Question 1

What is the easiest language to learn for English speakers?

Accepted Answer

For native English speakers, the easiest languages to learn are typically those in the Germanic and Romance families. Languages like Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, and Afrikaans share the most vocabulary and grammar structure with English. Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian are also considered relatively easy due to vast shared Latin-root vocabulary. MyNextLanguage scores all 96 languages across lexical similarity, grammar distance, phonology, and writing system to give you a personalised ranking.

Question 2

How long does it take to learn a new language?

Accepted Answer

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) groups languages into four difficulty categories for English speakers. Category I languages (Spanish, French, Dutch) take roughly 600–750 classroom hours to reach professional working proficiency. Category II (German, Indonesian) take about 900 hours. Category III (Russian, Hebrew, Thai) take around 1,100 hours. Category IV languages (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean) take approximately 2,200 hours. MyNextLanguage displays the relevant FSI tier and hour estimate on every language card.

Question 3

How does MyNextLanguage calculate language difficulty?

Accepted Answer

MyNextLanguage scores each candidate language across five weighted dimensions: lexical similarity (shared vocabulary and cognates), grammatical distance (morphology and syntax), phonological similarity (shared sounds), writing system difficulty, and genealogical distance (position in the language family tree). Each dimension is weighted by your CEFR proficiency level in each language you already know, so the more advanced you are, the more transfer benefit you get. The five scores are combined into a single 0–1 composite score.

Question 4

Which language should I learn after Spanish?

Accepted Answer

After Spanish, the closest languages are Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Romanian, and French — all Romance languages sharing a large common Latin vocabulary. Portuguese is often cited as the single easiest step from Spanish due to near-identical grammar and high lexical overlap. MyNextLanguage lets you select Spanish (and your other languages) and instantly ranks all 96 languages by how easy each will be for you specifically.

Question 5

What languages are most similar to each other?

Accepted Answer

The most mutually intelligible language pairs include: Serbian and Croatian (near-identical at a colloquial level), Norwegian and Swedish, Spanish and Portuguese, Czech and Slovak, and Malay and Indonesian. Within the Romance family, all six major languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan) share significant vocabulary. MyNextLanguage's comparison mode lets you place any two languages side-by-side to see their lexical, grammatical, phonological, and writing system scores at a glance.

Question 6

Is MyNextLanguage free to use?

Accepted Answer

Yes — MyNextLanguage is completely free, ad-free, and runs entirely in your browser with no account or installation required. It covers 96 world languages across 17 language families and works offline as a Progressive Web App (PWA) once installed.

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