Which language is easier for the typical English speaker to learn?

[12th Doctor]

This is a double edged sword.

Spanish will beat you up less in learning the basics, because Spanish, similar to English, has fairly stream-lined grammatical rules, and few peculiarities... I know this flies in the face of what you typically hear about English, but the people who preach the "complexity" of English are ridiculously wrong and usually pretentious, or repeating what they heard pretentious people say.  French, on the other hand, while no less packed with oddities, and complexities than any normal language, has far more than either English or Spanish... there is also a significant divorce between spoken and written French... the same could be said of English, but that is beside the point.

On the other hand, once you get past the basics of vocab and grammar, French is easier by a mile, because of the number of terms for more complex ideas that English borrowed from French.  For upper-level vocabulary all you really have to do is Franco-phone familiar English terms.

[12th Doctor]

On a side note, I decided to attempt to take up Italian, and even bought the expensive Rosetta Stone software.  I regret it.  Italian is a great language.  But I have enough trouble learning languages as it is, and Italians sound system is brutal.

[12th Doctor]

I mean, it is lovely to the ears, but it is brutal for an English speaker to try to replicate, because the cadence and the way they put sounds together is very different from any English I'm familiar with.  That's something you have to consider too, when looking at a language.

[12th Doctor]

    French, most definitely. Pronunciation is probably the hardest part of learning French.

That's funny, because I have always thought that French was kinda easy to pronounce, for an English speaker.  Now, if you are reading French aloud, yes they have a very peculiar sound system compared to English, but I have never had any trouble mimic the sounds of French... and I don't mean mocking the sounds, either.  I've actually had many people mistake me for someone who is a fluent, when I actually don't know any of it, except a very basic words, and the English-French cognates.

This could possibly vary for an English speaker, based on dialect differences.  Where I am from, we use alot of soft sounds, and diphthongs, in our speech, so it might just seem more natural to me than the "rapid fire consonants" of Spanish.

Edit: I meant to say "monothongs" meaning the we monothong things where in most other parts of the country they are diphthongs.

[12th Doctor]

On a side note, I decided to attempt to take up Italian, and even bought the expensive Rosetta Stone software.  I regret it.  Italian is a great language.  But I have enough trouble learning languages as it is, and Italians sound system is brutal.

Rosetta Stone is crap. A waste of money. They won't even allow you sell it on ebay when you realize you spent hundreds of dollars on crap.

I actually think its pretty good.  I've learned as Italian in probably a cumulative 1 hour I have put into it than I learned German in three years of schooling.  I have also notices that there is a difference in learning, I think of the Italian words as just words, where as if I ever have to do German, I have to translate in my brain.  In otherwords, I can just think in Italian, even if I don't know that much right now.

[12th Doctor]

Problem for me is that I will never be good at other languages, as hard as a try... and I would like to be.  Thanks to my wonderful brain, I have enough trouble wrestling with the one language I do know, half the time.