. German has many words that are close to their English counterparts, and can be easier to guess than French I think.

German is also an inflected language which is alien to many English speaking natives (maybe French is as well I don’t know). German often has odd verb placement compared to English.

I’m still going with German being easier.

French is easier to pick up than German, for anglophone.

The one hiccup is pronunciation. It's difficult for francophones to pronounce English naturally, and for Anglophones to pronounce French. It can be done but it takes REAL effort.

Germans pick up the sound of English and vice versa.

French is moderately inflected. English is slightly inflected. Aspect is inflection and English has 4 aspects while French as 2. French has 4 tenses however, and English only 2.

I have a German friend who's lived in the US for many years. She says that speaking German sometimes throws her now, because of the grammar.

I studied French for four years in high school and then took French lit in college (in the original, only translation we used was for Roust). Forty years later took a year of German. I can still read French pretty well (never was a good speaking or listening to it); I struggled with German, though had also previously studied two inflected languages—a year of Russian and two years of Attic Greek, one semester of Homeric). The different alphabets of those slowed me down. With German, the logic of the language was very clear—with it and with the Russian and Greek, I think it had more to do with being middle-aged when I began them and not having the natural “facility” some people and which I envy. With Russian and Greek, I recognize words and phrases and can read them aloud like a Bar Mitzvah boy reading his Torah portion. The two years of middle school Spanish are still very available to my brain. Oddly, the year of Latin I did in 2019-20 is still there (we learned it by translating modified selections from Ovid, along with grammar). I suspect that may be because the first two non-native languages I studied were Romance languages, so much of the Latin felt like it was already buried somewhere in my brain (though Latin, like German, Greek, and German are inflected much more than Spanish or French). I think the age one begins is more relevant than the specific language (if we were raised around tonal languages, like many Asian ones, we’d have internalized the subtle nuances of meaning there). John Stuart Mills’ father had the right idea—he had JSM up at dawn to study Greek when he was 3 or 4.

Excuse me Mr. TLDR, did you answer the question somewhere in that post?

What is inflected? What is aspect? French has more than 2 tenses. I’m so confused.

French as 4 tenses hun. English has two - past and present. The 4 English aspects are simple, progressive (continuous), perfective, and perfect progressive (continuous). Many North American English speakers avoid the prefect.

avoid the perfect. Not the prefect!

Survey Says: French is slightly easier.

R10. Inflected means that the syntactic/grammatical meaning of a word in a sentence is indicated by an “affix—a generally regular and predictable letter or syllable, often a suffix (at end of root word). So, in a language like Latin, word order is more flexible because the status of a noun, for example, as subject or object is determined by the word ending, not the placement in the sentence In some inflected languages, there are rules/conventions of word order (in German the verb usually comes near the end of the sentence), but the literal meaning is determined by the word ending. English, a Germanic language, has some degree of inflection (pluralization of regular nouns is a form of inflection), but word order is much more critical. Aspect has to do with verbs and indicates duration of an action, it combines with tense.

r14 German is a verb-second (V2) language. In simple German sentences, the verb is the second element, but can be preceded by almost any other element first (subject, direct object, indirect object, adverb, etc). If the verb is separable, then the separable prefix goes at the end. In subordinate clauses, the conjugated verb goes at the end.

German. There might be alot of vocabulary words stemming from french but the grammar (especially the genderless aspect to german) and pronunciation is much more germanic than french.

In my experience German is easier to pronounce. Those nasalized vowels and diphthongs in French are tough to master.

French is easier for me to read, because the grammatical construction is more like English. No verbs splitting apart and appearing at the end of the sentence or other odd things. German vocab seems more like English. Overall French is less work for me.

French pronunciation is obviously a challenge, but so are rolled Rs in German.

French seems easier, despite the pronunciation issues.

R8, your post needed some paragraph breaks.

I agree with all of R4's points. German is much easier once you get the hang of it. Aus, bei, mit, nach, zeit, von, zu!

Gegenuber

The toughest thing about German is remembering the masculine/feminine forms for articles as they relate to each word. It isn't tough aside from that and rules have few if any exceptions, which is nice.

[quote]especially the genderless aspect to german

r16 German is not genderless. In fact, the English definitive article "the" translates into German as der, die, das, den, dem, or des, depending on gender (there are three) and case.

I had 24 hours of college French and 3 hours of German and found German much more difficult.

The cases in German a bit of a trip. I like the flexibility that it lends, but German sentences can't really be skimmed. Also the way sentences can end with meanings that are the exact opposite of how you thought they'd end.

Spanish and Italian are easier than both of them.

Pig Latin

[quote] Spanish and Italian are easier than both of them.

Yeah, I think everybody knows.

I don't know about Italian being easier necessarily.

All of them are easier than Old Icelandic.

Spanish

Hungarian

I studied French for six years (two in junior high school and then four years of high school French). I tried one semester of German in college and found it very difficult.

If you learn German, you'll be hated for the Nazis.

If you learn French, you'll be hated for Jerry Lewis.

If you learn both, you'll be hated for "The Day the Clown Cried."

I studied 2 years of German in college and started dreaming in German. At 54 I started studying French, and it's been 5 years. I'm stuck at A2/B1, and find that French grammar is way harder than German. However my pronunciation in French is way better than my German. I don't dream in French unfortunately. Imparfait and passe composé? Jesus Christ, how many past tenses do you need? And all masculine/feminine everything! At least German has a neuter/neutral situation.

r33=Zoltan Karpathy

R36, I only studied German for a year in college, and I started dreaming in German, too! The language feels really similar to English to me, even with the declensions. I know the sentence structure is inside out compared to English, but there is something so sticky about German. All these years later, I can still read and understand a lot of it and speak some.

I don't think Italian is that easy. A friend of mine who speaks near-native French once told me she thought it was easy, and maybe it is comparatively, but I've studied Italian a lot and am pretty good but still find the tenses a little hard, especially the imperative and passato remoto.

In my experience, reading in German is more difficult than reading in French and Italian (and the other Romance languages, I would guess). Not only do the case system and separable verbs make it a challenge, but despite the cursory similarity of German and English vocabulary, there are significant differences, and, for me, German verbs are particularly unwieldy. r26 is correct that German can't really be skimmed.

I studied both French and German (and Latin, too). German was harder to learn at first for the reasons already stated. Then, I began to discover the similarities between English and German.

The hardest thing is remembering the correct articles.

German grammar is complex enough to be its own category

What's nice with French is that if you have an excellent vocabulary in English, you'll recognize half the words already, since the fancy word in English is often the basic word in French, e.g. "quotidien" = "daily", although there are faux amis.

I lived in Germany for years, studied French for a year in junior high and one semester of college. French came easier to me aside from the pronunciation. Motivation makes a big difference...to me, German was and still is just an ugly language, and I hated learning the grammar. Back in junior high, we had the option of choosing French, Spanish, or German. I chose French without a second thought because it sounded the most beautiful.

Written French is so elegant looking. The orthography and the diacritics make it a pleasure to read a French text.

French ftw!

Esperanto

I think French is easier.

I'll add that I studied German for years, and then tried to pick up Italian.

I know that Italian is not French. However, I feel that in less than a month, I was more comfortable reading Italian than German.

I've just started studying French, but I'm noticing a similar phenomenon.

(I can't speak to speaking and listening, though, since I'm mainly concerned with gaining reading competency in these languages.)

To those who've studied both: is French harder or easier than Italian?

Italian and Spanish have regular pronunciation rules that are pretty easy to remember and follow. French has regular rules, but they're confusing. Of course ANY of them is more logical than English.

For simple sentences in the present tense, German is easiest, and basic communication can take place. That's because basic German strong verbs are very similar to English (Singen, schwimmen, gehen, essen, bringen, sehen, helfen), as are helping verbs (koennen, wuerden, sollen, etc). (If you can't guess, sing, swim, go, eat, bring, see, help- and can, would, should). However, once you go past simple present tense communication, French rapidly becomes easier, because of the tendency of German verbs going to the end of the sentence. Ich sehe ihn. I see him. Ich habe ihn gesehen. I have him seen. (I saw him).

German orthography follows rather strict rules, so pronunciation is no mystery - however, some sounds are somewhat difficult for American mouths - ch following i, ch following a (two different sounds, neither one of which exists in English). The uvular r exists in both German and French and is hard for American mouths. Most Americans can't hear or differentiate between u with umlaut and u without umlaut.

There are some delicious words in German though. My friends and I love the word Ungeheuer. (Monster). So useful in a bar setting.

^ If you want to use it, it's pronounced Oon ga HOY a (not quite, but close enough).

Probably Afrikaans and Dutch.

They seem fairly simple from a grammar point of view, and they are related to English.