The easiest languages to learn for English speakers
The easiest languages for an English speaker are Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian and Swedish, each rated at 24 weeks of full-time study by the US Foreign Service Institute — the shortest time it gives any language. Spanish and French come next, at 30. But "easiest" hides two different questions: how long until you are fluent, and how fast the first words pay off. Measured by vocabulary, the answer to the second one is surprising, and so is the language designed to be the easiest of all.
The official answer
The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is the US State Department's language school, and it publishes how long its students usually take to reach an integrated score of 3 (Speaking + Listening) on the ILR scale. Its easiest band, Category I — "languages close to English" — takes 24–30 weeks, 552–690 class hours:
| 24 weeks | 30 weeks |
|---|---|
| Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish | French, Spanish |
Everything else takes longer: German 36 weeks, the long middle band of "hard" languages about about 44, and Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese and Arabic 88. The reasons are the ones you would guess — shared Germanic or Latin vocabulary, the same alphabet, familiar grammar — and the list is a genuinely useful starting point, with one caveat: the weeks describe full-time adult students selected partly for aptitude, so what transfers to you is the ratio between languages, not the number.
The ranking the other way round, and the reasons behind it, are in the hardest languages to learn for English speakers.
How fast the first words pay off
Time to fluency is one measure. Another is how much of real speech your first thousand words already cover, because that is what decides whether the early months feel like progress. Counted on film and television dialogue — every corpus sampled to the same 403,882 words so the comparison is fair — the first 1,000 word forms cover:
| Language | First 100 | First 500 | First 1,000 | First 2,000 | First 5,000 | First 10,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| French | 56.6% | 73.9% | 79.5% | 84.7% | 90.7% | 94.5% |
| German | 51.4% | 71.1% | 77.6% | 83.0% | 89.1% | 92.9% |
| Portuguese (Brazil) | 51.6% | 70.2% | 76.8% | 82.8% | 89.7% | 94.0% |
| Spanish | 50.6% | 68.6% | 75.0% | 80.8% | 87.8% | 92.5% |
| Italian | 46.9% | 67.6% | 74.7% | 80.9% | 88.0% | 92.7% |
| Esperanto | 51.2% | 67.5% | 73.3% | 79.0% | 86.4% | 91.6% |
| Mandarin (words) | 44.9% | 62.7% | 69.5% | 75.7% | 83.3% | 88.6% |
Two things stand out.
French pays off fastest of all, at 79.5% with 1,000 words, even though the FSI puts it at the slow end of the easy band. Spoken French leans very heavily on a small set of pronouns and short function words; its difficulties are elsewhere, in spelling and pronunciation.
The FSI's fastest languages are not the steepest curves. Italian, at 74.7%, sits below Spanish and German. Ease of learning is not the same thing as a concentrated vocabulary: pronunciation, spelling and grammar count for at least as much, and Italian's spelling and pronunciation are unusually regular.
The full comparison, with the chart, is in which language has the steepest frequency curve.
Esperanto: designed to be easiest, measured near the bottom
Esperanto is the one language on this page built on purpose to be easy. It has no irregular verbs; every noun ends in -o, every adjective in -a, every present-tense verb in -as; and a small set of prefixes and suffixes builds whole families of words from one root. The FSI does not rate it.
So you would expect its vocabulary curve to be the steepest. It is second from last: 73.3% with 1,000 word forms, ahead only of Mandarin. The reason is the regularity itself. Esperanto marks the plural and the object on every noun and on the adjectives that agree with it, so one adjective is four forms — bona, bonaj, bonan, bonajn — and a frequency list counts each separately.
Strip those endings mechanically, which Esperanto alone allows, and count stems instead: 1,000 stems cover 80.7%, more than French word forms. That is the honest measure of what an Esperanto learner actually has to memorise. It is not a fair ranking, though — the other languages were counted as forms too, and counting them as dictionary words would raise them as well — and the Esperanto post sets out exactly how far the comparison goes. Its corpus is also small, 403,882 words, and much of it is likely to be translated.
So which is easiest?
- For reaching fluency, one of the FSI's 24-week languages: Italian, Portuguese, Dutch or one of the Scandinavian languages.
- For a fast start with the words, French: its first thousand words cover the most of what people say.
- For regularity, Esperanto: no irregular verbs and one ending for each job, even though a frequency list hides it.
Whichever you pick, start with the most common words. Each word list — Italian, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Esperanto — is in frequency order and free.
The Spanish, French and German lists can also be downloaded free: Spanish, French and German as printable PDFs, or Spanish, French and German as CSV files for Excel or Anki.
Sources
- Foreign Service Institute, National Foreign Affairs Training Center: language learning timelines, checked 2026-09-25.
- Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
- Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. Every coverage figure is computed by
scripts/frequency_curves.pyand printed from its output rather than typed.