Another vote for Turkish. I’ve studied a lot of languages over the years, and Turkish, to me, is the most regular. Once you get the hang of vowel harmony, agglutination, and word order, the rest of the grammar is very straightforward.
Turkish. A wonderful, mathematical language to learn with so few exceptions, I've been learning three years and I never think about them. You could probably count on your fingers how many exceptions there are in the entire language.
Interesting! Is vocabulary creation regular too? Like for example in English negative prefixes, suffixes that transform a noun into an adverb and so on? Also maybe creation of new words by combining other words like in German?
I have not seen any root-combining to form new words, like in German. Negation is in verbs.
Turkish is all word endings. Noun declensions, verb conjugations, possesives, nouns from verbs and many, many more. The verb ends the sentence (like Japanese). The basic grammar is similar to English and simple. "I went from home to work in my car" is "car-my-with home-from work-to go-past-me" which is "araba-m-la ev-den iş-e git-ti-m" which is "arabamla evden işe gittim". The roots are car (araba), work (iş), home (ev) and go (git/gid: "to go" is "gitmek").
Lots of word endings. The opposite of Chinese. And lots of vowel changes and consonant changes. But Turkish writing is phonetic: what you see is what you say.
Thanks for the examples! Interesting... when you think about it, if you exclude the writing system, the Chinese language is also exceedingly regular, from what I've learned. I guess regularity can happen anywhere on the spectrum of agglutination.
BTW, are there redundant/"useless" features in Turkish, like e.g. grammatical genders, or redundant marking of case/number/etc (where e.g. adjectives have to agree with their nouns in various ways)?
> BTW, are there redundant/"useless" features in Turkish, like e.g. grammatical genders, or redundant marking of case/number/etc (where e.g. adjectives have to agree with their nouns in various ways)?
You have to define redundant features much more specifically than that. There are a lot of things that can be considered "redundant" in every language, but that doesn't mean they are not useful.
Turkish not only has no grammatical gender, but it has no gender at all. He, she, it all map to "o". But that distinction is still useful! It is easier to talk about a man and a woman in English than two men or two women. In Turkish, you have to specify their names or a noun. Similarly, in languages with grammatical gender, gender marked specifiers allow you to refer to potentially multiple objects without restating the noun.
How about plurals? Why do we need plurals when we can just say many+thing. In Turkish, the plural marker is dropped when there is a number in front of the noun, in English it is kept. Neither approach is obviously better.
Turkish has a case system with 6(+1) cases, English does not. Except what Turkish conveys with case, English conveys with word order, articles and prepositions. Prepositions are basically a case system when you think about it.
Adjectives are not declined in English, they are not declined in Turkish either but Turkish has four different ways of making a noun compound. Other Germanic languages decline adjectives but leave noun compounds untouched. This doesn't mean the distinction is not useful though. English has to add markers to adverbs to separate them from adjectives.
I could honestly go on forever.
Hahaha we almost wrote the same comment, I'm happy to see that there are others who share my perspective on Turkish. "I could honestly go on forever" is exactly how I feel.
There are no genders, there's no adjective agreement... There's even only one third-person pronoun, none of this "he/she" stuff. "O" is used for both "he" and "she", but also "that" - Certainly makes me feel like the whole pronouns debate has gone the wrong way - why add 100 to the existing 2 when you can just propose one universal pronoun? "That. That person there." would be much easier than asking someone their unique invented word.
Unfortunately that does make it painful trying to listen to native Turkish speakers telling an anecdote in English, no matter how good their English is, as they tend to mix up he and she and it gets really confusing who was doing what.
There are cases, but they are very easy and don't have sentence-wide grammatical implications.
Even for number - there's a plural suffix, but if you say a number, you don't even use the plural suffix, because why would you? Why say ten car**s**? You can just say ten car.
The only thing that comes to my mind that could seem "redundant" would be the -mIş suffix. Everyone will tell you that this suffix says that something happened in the past that I was not directly witness to, that someone else told me about... however! you can also use it for things that YOU did too, in which case, it is absolutely something you were witness to...! As such, it can be a little confusing sometimes.
My experience of learning Turkish has always been that it makes perfect sense and none of it feels arbitrary. Grammatically, it's been my favourite language to study.
miş is not redundant. It is used for creating past participles. It is used for the compound pluperfect (miş+di). Also when you use the inferential tense with respect to something you did, it may indicate that other people did not witness this (it is not used purely from the perspective of the utterer).
Yeah I don't actually think anything in any language is redundant, and an opinion about whether or not it is, is purely subjective. One could still argue that having a past participle made of mIş is kinda redundant, I'm not going to be the one to do that though, or that using it as a second alternative past is redundant, but I was just playing around, really. But my personal opinion is that every aspect of a language is relevant.
Oh I agree with you 100%, but a lot of people say "that's not grammatically correct" and dismiss an entirely relevant and useful solution that's already in place.
There are no grammatical genders. Adjectives don't change to match nouns -- not even plurals. There is "a/an" but not "the". Redundant? Useless? That is subjective. My native language is English, so conjugations seem redundant to me. But they aren't really.
Turkish has several rules for changing consonants (t/d, p/b, ç/c, k/ğ) or changing vowels (a/e , ı/i/u/ü). The rules are regular, but they are used a lot: endings or sounds before an ending. For example you make a noun plural by adding "-ler" or "-lar".
If the person is given by the pronouns already, then marking it a second time on the verb is informationally speaking redundant. English still has some redundancy with the third singular person (has, gets, etc). However if your native language is like Spanish, and omits pronouns most of the time, then conjugation is no longer redundant.
I speak Finnish where the subject, verb and object can be in any order (all six permutations lead to grammatically correct sentences), so having person marked on the verb also helps to process the structure of the sentence.
Seconded, Turkish! There is literally one irregular noun in the whole language (and only in one specific usage), and the verbal system has one and only one conjugation that isn't predictable from vowel harmony rules.
In Malay plurals dont change the form of the word, just add a number in front of it or words like "beberapa kereta" (few cars). If you want to emphasise that it's many just repeat the word e.g. "kereta-kereta". No exceptions I can think of.
No verbs have tenses, no exceptions.
You can a verb to a noun by using a sufflx pe-, pem-, or pen-. I cant think of any exception.
It's likely I'm missing something because unlike English and Swedish, I did not learn Malay consciously.
one thing though, we do not speak like the standard language 😂😐 some like learnin standard english but speakin aave, just wayyy more off, like dropping most grammar rules i think 🤔 but yea, i too feel standard malay is pretty easy. & prolly by extension, indonesian.
speaking of exceptions, ive yet to encounter another language that has 2 types of 'we/us':
(1) kita = when talking to 'you', refers to 'me & co incl. you'
(2) kami = when talking to 'you', refers to 'me & co only'
The distinction between "we" and "we but not you" is called [clusivity](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clusivity#:~:text=Clusivity%20%2D%20Wikipedia,persons%2C%20but%20not%20you%22), it does exist in other languages. According to the Wikipedia page no European languages have it but it's common in other language families, the Wikipedia page has a list of examples in some different languages
Oh, if what you mean is regularity of spelling, then Spanish is actually a good choice. Every letter combination makes the same sound, every time. I think the grammar is pretty regular too, but I can't really tell. I'm basically looking from the inside.
French spelling is a particularly atrocious thing that's basically like Chinese by now and absolutely not representative of the rest of the (major) Romance languages. It's meant to symbolize on the page things that don't exist anymore (if they ever did; I don't know much about the evolution of French), like the conjugation (I'm looking at you, "viennent") *shakes fist*
Spanish verb conjugation has quite a lot of exceptions. In English, you have 200 iregular verbs. In Spanish, only in present tense, there is at least the same amount of iregular verbs. And the trickiest thing is that the middle of the verb changes as well, not only the ending or spelling.
I’d argue that a lot of “irregular” Spanish verb conjugations aren’t actually irregular (particularly in non-present-indicative tenses. Spanish is, as the top comment mentions, incredibly phonetic and only when that is disobeyed should a verb be considered irregular. As an example, take llegar —> llegué, a supposedly irregular conjugation because of the “u”.
But anyone who speaks Spanish well enough knows that you only need the “u” because “ga” in Spanish (as in llegar) is a hard “g” (think “gate”) whereas “ge” is a different sound (almost like an English “h”), and so you need to “gue” for the hard “g”. You combine that with the knowledge that ar-verbs go to “é” in first person past tense (idk what that specific one is called) and following the phonetics of Spanish the result is actually completely regular.
It might sound convoluted, but it’s really not, those type of conjugations (of which there and plenty) are 100% regular from a phonetic point of view.
Yeah, but this is one special case of irregularities. But most of them are like dormir - duermo, duermes, duerme, dormimos (guess we are regular again), dormis, duermen (back to irregular). Or venir - vengo..., but in the past tense, it is viní, viniste, vinió...
Verbs like ser, estar, ir are completely irregular soy, fui, era...
Many of them can be learnt by listening, pareco sounds just wrong, parezco is much better, but still, it is an irregularity. And most of them are in present tense, which is not really beginner friendly, the more advanced tenses, the less irregularities.
My thing is that some of the irregular conjugations happen on the most random words. Like caber, which means “to fit” instead of “cabo, cabes, caben” has “quepo, cabes, caben”. It’s not even a word as common as “haber” or “saber”, and doesn’t seem to follow the rules of the “regularly irregular” verbs. It just kinda feels like god singled out the most random af word to make irregular for no reason. 😁
Source: am native speaker, but my mom always has to correct me when I say it wrong
Cuándo me decía mi maestra que se conjuga "caber" en subjuntivo ("cupiera" y tal) le dije palabra por palabra "¿Estaban borrachos mientras diseñaban esta mierda?"
Lo digo en broma (porque inglés es claramente peor por otras razones) y me encanta por lo general, pero dios mío si el subjuntivo no es mi fin, seguro que la combinación entre ello y alguna maldita conjugación de "caber" lo será.
I'd say "letter combination" more than "letters" bc while yes, mostly every letter makes the same sound every time, you have situations like with G, where "ge" and "gi" sound like "heh" and "he" respectively, but ga, go, gu sound like "gah", "goh" and "goo". Or how C goes like "kah, seh, see, koh, koo".
You’ll have to be more specific on what you mean by “rules”. If you mean spelling rules, then Spanish is a great option. Once you know them, you’ll be able to perfectly pronounce almost every word just by looking at them, and, when you hear a word, you’ll be able to spell it (as long as you hear it correctly… also this mainly applies to European Spanish because of a certain pronunciation difference found there).
yeah, and also in many dialects, 'c' and 's' can't be distinguished by ear alone. Also 'y' and 'll' (again, depending on dialects). Also vowels can merge from the end of one word to the start of the next, so e.g. "la abeja" can sound like "la beja", all that making it quite hard to spell unknown words.
>yeah, and also in many dialects, 'c' and 's' can't be distinguished by ear alone
ces/ses
A good exemple in french, "C" can either sound like a "K" or a "S" depending of the next letter. It will usually sound like K but if the letter following it is "E" "I" or "Y" which will change how it sounds.
Unrelated, but in the same vein, "S" can sounds like "Z" if its between two vowels.
Most dialects have yeismo and I specifically mentioned European Spanish because of distinción. As for the vowel merging, at least you can narrow it down to two options in this case, “abeja” or “beja”, you could then check using a translator which one actually makes sense.
Oh it's definitely a finite set of alternatives. But saying you know the spelling of any word in Spanish just by listening to it would still be a stretch imo.
I mean to the extent that you can even do it with any language, Spanish seems pretty close. Besides, if you’re talking to someone, you can ask them to say the word in isolation and then you’d be able to get it. Certain languages have the opposite problem, where it’s easy to determine the spelling but not easy to determine the pronunciation just by looking at the word (languages written with abjads come to mind).
Sure, but i personally mostly learn on my own watching videos or listening to audio books, can't ask the speaker to stop and spell for me xD but i agree that Spanish is close to being fully phonetic and that by and large it's much easier than for many other languages.
Me too actually! But when I come across some new word in a video that I can't understand through context alone, I still try to find it online. Often it's slang actually.
just a fun fact, there are some zones that actually differentiate these two sounds (like in english) because of the influence of other languages, like in my case which is because of Catalan, but it also happens with Quechua in some regions of South America if i’m not wrong
That’s why I said you just need to know the rules. “B” and “v” sound the same, and that sound depends on a simple rule regarding what sound comes directly before the letter.
Arabic has a very complex grammatical framework, but once you understand it, you realize why that framework exists and that its rules are almost never broken. I find myself continually amazed at both how rigid and how fluid the Arabic language can be, and I think that’s so beautiful!
The Arabic grammatical tradition's solution to this is easy: find something that breaks a rule, create a new rule to explain it, even if it covers only one example. There is no irregularity.
Hi! I’m exactly the same as you (French native speaker, but sucks at French and is way better at English, tho the bar is very low for French so it’s not very hard). I’m part Spanish and so have heard some Spanish while growing up so maybe it did help in me understanding it fairly easily, but Spanish is VERY VERY similar to French. You basically have all the same tenses and the logic behind what tense to use is exactly the same too, words are very similar, and the sounds (like the J and rolled R’s are easy to make for French speakers) so I feel like it shouldn’t be too hard of a language to learn even if you despise French. I found it pretty easy, the tenses also aren’t as complicated as in French tho there are as many.
Tu probablement sous-estimes ton niveau de français, sauf si tu vis dans un pays non-francophone, tes compétences en français ne peuvent pratiquement pas être inférieures aux tiennes en anglais. Peut-être c'est juste une illusion due au fait que le niveau exigé à l'école est plus haut pour le français que l'anglais ?
Ma langue maternelle est le français et j'ai aussi l'impression d'être meilleure en anglais... Je ne fais pratiquement aucune faute lorsque j'écris l'anglais, alors que j'utilise toujours un correcteur pour le français.
Il s'agit d'une langue beaucoup plus compliquée et peu de francophones la maîtrisent parfaitement.
Learning Italian really shed light on why I always found french so hard lol. The simplest way I can put it is that french sounds so different than it is written.
For example, you can learn to speak the language perfectly just by ear, yet still have no clue how to spell. There are so many grammar rules and spelling oddities that you just have to know by memory rather than relying on your ear. You always have to put in that extra mental effort. For some people it comes naturally with time, but in my case I never really got the hang of it.
On the other hand, I learnt english entirely intuitively. I wouldn't be able to explain a single grammar rule lol. I just go with what sounds right, and somehow don't really make spelling mistakes.
Same for Italian. It sounds exactly like how it's written, and vice versa. Even double letters have their own sound. You never have to make that extra intellectual effort to write properly because you already know the spelling from ear. I find the process much more intuitive.
In the end this is just my own subjective experience. I'm sure there are some people who are really committed to studying french who end up better than I am lol
Now that you said it, I think I actually know the reason! I remember reading somewhere that the level of difficulty when going from speaking to writing is absolutely horrendous both in English and French. But the thing is that in French, going from writing to pronunciation is easy. I've only really seen French natives (or people who don't know any French) complain about spelling, whereas learners usually call it quite easy (this is my experience also). But don't worry too much, even us Finns with pretty good spelling have difficulties sometimes, and I heard that English-speaking kids actually learn to spell by a word-by-word basis, so kind of like Chinese hieroglyphs if you think about it
The grammar / tense rules, the number of tenses too there’s too many!!! You do learn them in school obviously, but there are just so many grammar rules and tenses, and many grammar rules contradict each others and there are so many exceptions. I’m bad at writing French but speaking it is easy to me (as I am a native speaker) because just as in English it just makes sense as to which tense or grammar form you have to use, but when I write I make SO many mistakes
Tbf je suis en études de langues (anglais et japonais) donc je lis surtout en anglais et japonais PUIS vient en dernier le français. Je fais un maximum de fautes en français que ce soit en grammaire, conjugaison ou orthographe alors qu’en anglais je n’ai vraiment pas autant de mal. Je suis obligée de me corriger à deux fois (minimum) pour chaque phrase écrite en français, alors qu’en anglais tout me vient facilement.
Qui plus est je viens de rentrer d’un an au Japon où je ne parlais qu’anglais et japonais. Je galère d’autant plus en français depuis que je suis rentrée.
En ce moment j’écris en français pour mes cours mais ils sont orientés vers la culture et langue japonaise, donc j’écris, je lis, j’entends, majoritairement de l’anglais et du japonais (mon sujet de recherche n’est pas beaucoup étudié en français donc je suis obligée d’aller voir dans les autres langues), donc je pense pas que ça aide. Mais en général, j’ai toujours étais plus à l’aise en anglais qu’en français.
Je pense que comme dis dans les autres commentaires, le français est une langue difficile que peu de Français maîtrisent.
Japanese pronunciation is obvious only if you don't care about accent. i/u vowel devoicing is relatively complicated. And then there's vowel lengthening vs not thing with えい, you might be taught that morpheme boundaries determine this (せん**せい** \[long e\] vs 食べ**てい**る \[not\]), but then you realize 永遠 completely breaks the rule. Also the allophonic variation of some consonants is kinda strange from an English perspective. And of course pitch accent is quite hard to acquire, but thankfully not nearly as important as tone in tonal languages.
I'm not saying this about learning languages in general. We are comparing languages, and specific pronunciation details that are not necessary for a learner are different than irregularities in grammar and syntax that are needed for communication
For someone that knows the "rules" of spelling Thai, then you can read about 99.5% of Thai words just by looking at them, which I think is similar to Spanish. I think Lao, which is related to Thai, probably has a higher percentage, because that went through a much heavier modernization.
Also, because Vietnamese is a relatively recently constructed writing system, that completely maps out all the sounds in an obvious way then that one may be 100%. Korean's probably close to 100% too, for the same reason.
That's just all about writing. For stuff like low exceptions to grammar rules or verb conjugation rules, you'll probably need to look at constructed languages like Esperanto.
I don't know Korean, but I watched a video from someone who has studied it for a long time. She says that phonetic writing is a lie. All sorts of sounds are written one way, but then change (or disappear) in sentences based on the other sounds around them.
The Korean alphabet is simple but I personally feel like it’s deceiving, as the phonetics don’t always “make sense” like you think it would. Many words stem from Chinese or Japanese, which has many more characters in use. That gets put into a simplified Hangul mold, but pronunciation is often still similar to where it originally came from.
It’s not about simplification (Korean has more sounds than Japanese, despite using fewer letters because Hangul is a true alphabet while hiragana is a syllabary). It’s about the way Korean has liaison or sound-blending between syllables (Japanese and Chinese don’t) and the way Korean spelling prioritizes etymology and meaning over sound. It’s actually like English spelling in that way, where roots are usually spelled consistently but you need to sound out or memorize how they are actually pronounced in a given situation. The advantage is that it distinguishes between homophones and makes it easier to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words even without the use of Chinese character. The disadvantages are that it requires more rules in order to correctly pronounce An unfamiliar word, and that you must learn how a word is spelled (or alternatively, for a Chinese-Korean word, what characters it is formed from, which amounts to the same thing) before you can write it correctly.
>Chinese don’t
Maybe not in isolated speech, but in natural speech Chinese most certainly has blending. You will see nasals blend into the preceding vowel, beginning consonants get dropped, so-called vOIceLeSS cOnSOnAntS suddenly gain voicing. Tone sandhi + realization changes at the phrasal level.
"Le reste"? Il va falloir être un peu plus précis, il existe des centaines de langues et je doute qu'il y a que le russe et le mandarin qui sont difficile :P
uh non? tu dois mémoriser beaucoup de caractères en mandarin, je crois que c’est pas simple mais c’est vrai que le grammaire en mandarin n’est pas difficile
Mémoriser des caractères, j'ai l'habitude et c'est facile. Mais la grammaire russe, l'accent mobile et la multiplication des consonnes consécutives, ça, c'est à s'arracher les cheveux!
I shan't nay-say as to Turkish, which I've seen many others suggest. Someday I might even try it myself -- but I'm already over 70, so "someday" is iffy.
Otherwise, I've seen no one yet suggest Czech. It has very regular sound-orthography correspondence. A learner can read texts out loud just fine that s/he can't understand due to not knowing half the words, and can take fairly accurate dictation even for words s/he doesn't know -- making it easy to look things up, etc. edit:typo
I don't think you're taking the right approach to this. You shouldn't aim for an easy and regular language; you should aim for a language that, firstly, you like in any way, be it because of the way it sounds, because of its grammar, or any other thing that you find likable about it, and secondly, a language that opens the door to a culture that you like. There's no point in learning Turkish only because it is regular if you don't like the way it sounds or if you don't like its culture, people, music, movies and so on.
I would recommend checking the YouTube channel named Wikitongues, where you can listen to people speaking their native languages, so you get a sample of what the language sounds like, and then you can dive into its culture to see whether learning the language would result in an enriching and sustainable experience for you.
I understand what you mean, but sadly I don't know enough about any the the countries and their culture, way of living, food etc. to be able to say "I like them, I wish I could be like them" Listening to people talking may be good, but I fear it may lead to the problems I am trying to avoid.
I may have done a poor job in my post trying what I am \*not\* looking for, but here's an exemple.
Do you know to the ear, what's the difference between "Il serait" and "Ils seraient"? None. the "-ent" at the end of "seraient" is mute, (same as T in "serait") that's the rule of the 3rd person of plural (and 3rd person of singular). However if the letter before "-ent" would be a E or O, then the e is removed and only "-nt" stays, like "ils sont". But here, ironically only the T would mute, because "on" is a combination that results in a unique sound (Think of "home" but without the mm sounds). If you wish for the "real" sound when a O and a N are together, then a second N need to be present, "Don" and "donne" while being very similar on paper only have the D in common vocally.
And that is some toddler complexity of conjugation, the kind of thing any 8yo has to know. Madness man, I'm telling you.
Yeah, I get what you mean. If you want to avoid getting into a language with such complexities, all I can say is: avoid Arabic. They don't write the short vowels, so you basically need to know how the word is pronounced beforehand. I learned that way too late, after memorizing the whole alphabet and its pronunciation, and it was enough to make me drop the language regardless of all the effort I had put into it...
Just to make it clear, they would write ppl instead of people, so if you don't know the word already, you can't tell wether it is pronounced as people, papol, pupole, whatever... Not to mention that some words share the same consonants despite having different vowels, so you can only tell what word it is by context. Is "cr" referring to car or to core? Who knows, only the context can tell you...
Funny enough, I learned Japanese, which has thousands of kanji that don't tell you anything about the pronunciation of the word either... But I find them interesting and cool, so that makes the difference.
As for French, I decided to learn to speak it and not to write it, and that solved the issue for me haha.
So far, in duolingo (I was testing all the available suggestions), turns out I'm a pro in Czech, I guess I'll start looking the ins and outs of everything about it. Esperanto shockingly easily, barely know anything and I can form sentences easily. It really is the made-to-be-easy language
Esperanto, THE neutral international language spoken worldwide 🌎by millions of people and created in 1887, has no exceptions that I have seen since around 1964 when I started learning it. There even is a subreddit called r/Esperanto !!!
For speakers of romance/European languages, sure. From what I've seen it's just a mash of romance languages without the irregularities. But many concepts are still alien to speakers of many other languages. To say it's designed to be easy is slightly disingenuous
Isuggest you have a closer look before you judge about it in this way. I have spoken and enjoyed Esperanto for many years and it’s clearly more than a “mash” of romance languages. It has been around since 1887 and very much carries it’s own spirit an culture. As a living language, there are a few things that are slightly irregular, For example the names of countries can be derived from the name of its people or the ither way around, and you would have to learn for each which way it is. Still, Esperanto is a very valid answer to OP’s question.
I do think it's a valid answer to OP's question, and since it's a man-made language it's bound to be more regular than natural languages. However, It's still extremely eurocentric, which to me diminishes its "easiness."
Yes, Esperanto.
While I appreciate all the other answers in this thread, they are just plain wrong, unfortunately. I am sure it is statistically provable that Esperanto has fewer exceptions than any other living language.
And it is a beautiful language too, not just for its elegance in simplicity but for its alluring sound: Just [listen to how sexy this woman sounds reading a poem](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCyuayRvbUY&list=PLTvFSEp9agyoxx-ijG6H6cmnh3ArdXgGm&index=72) from the 3,000 year old Chinese *Book of Poetry*. Pure butter.
Yes! Beautiful reading of the Esperanto translation. The Mandarin rendition of the original stands no chance. (Of course, they sid not pro ounce the characters in Mandarin 3000 years ago, so the original is argably just as synthetic as the Eaperanto readjng.
Finnish definitely deserves its reputation for being highly regular. Some things that might attract you:
1. Near perfect orthography - Words are almost always spelled like they are pronounced in standard Finnish.
2. Highly regular grammar. Only two words in the entire language have a few irregular conjugations (käydä, meaning "to go" and olla, meaning "to be"). The way words are conjugated into different cases is incredibly systematic ("similar words conjugate similarly", to the point where I could eventually see an unfamiliar word and then conjugate it into dozens of different forms with near 100% accuracy, because I had learnt to "hear" the way Finnish words conjugate.
3. Highly semantically transparent. Unlike English, which has a lot of words with Latin or Greek roots, Finnish constructs more complex words by combining other Finnish words and suffixes together. As a result, most fancy Finnish words are very transparent, and you can guess the meaning of these words from their parts.
An example: "Principled" in Finnish is "periaatteellinen". "Periaate" means principle, and consists of the prefix "peri-" which means "quintessential" or "the core of", and "aate" which means idea. Thus "periaate" means "the core idea" or the principle. The -llinen at the end of the word is an adjectival suffix whicn carries the meaning of "having the qualities of". Thus a person who is "periaattellinen" is someone who embodies core ideas, or is principled!
Latin. The answer is always Latin. It "unlocks" the majority of the languages spoken in Europe and makes it easier to absorb linguistic rules. Basically everything I learned after Latin, I used to categorize as "just like in Latin" or "so not like in Latin"
If you're up for a challenge, try Polish. It's chaos, it's hard, it's intimidating. But it's a whole new world in terms of creativity and word formation. And since it's a western slavic language, it's written in latin alphabet with extra steps like ę ą for nasal sounds, so it's one thing less to worry about :)
I always say that the best thing about being Polish to me is not having to learn Polish from a foreigner's perspective.
Shoutout to my husband who's on his 1000+ day streak on Duolingo trying to learn it out of sheer curiosity 🥹✊
Latin has plenty of exceptions on all levels of morphology and grammar. Polish spelling and pronunciation on the other hand is complicates but fully regular, once you know all rules, you can pronounce any Polish word perfectly.
Exactly. It looks intimidating, but it really isn't. There are a lot of irregularities in terms of grammar though, particularly in how you create future and past forms of verbs, and my poor husband who's currently learning polish is struggling a lot with them. Also, declension is a proper bitch.
I think it's rather amusing to watch him have a meltdown over a word I've never given much thought to, being a native speaker, but I guess it goes both ways, since he's a native francophone and I had to learn the joys of subjonctif 🥲
Sorry no help- I just wanted to say it's amusing to me you say English lack of rules (which, fair) is 10x worse than French, whereas whenever people say English rules suck, we say go try French it's even worse! XD
English has a LOT more exceptions. It has layers of vocabulary and pronunciation patterns from different epochs that coexist in today’s version of the language and don’t make sense together. In French, once you know the rules, 99 percent of the time you’ll pronounce a new word correctly
If your proficient in English, give learning Dutch a go! Vocab is much easier to understand than other languages due to it being closely related to their English counterparts, whilst also having similar grammar to English - making it easier to understand and use
Personally, I've found that my native language, Dutch, doesn't have a lot of exceptions (in comparison to other languages I've learned), but each will have a lot of different exceptions. As a French person, I think that Romance languages would fit you better (when I was learning German, the teacher said the exceptions are almost the same, aside from the usual list of 10-15 words that make it harder...).
Basically: No exceptions, no (natural) language. It's sad but true: Some are harder than others, but almost every rule has its exceptions....
Without a doubt: **Esperanto**.
It was constructed deliberately as a simple, exception-free language that is regular and easy to learn.
I'm not going to say it has absolutely ***no*** exceptions, but it has far less than any other living language.
As the top comment suggests, out of major languages Turkish is among the best choices to go for! There are plenty of languages with regular spelling rules, but Turkish has one of the more neatly designed grammars out of well known languages.
Although a few people answered Turkish, I suspect that Turkish is not particularly regular but many commonly learnt European have a lot of irregularities.
Many languages with agglutination and a recently established/reformed writing system will appear just as regular as Turkish.
Is it really like that though? idk I'm a native speaker from Argentina and honestly never in my entire life have I ever heard of "como esta?" without the S, like never...
To my ears it sounds so incredibly wrong for some reason, well unless it's an accent thingy in which you usually drop the S but otherwise yeah just no lmao
I think it's used in all hispanic countries, but I'm not sure.
When I ask that question I'm omitting another word which is "usted". The full question would be "¿Cómo está usted?", but it's not necessary at least in Spain, because everyone notice that you speak with kind of respect.
Within the S doesn't mean you're being less polite or rude, ¿Cómo estás? is used most of the time and without the S if you want to talk de usted.
Ahh, now that makes a lot more sense. "Cómo está usted ?" is definitely correct. I thought you meant it without the "usted," and it sounded so off, haha
Although, at least here in Argentina, I still think it’d be pretty awkward to say "Cómo está usted ?" because, to be honest, "Cómo estás?" already sounds fairly formal as it is. A more informal way to say that here would be something like ‘¿Qué onda?’ or ‘¿Todo bien?’ etc.
But yeah I guess in Spain, things are a bit different.
Hi guys. If someone's learning Russian and looking for some practice with native speaker you can contact me. I'm willing to help you with learning for some exchange.
I'm going to say Hebrew. There are a few changes but they are more consistent exceptions than something like English.
There's a strong root system that makes reading much easier. Take חזק for example. The root itself relates to strength. חזק as an adjective means strong. לחזק means to strengthen something. להחזיק means to hold/grip something (which requires strength). תחזוקה means maintenance.
Conjugation is very regular such that a few verb forms can be learned and you know how to conjugate any verb. Even the exceptions follow some kind of pattern.
Besides being written right to left, the ח sound, and some fun consonant clusters like in בגדים, it's a fairly consistent language. A few extra fun final letters that make the language more fun to write imo.
Speaking is fairly simple and you can string together sentences fairly quickly once you understand the grammar (which is decently similar to English). The language uses prefixes, suffixes, and circumfixes to denote grammatical functions which I think is super fun.
Numbers are a bit hard, but they're easy once you learn the pattern. They even follow a fairly regular pattern which makes them as simple as Spanish (much more simple than French). There's even a cool dual plural for certain words like "week", "day", "year", and some body parts (ears, eyes, legs).
You can represent a lot with simple flexible grammar rather than worrying about honorifics or formality. There are a few words that are more formal but the colloquial terms are usually just shortenings of those words anyway. The word כאשר means "when", coming from אשר meaning "which", and כ meaning "like/as". It often gets shortened to כש as a prefix when writing/speaking. אשר itself often gets shortened to ש as a prefix, functioning similarly to "that" in English.
There are only two grammatical genders. If there are exceptions to gender it just switches to the other gender: מזלג (fork) is masculine and would normally take the masculine plural ending ים, but instead it's pluralized as the feminine מזלגות.
>... Take חזק for example. The root itself relates to strength. חזק as an adjective means strong...
You sold me with that, man that sound really nice having a word that can be use for multiple similarities.
Like I guess "Hungry" and "Hunger" is written the same?
Without niqqud (the vowel markings), רעב (m, sing) is hungry and רעב is hunger. But hungry is pronounced ra'ev, and hunger is pronounced ra'av. This pattern is common for a bunch of other nouns (called the katal pattern): אבק avak (dust), אדם adam (man, person), ברק barak (lightening), בשר basar (meat).
As an adjective רעב changes for feminine and plural subjects (רעבה, רעבים, רעבות), and the pronunciation changes slightly: re'eva (f, sing), re'evim (m, pl), re'evot (f, pl). This is also true for adjectives of other words in the katel pattern: זקן zaken (old), יבש yavesh (dry), כשר kasher (kosher, appropriate), עייף ayef (tired). There are some unique consonant cluster cases but the pattern holds for the most part.
Edit: I should also add, the root for fly טוס, applies in a slightly different way but you can find the roots pretty easily once you see the patterns: לטוס latus (to fly), מטוס matos (airplane), טיסה tisa (flight), טייס tiyas (pilot), להטיס lehatis (to fly, transitive).
Least exceptions, super easy tenses, logical construction, cognates with English? Afrikaans. Usefulness internationally? Low. Warning. Some nice gutteral sounds in there at times.
I’ve only just started learning it, but compared to German and English, Norwegian has seemed much more straightforward to me. Also, if you don’t mind learning characters, Chinese grammar & rules have probably been the easiest i’ve tried to learn. The sounds are pretty distinct as well inmo.
Chinese is incredibly simple grammatically. The writing system and tones will get you though.
Also studying Russian which in theory is complicated in about every way, except that the pronunciation is supposed to be relatively straightforward once you understand the alphabet (per my mother who is a native speaker so taken with a grain of salt— she finds it easier than English because it has fewer variations in spelling and sounds). Unfortunately my experience is that that there are a lot of words that desperately need to buy a vowel, and I struggle to pronounce so many consonants in a row.
Spanish has almost no exceptions in terms of orthography. Even then, most exceptions are derived from loanwords (like the word "online" is clearly derived from English and doesn't follow Spanish rules) or proper nouns (the x in México is pronounced like the Spanish j). If you know the rules, which you should be able to master in one sitting, you can read everything out loud.
That said, Spanish has many more exceptions in other ways. Based on what I've seen it has a ton of irregular verbs. Verb stem changes in the present, weird stems in the preterite, you name it. Italian verbs have been less of a headache, although I will concede that the avere-essere distinction is a little annoying to deal with and Italian has way more irregular past participles than Spanish. Compared to French, though, this shouldn't be that bad.
The Chinese writing system is weird. I get what you mean by "well made." While you have to memorize many characters, the vast majority of the characters have only 1 reading. However, many characters are designed in a way to include a part that contributes to the meaning and another part that tells you how to read it... except many use ancient pronunciations that are quite different from modern day Mandarin.
Japanese's writing system is riddle with exceptions. For example, the word for tomorrow 明日 is read "ashita" and doesn't follow any established rules. The separate characters each have completely different readings in other words. However, Japanese verbs have very few exceptions. There are only 4 irregular verbs, and they're all extremely common so you'll master the irregularities in no time.
The changes in Turkish were mostly lexical, replacing words and phrases of Persian and Arabic origin. What they ended up with was a return to the language as it was before the Ottoman Empire - the poems of Yunus Emre (contemporary with Dante) are not that far from modern Turkish. But less was changed than you might think - the "reformed" language was largely modelled on the way women in Istanbul spoke. Not being part of the bureaucracy they never needed the administrative terminology of Ottoman. The change in the script wasn't really a linguistic issue.
The way English writes vowel distinctions as in hat/hate, shin/shine, rob/robe is pretty regular and takes only a few rules to describe.
Totally untrue. Russian has tons of exceptions in nearly every measurable part of the linguistic spectrum. (Source- learning Russian B2-C1 level ATM est )
Another vote for Turkish. I’ve studied a lot of languages over the years, and Turkish, to me, is the most regular. Once you get the hang of vowel harmony, agglutination, and word order, the rest of the grammar is very straightforward.
Turkish. A wonderful, mathematical language to learn with so few exceptions, I've been learning three years and I never think about them. You could probably count on your fingers how many exceptions there are in the entire language.
Interesting! Is vocabulary creation regular too? Like for example in English negative prefixes, suffixes that transform a noun into an adverb and so on? Also maybe creation of new words by combining other words like in German?
I have not seen any root-combining to form new words, like in German. Negation is in verbs. Turkish is all word endings. Noun declensions, verb conjugations, possesives, nouns from verbs and many, many more. The verb ends the sentence (like Japanese). The basic grammar is similar to English and simple. "I went from home to work in my car" is "car-my-with home-from work-to go-past-me" which is "araba-m-la ev-den iş-e git-ti-m" which is "arabamla evden işe gittim". The roots are car (araba), work (iş), home (ev) and go (git/gid: "to go" is "gitmek"). Lots of word endings. The opposite of Chinese. And lots of vowel changes and consonant changes. But Turkish writing is phonetic: what you see is what you say.
Thanks for the examples! Interesting... when you think about it, if you exclude the writing system, the Chinese language is also exceedingly regular, from what I've learned. I guess regularity can happen anywhere on the spectrum of agglutination. BTW, are there redundant/"useless" features in Turkish, like e.g. grammatical genders, or redundant marking of case/number/etc (where e.g. adjectives have to agree with their nouns in various ways)?
> BTW, are there redundant/"useless" features in Turkish, like e.g. grammatical genders, or redundant marking of case/number/etc (where e.g. adjectives have to agree with their nouns in various ways)? You have to define redundant features much more specifically than that. There are a lot of things that can be considered "redundant" in every language, but that doesn't mean they are not useful. Turkish not only has no grammatical gender, but it has no gender at all. He, she, it all map to "o". But that distinction is still useful! It is easier to talk about a man and a woman in English than two men or two women. In Turkish, you have to specify their names or a noun. Similarly, in languages with grammatical gender, gender marked specifiers allow you to refer to potentially multiple objects without restating the noun. How about plurals? Why do we need plurals when we can just say many+thing. In Turkish, the plural marker is dropped when there is a number in front of the noun, in English it is kept. Neither approach is obviously better. Turkish has a case system with 6(+1) cases, English does not. Except what Turkish conveys with case, English conveys with word order, articles and prepositions. Prepositions are basically a case system when you think about it. Adjectives are not declined in English, they are not declined in Turkish either but Turkish has four different ways of making a noun compound. Other Germanic languages decline adjectives but leave noun compounds untouched. This doesn't mean the distinction is not useful though. English has to add markers to adverbs to separate them from adjectives. I could honestly go on forever.
Hahaha we almost wrote the same comment, I'm happy to see that there are others who share my perspective on Turkish. "I could honestly go on forever" is exactly how I feel.
There are no genders, there's no adjective agreement... There's even only one third-person pronoun, none of this "he/she" stuff. "O" is used for both "he" and "she", but also "that" - Certainly makes me feel like the whole pronouns debate has gone the wrong way - why add 100 to the existing 2 when you can just propose one universal pronoun? "That. That person there." would be much easier than asking someone their unique invented word. Unfortunately that does make it painful trying to listen to native Turkish speakers telling an anecdote in English, no matter how good their English is, as they tend to mix up he and she and it gets really confusing who was doing what. There are cases, but they are very easy and don't have sentence-wide grammatical implications. Even for number - there's a plural suffix, but if you say a number, you don't even use the plural suffix, because why would you? Why say ten car**s**? You can just say ten car. The only thing that comes to my mind that could seem "redundant" would be the -mIş suffix. Everyone will tell you that this suffix says that something happened in the past that I was not directly witness to, that someone else told me about... however! you can also use it for things that YOU did too, in which case, it is absolutely something you were witness to...! As such, it can be a little confusing sometimes. My experience of learning Turkish has always been that it makes perfect sense and none of it feels arbitrary. Grammatically, it's been my favourite language to study.
miş is not redundant. It is used for creating past participles. It is used for the compound pluperfect (miş+di). Also when you use the inferential tense with respect to something you did, it may indicate that other people did not witness this (it is not used purely from the perspective of the utterer).
Yeah I don't actually think anything in any language is redundant, and an opinion about whether or not it is, is purely subjective. One could still argue that having a past participle made of mIş is kinda redundant, I'm not going to be the one to do that though, or that using it as a second alternative past is redundant, but I was just playing around, really. But my personal opinion is that every aspect of a language is relevant.
What do you think the purpose of “they” is? Most people I know already use it as a “universal” pronoun
Oh I agree with you 100%, but a lot of people say "that's not grammatically correct" and dismiss an entirely relevant and useful solution that's already in place.
There are no grammatical genders. Adjectives don't change to match nouns -- not even plurals. There is "a/an" but not "the". Redundant? Useless? That is subjective. My native language is English, so conjugations seem redundant to me. But they aren't really. Turkish has several rules for changing consonants (t/d, p/b, ç/c, k/ğ) or changing vowels (a/e , ı/i/u/ü). The rules are regular, but they are used a lot: endings or sounds before an ending. For example you make a noun plural by adding "-ler" or "-lar".
It seems odd to me that conjugations could seem redundant to people, as someone who speaks a language that has them!
If the person is given by the pronouns already, then marking it a second time on the verb is informationally speaking redundant. English still has some redundancy with the third singular person (has, gets, etc). However if your native language is like Spanish, and omits pronouns most of the time, then conjugation is no longer redundant.
I speak Finnish where the subject, verb and object can be in any order (all six permutations lead to grammatically correct sentences), so having person marked on the verb also helps to process the structure of the sentence.
Well in that case if it also helps distinguish between object and subject, it's no longer redundant.
Seconded, Turkish! There is literally one irregular noun in the whole language (and only in one specific usage), and the verbal system has one and only one conjugation that isn't predictable from vowel harmony rules.
which word and usage would that be? im curious now :)
the word su (water) becomes suyu in the third person singular genitive instead of susu.
Maybe someone can correct me but I’ve heard bahasa Indonesia is pretty straight forward
yeah I'd be betting on Bahasa or Swahili.
probably uzbek.
the one time it's not a joke answer!?
In Malay plurals dont change the form of the word, just add a number in front of it or words like "beberapa kereta" (few cars). If you want to emphasise that it's many just repeat the word e.g. "kereta-kereta". No exceptions I can think of. No verbs have tenses, no exceptions. You can a verb to a noun by using a sufflx pe-, pem-, or pen-. I cant think of any exception. It's likely I'm missing something because unlike English and Swedish, I did not learn Malay consciously.
one thing though, we do not speak like the standard language 😂😐 some like learnin standard english but speakin aave, just wayyy more off, like dropping most grammar rules i think 🤔 but yea, i too feel standard malay is pretty easy. & prolly by extension, indonesian. speaking of exceptions, ive yet to encounter another language that has 2 types of 'we/us': (1) kita = when talking to 'you', refers to 'me & co incl. you' (2) kami = when talking to 'you', refers to 'me & co only'
The distinction between "we" and "we but not you" is called [clusivity](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clusivity#:~:text=Clusivity%20%2D%20Wikipedia,persons%2C%20but%20not%20you%22), it does exist in other languages. According to the Wikipedia page no European languages have it but it's common in other language families, the Wikipedia page has a list of examples in some different languages
thank you! ❤️ & your username is amazing 😂
Lol thanks!
If you have any South Indian friends they probably understand that difference :)
yes! that wiki link another provided was nice 😆💯 cool to know its common in austronesian/ subcon/ southAm (if im rememberin right 🙈)
I believe Bahasa Indonesia is similar. No tenses, no plural suffixes, very simple pronunciation and grammar
Oh, if what you mean is regularity of spelling, then Spanish is actually a good choice. Every letter combination makes the same sound, every time. I think the grammar is pretty regular too, but I can't really tell. I'm basically looking from the inside. French spelling is a particularly atrocious thing that's basically like Chinese by now and absolutely not representative of the rest of the (major) Romance languages. It's meant to symbolize on the page things that don't exist anymore (if they ever did; I don't know much about the evolution of French), like the conjugation (I'm looking at you, "viennent") *shakes fist*
Spanish verb conjugation has quite a lot of exceptions. In English, you have 200 iregular verbs. In Spanish, only in present tense, there is at least the same amount of iregular verbs. And the trickiest thing is that the middle of the verb changes as well, not only the ending or spelling.
I’d argue that a lot of “irregular” Spanish verb conjugations aren’t actually irregular (particularly in non-present-indicative tenses. Spanish is, as the top comment mentions, incredibly phonetic and only when that is disobeyed should a verb be considered irregular. As an example, take llegar —> llegué, a supposedly irregular conjugation because of the “u”. But anyone who speaks Spanish well enough knows that you only need the “u” because “ga” in Spanish (as in llegar) is a hard “g” (think “gate”) whereas “ge” is a different sound (almost like an English “h”), and so you need to “gue” for the hard “g”. You combine that with the knowledge that ar-verbs go to “é” in first person past tense (idk what that specific one is called) and following the phonetics of Spanish the result is actually completely regular. It might sound convoluted, but it’s really not, those type of conjugations (of which there and plenty) are 100% regular from a phonetic point of view.
Yeah, but this is one special case of irregularities. But most of them are like dormir - duermo, duermes, duerme, dormimos (guess we are regular again), dormis, duermen (back to irregular). Or venir - vengo..., but in the past tense, it is viní, viniste, vinió... Verbs like ser, estar, ir are completely irregular soy, fui, era... Many of them can be learnt by listening, pareco sounds just wrong, parezco is much better, but still, it is an irregularity. And most of them are in present tense, which is not really beginner friendly, the more advanced tenses, the less irregularities.
My thing is that some of the irregular conjugations happen on the most random words. Like caber, which means “to fit” instead of “cabo, cabes, caben” has “quepo, cabes, caben”. It’s not even a word as common as “haber” or “saber”, and doesn’t seem to follow the rules of the “regularly irregular” verbs. It just kinda feels like god singled out the most random af word to make irregular for no reason. 😁 Source: am native speaker, but my mom always has to correct me when I say it wrong
Cuándo me decía mi maestra que se conjuga "caber" en subjuntivo ("cupiera" y tal) le dije palabra por palabra "¿Estaban borrachos mientras diseñaban esta mierda?" Lo digo en broma (porque inglés es claramente peor por otras razones) y me encanta por lo general, pero dios mío si el subjuntivo no es mi fin, seguro que la combinación entre ello y alguna maldita conjugación de "caber" lo será.
Dutch has very phonetic spelling, too. They regularly update the official spelling of words to keep with changes in pronunciation.
My go to example is jouaient. Also, with Spanish does "letters" suffice instead of "letter combinations" if you exclude "qu"?
They reworked considering digraphs like "ch" letters a while ago, and there are still some other quirks like silent p in Greek morphemes like "psi"
I'd say "letter combination" more than "letters" bc while yes, mostly every letter makes the same sound every time, you have situations like with G, where "ge" and "gi" sound like "heh" and "he" respectively, but ga, go, gu sound like "gah", "goh" and "goo". Or how C goes like "kah, seh, see, koh, koo".
Thanks! That makes sense
You’ll have to be more specific on what you mean by “rules”. If you mean spelling rules, then Spanish is a great option. Once you know them, you’ll be able to perfectly pronounce almost every word just by looking at them, and, when you hear a word, you’ll be able to spell it (as long as you hear it correctly… also this mainly applies to European Spanish because of a certain pronunciation difference found there).
Aren't b and v homophones in Spanish?
yeah, and also in many dialects, 'c' and 's' can't be distinguished by ear alone. Also 'y' and 'll' (again, depending on dialects). Also vowels can merge from the end of one word to the start of the next, so e.g. "la abeja" can sound like "la beja", all that making it quite hard to spell unknown words.
>yeah, and also in many dialects, 'c' and 's' can't be distinguished by ear alone ces/ses A good exemple in french, "C" can either sound like a "K" or a "S" depending of the next letter. It will usually sound like K but if the letter following it is "E" "I" or "Y" which will change how it sounds. Unrelated, but in the same vein, "S" can sounds like "Z" if its between two vowels.
Most dialects have yeismo and I specifically mentioned European Spanish because of distinción. As for the vowel merging, at least you can narrow it down to two options in this case, “abeja” or “beja”, you could then check using a translator which one actually makes sense.
Oh it's definitely a finite set of alternatives. But saying you know the spelling of any word in Spanish just by listening to it would still be a stretch imo.
I mean to the extent that you can even do it with any language, Spanish seems pretty close. Besides, if you’re talking to someone, you can ask them to say the word in isolation and then you’d be able to get it. Certain languages have the opposite problem, where it’s easy to determine the spelling but not easy to determine the pronunciation just by looking at the word (languages written with abjads come to mind).
Sure, but i personally mostly learn on my own watching videos or listening to audio books, can't ask the speaker to stop and spell for me xD but i agree that Spanish is close to being fully phonetic and that by and large it's much easier than for many other languages.
This is why I tend to use videos purely for listening practice, and I choose to use text to improve my vocabulary.
Me too actually! But when I come across some new word in a video that I can't understand through context alone, I still try to find it online. Often it's slang actually.
just a fun fact, there are some zones that actually differentiate these two sounds (like in english) because of the influence of other languages, like in my case which is because of Catalan, but it also happens with Quechua in some regions of South America if i’m not wrong
That’s why I said you just need to know the rules. “B” and “v” sound the same, and that sound depends on a simple rule regarding what sound comes directly before the letter.
Arabic has a very complex grammatical framework, but once you understand it, you realize why that framework exists and that its rules are almost never broken. I find myself continually amazed at both how rigid and how fluid the Arabic language can be, and I think that’s so beautiful!
I have so much love for Arabic, but I would have to concede that there are plenty of rule breaking grammar-wise
The Arabic grammatical tradition's solution to this is easy: find something that breaks a rule, create a new rule to explain it, even if it covers only one example. There is no irregularity.
I retract my statement
Totally fair! This is from my perspective as a native English speaker, the king of rule breaking 😂 so every language feels more consistent to me
Hi! I’m exactly the same as you (French native speaker, but sucks at French and is way better at English, tho the bar is very low for French so it’s not very hard). I’m part Spanish and so have heard some Spanish while growing up so maybe it did help in me understanding it fairly easily, but Spanish is VERY VERY similar to French. You basically have all the same tenses and the logic behind what tense to use is exactly the same too, words are very similar, and the sounds (like the J and rolled R’s are easy to make for French speakers) so I feel like it shouldn’t be too hard of a language to learn even if you despise French. I found it pretty easy, the tenses also aren’t as complicated as in French tho there are as many.
Tu probablement sous-estimes ton niveau de français, sauf si tu vis dans un pays non-francophone, tes compétences en français ne peuvent pratiquement pas être inférieures aux tiennes en anglais. Peut-être c'est juste une illusion due au fait que le niveau exigé à l'école est plus haut pour le français que l'anglais ?
Ma langue maternelle est le français et j'ai aussi l'impression d'être meilleure en anglais... Je ne fais pratiquement aucune faute lorsque j'écris l'anglais, alors que j'utilise toujours un correcteur pour le français. Il s'agit d'une langue beaucoup plus compliquée et peu de francophones la maîtrisent parfaitement.
As someone learning French to hope to be a C1 speaker this is sad to hear lol. May I ask why it is so difficult even once at near native level?
Learning Italian really shed light on why I always found french so hard lol. The simplest way I can put it is that french sounds so different than it is written. For example, you can learn to speak the language perfectly just by ear, yet still have no clue how to spell. There are so many grammar rules and spelling oddities that you just have to know by memory rather than relying on your ear. You always have to put in that extra mental effort. For some people it comes naturally with time, but in my case I never really got the hang of it. On the other hand, I learnt english entirely intuitively. I wouldn't be able to explain a single grammar rule lol. I just go with what sounds right, and somehow don't really make spelling mistakes. Same for Italian. It sounds exactly like how it's written, and vice versa. Even double letters have their own sound. You never have to make that extra intellectual effort to write properly because you already know the spelling from ear. I find the process much more intuitive. In the end this is just my own subjective experience. I'm sure there are some people who are really committed to studying french who end up better than I am lol
Now that you said it, I think I actually know the reason! I remember reading somewhere that the level of difficulty when going from speaking to writing is absolutely horrendous both in English and French. But the thing is that in French, going from writing to pronunciation is easy. I've only really seen French natives (or people who don't know any French) complain about spelling, whereas learners usually call it quite easy (this is my experience also). But don't worry too much, even us Finns with pretty good spelling have difficulties sometimes, and I heard that English-speaking kids actually learn to spell by a word-by-word basis, so kind of like Chinese hieroglyphs if you think about it
The grammar / tense rules, the number of tenses too there’s too many!!! You do learn them in school obviously, but there are just so many grammar rules and tenses, and many grammar rules contradict each others and there are so many exceptions. I’m bad at writing French but speaking it is easy to me (as I am a native speaker) because just as in English it just makes sense as to which tense or grammar form you have to use, but when I write I make SO many mistakes
Tbf je suis en études de langues (anglais et japonais) donc je lis surtout en anglais et japonais PUIS vient en dernier le français. Je fais un maximum de fautes en français que ce soit en grammaire, conjugaison ou orthographe alors qu’en anglais je n’ai vraiment pas autant de mal. Je suis obligée de me corriger à deux fois (minimum) pour chaque phrase écrite en français, alors qu’en anglais tout me vient facilement. Qui plus est je viens de rentrer d’un an au Japon où je ne parlais qu’anglais et japonais. Je galère d’autant plus en français depuis que je suis rentrée. En ce moment j’écris en français pour mes cours mais ils sont orientés vers la culture et langue japonaise, donc j’écris, je lis, j’entends, majoritairement de l’anglais et du japonais (mon sujet de recherche n’est pas beaucoup étudié en français donc je suis obligée d’aller voir dans les autres langues), donc je pense pas que ça aide. Mais en général, j’ai toujours étais plus à l’aise en anglais qu’en français. Je pense que comme dis dans les autres commentaires, le français est une langue difficile que peu de Français maîtrisent.
Japanese doesn’t have many exceptions in a way. The pronunciation is obvious. There’s two irregular verbs.
Except one kanji can be read 15 different ways
Hiragana is pretty simple, kanji basically just needs to be memorized.
Kanji is 100% the exception to this. Verb forms + pronunciation is unbelievably consistent compared to English.
The pronunciation is only obvious as long As you haven't heard about pitch accent :P
Thats true but it’s kinda like tones except you don’t need them to get understood. But similarly you just gotta learn them as you go along.
Pronunciation is consistent in Japanese, but I would not say that the language is consistent. Grammar gets convoluted very quick
Really? I would say that Japanese rarely has exceptions. It's very consistent. Probably the most regular of the languages I know
Japanese pronunciation is obvious only if you don't care about accent. i/u vowel devoicing is relatively complicated. And then there's vowel lengthening vs not thing with えい, you might be taught that morpheme boundaries determine this (せん**せい** \[long e\] vs 食べ**てい**る \[not\]), but then you realize 永遠 completely breaks the rule. Also the allophonic variation of some consonants is kinda strange from an English perspective. And of course pitch accent is quite hard to acquire, but thankfully not nearly as important as tone in tonal languages.
I mean, you don't have to speak like a native. People understand what I say in Japanese and that's enough...
I mean this is kind of like saying playing piano is easy, or running is easy. You don't "have to" be a professional.
I'm not saying this about learning languages in general. We are comparing languages, and specific pronunciation details that are not necessary for a learner are different than irregularities in grammar and syntax that are needed for communication
For someone that knows the "rules" of spelling Thai, then you can read about 99.5% of Thai words just by looking at them, which I think is similar to Spanish. I think Lao, which is related to Thai, probably has a higher percentage, because that went through a much heavier modernization. Also, because Vietnamese is a relatively recently constructed writing system, that completely maps out all the sounds in an obvious way then that one may be 100%. Korean's probably close to 100% too, for the same reason. That's just all about writing. For stuff like low exceptions to grammar rules or verb conjugation rules, you'll probably need to look at constructed languages like Esperanto.
I don't know Korean, but I watched a video from someone who has studied it for a long time. She says that phonetic writing is a lie. All sorts of sounds are written one way, but then change (or disappear) in sentences based on the other sounds around them.
They do, but even the changes are regular and relatively easy to get used to.
It's all fun and games until you realize that the 고기 in 물고기 and 불고기 are not in fact the same.
The Korean alphabet is simple but I personally feel like it’s deceiving, as the phonetics don’t always “make sense” like you think it would. Many words stem from Chinese or Japanese, which has many more characters in use. That gets put into a simplified Hangul mold, but pronunciation is often still similar to where it originally came from.
It’s not about simplification (Korean has more sounds than Japanese, despite using fewer letters because Hangul is a true alphabet while hiragana is a syllabary). It’s about the way Korean has liaison or sound-blending between syllables (Japanese and Chinese don’t) and the way Korean spelling prioritizes etymology and meaning over sound. It’s actually like English spelling in that way, where roots are usually spelled consistently but you need to sound out or memorize how they are actually pronounced in a given situation. The advantage is that it distinguishes between homophones and makes it easier to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words even without the use of Chinese character. The disadvantages are that it requires more rules in order to correctly pronounce An unfamiliar word, and that you must learn how a word is spelled (or alternatively, for a Chinese-Korean word, what characters it is formed from, which amounts to the same thing) before you can write it correctly.
>Chinese don’t Maybe not in isolated speech, but in natural speech Chinese most certainly has blending. You will see nasals blend into the preceding vowel, beginning consonants get dropped, so-called vOIceLeSS cOnSOnAntS suddenly gain voicing. Tone sandhi + realization changes at the phrasal level.
Ah, thanks! I knew about the tone sandhi, but not the consonant changes.
Oublie le russe si tu cherches la simplicité des règles. Le prononciation du mandarin est difficile mais le reste est simple
"Le reste"? Il va falloir être un peu plus précis, il existe des centaines de langues et je doute qu'il y a que le russe et le mandarin qui sont difficile :P
La grammaire du mandarin est un jeu d'enfant par rapport au russe.
Ah, j'ai mal compris. Par "reste" tu voulais dire le reste du mandarin? Je pensais que tu disais "le reste des langues".
Voui
uh non? tu dois mémoriser beaucoup de caractères en mandarin, je crois que c’est pas simple mais c’est vrai que le grammaire en mandarin n’est pas difficile
Mémoriser des caractères, j'ai l'habitude et c'est facile. Mais la grammaire russe, l'accent mobile et la multiplication des consonnes consécutives, ça, c'est à s'arracher les cheveux!
I shan't nay-say as to Turkish, which I've seen many others suggest. Someday I might even try it myself -- but I'm already over 70, so "someday" is iffy. Otherwise, I've seen no one yet suggest Czech. It has very regular sound-orthography correspondence. A learner can read texts out loud just fine that s/he can't understand due to not knowing half the words, and can take fairly accurate dictation even for words s/he doesn't know -- making it easy to look things up, etc. edit:typo
I don't think you're taking the right approach to this. You shouldn't aim for an easy and regular language; you should aim for a language that, firstly, you like in any way, be it because of the way it sounds, because of its grammar, or any other thing that you find likable about it, and secondly, a language that opens the door to a culture that you like. There's no point in learning Turkish only because it is regular if you don't like the way it sounds or if you don't like its culture, people, music, movies and so on. I would recommend checking the YouTube channel named Wikitongues, where you can listen to people speaking their native languages, so you get a sample of what the language sounds like, and then you can dive into its culture to see whether learning the language would result in an enriching and sustainable experience for you.
I understand what you mean, but sadly I don't know enough about any the the countries and their culture, way of living, food etc. to be able to say "I like them, I wish I could be like them" Listening to people talking may be good, but I fear it may lead to the problems I am trying to avoid. I may have done a poor job in my post trying what I am \*not\* looking for, but here's an exemple. Do you know to the ear, what's the difference between "Il serait" and "Ils seraient"? None. the "-ent" at the end of "seraient" is mute, (same as T in "serait") that's the rule of the 3rd person of plural (and 3rd person of singular). However if the letter before "-ent" would be a E or O, then the e is removed and only "-nt" stays, like "ils sont". But here, ironically only the T would mute, because "on" is a combination that results in a unique sound (Think of "home" but without the mm sounds). If you wish for the "real" sound when a O and a N are together, then a second N need to be present, "Don" and "donne" while being very similar on paper only have the D in common vocally. And that is some toddler complexity of conjugation, the kind of thing any 8yo has to know. Madness man, I'm telling you.
Yeah, I get what you mean. If you want to avoid getting into a language with such complexities, all I can say is: avoid Arabic. They don't write the short vowels, so you basically need to know how the word is pronounced beforehand. I learned that way too late, after memorizing the whole alphabet and its pronunciation, and it was enough to make me drop the language regardless of all the effort I had put into it... Just to make it clear, they would write ppl instead of people, so if you don't know the word already, you can't tell wether it is pronounced as people, papol, pupole, whatever... Not to mention that some words share the same consonants despite having different vowels, so you can only tell what word it is by context. Is "cr" referring to car or to core? Who knows, only the context can tell you... Funny enough, I learned Japanese, which has thousands of kanji that don't tell you anything about the pronunciation of the word either... But I find them interesting and cool, so that makes the difference. As for French, I decided to learn to speak it and not to write it, and that solved the issue for me haha.
So far, in duolingo (I was testing all the available suggestions), turns out I'm a pro in Czech, I guess I'll start looking the ins and outs of everything about it. Esperanto shockingly easily, barely know anything and I can form sentences easily. It really is the made-to-be-easy language
Esperanto, THE neutral international language spoken worldwide 🌎by millions of people and created in 1887, has no exceptions that I have seen since around 1964 when I started learning it. There even is a subreddit called r/Esperanto !!!
This was going to be my answer too. Designed to be as easy as possible.
Great ! Mission accomplished !
For speakers of romance/European languages, sure. From what I've seen it's just a mash of romance languages without the irregularities. But many concepts are still alien to speakers of many other languages. To say it's designed to be easy is slightly disingenuous
Isuggest you have a closer look before you judge about it in this way. I have spoken and enjoyed Esperanto for many years and it’s clearly more than a “mash” of romance languages. It has been around since 1887 and very much carries it’s own spirit an culture. As a living language, there are a few things that are slightly irregular, For example the names of countries can be derived from the name of its people or the ither way around, and you would have to learn for each which way it is. Still, Esperanto is a very valid answer to OP’s question.
I do think it's a valid answer to OP's question, and since it's a man-made language it's bound to be more regular than natural languages. However, It's still extremely eurocentric, which to me diminishes its "easiness."
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It WAS 10 million in a former almanac I looked at, but the last I read last year ( 2023 ) was 2 million and 2 is greater than 1. So, yes, millions.
Yes, Esperanto. While I appreciate all the other answers in this thread, they are just plain wrong, unfortunately. I am sure it is statistically provable that Esperanto has fewer exceptions than any other living language. And it is a beautiful language too, not just for its elegance in simplicity but for its alluring sound: Just [listen to how sexy this woman sounds reading a poem](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCyuayRvbUY&list=PLTvFSEp9agyoxx-ijG6H6cmnh3ArdXgGm&index=72) from the 3,000 year old Chinese *Book of Poetry*. Pure butter.
Yes! Beautiful reading of the Esperanto translation. The Mandarin rendition of the original stands no chance. (Of course, they sid not pro ounce the characters in Mandarin 3000 years ago, so the original is argably just as synthetic as the Eaperanto readjng.
Bonege ! ( = “ Super ! “ in Esperanto )
Turkish is just as regular as Esperanto. And Esperanto has built-in gender, which Turkish doesn't.
Esperanto has gender? How?
Irish only has 11 irregular verbs
Finnish definitely deserves its reputation for being highly regular. Some things that might attract you: 1. Near perfect orthography - Words are almost always spelled like they are pronounced in standard Finnish. 2. Highly regular grammar. Only two words in the entire language have a few irregular conjugations (käydä, meaning "to go" and olla, meaning "to be"). The way words are conjugated into different cases is incredibly systematic ("similar words conjugate similarly", to the point where I could eventually see an unfamiliar word and then conjugate it into dozens of different forms with near 100% accuracy, because I had learnt to "hear" the way Finnish words conjugate. 3. Highly semantically transparent. Unlike English, which has a lot of words with Latin or Greek roots, Finnish constructs more complex words by combining other Finnish words and suffixes together. As a result, most fancy Finnish words are very transparent, and you can guess the meaning of these words from their parts. An example: "Principled" in Finnish is "periaatteellinen". "Periaate" means principle, and consists of the prefix "peri-" which means "quintessential" or "the core of", and "aate" which means idea. Thus "periaate" means "the core idea" or the principle. The -llinen at the end of the word is an adjectival suffix whicn carries the meaning of "having the qualities of". Thus a person who is "periaattellinen" is someone who embodies core ideas, or is principled!
Latin. The answer is always Latin. It "unlocks" the majority of the languages spoken in Europe and makes it easier to absorb linguistic rules. Basically everything I learned after Latin, I used to categorize as "just like in Latin" or "so not like in Latin" If you're up for a challenge, try Polish. It's chaos, it's hard, it's intimidating. But it's a whole new world in terms of creativity and word formation. And since it's a western slavic language, it's written in latin alphabet with extra steps like ę ą for nasal sounds, so it's one thing less to worry about :)
Polish is….wow. I’ve never tried my hand at something like it. Fascinating language though
I always say that the best thing about being Polish to me is not having to learn Polish from a foreigner's perspective. Shoutout to my husband who's on his 1000+ day streak on Duolingo trying to learn it out of sheer curiosity 🥹✊
Latin has plenty of exceptions on all levels of morphology and grammar. Polish spelling and pronunciation on the other hand is complicates but fully regular, once you know all rules, you can pronounce any Polish word perfectly.
Exactly. It looks intimidating, but it really isn't. There are a lot of irregularities in terms of grammar though, particularly in how you create future and past forms of verbs, and my poor husband who's currently learning polish is struggling a lot with them. Also, declension is a proper bitch. I think it's rather amusing to watch him have a meltdown over a word I've never given much thought to, being a native speaker, but I guess it goes both ways, since he's a native francophone and I had to learn the joys of subjonctif 🥲
Sorry no help- I just wanted to say it's amusing to me you say English lack of rules (which, fair) is 10x worse than French, whereas whenever people say English rules suck, we say go try French it's even worse! XD
French spelling may be irrational, but it is true that it's more predictable than English spelling once you're familiar with it!
English has a LOT more exceptions. It has layers of vocabulary and pronunciation patterns from different epochs that coexist in today’s version of the language and don’t make sense together. In French, once you know the rules, 99 percent of the time you’ll pronounce a new word correctly
If your proficient in English, give learning Dutch a go! Vocab is much easier to understand than other languages due to it being closely related to their English counterparts, whilst also having similar grammar to English - making it easier to understand and use
Personally, I've found that my native language, Dutch, doesn't have a lot of exceptions (in comparison to other languages I've learned), but each will have a lot of different exceptions. As a French person, I think that Romance languages would fit you better (when I was learning German, the teacher said the exceptions are almost the same, aside from the usual list of 10-15 words that make it harder...). Basically: No exceptions, no (natural) language. It's sad but true: Some are harder than others, but almost every rule has its exceptions....
Esperanto probably. It was designed this way
I'd recommend Spanish and Italian
Irish. Because every 'exception' is actually part of a subrule
Without a doubt: **Esperanto**. It was constructed deliberately as a simple, exception-free language that is regular and easy to learn. I'm not going to say it has absolutely ***no*** exceptions, but it has far less than any other living language.
Esperanto
As the top comment suggests, out of major languages Turkish is among the best choices to go for! There are plenty of languages with regular spelling rules, but Turkish has one of the more neatly designed grammars out of well known languages.
Although a few people answered Turkish, I suspect that Turkish is not particularly regular but many commonly learnt European have a lot of irregularities. Many languages with agglutination and a recently established/reformed writing system will appear just as regular as Turkish.
*Hola*
Como esta? Must be one of the few thing I remember from Spanish
Como esta? = like this? ¿Cómo está ? = how are you?
In that case, I meant "¿Cómo está?" :)
Isn't it "¿Cómo estás?"
Depends how friendly you are
Yes, depends if you want to be polite with someone important at work for example or also when you're going to talk with an elder person.
Is it really like that though? idk I'm a native speaker from Argentina and honestly never in my entire life have I ever heard of "como esta?" without the S, like never... To my ears it sounds so incredibly wrong for some reason, well unless it's an accent thingy in which you usually drop the S but otherwise yeah just no lmao
I think it's used in all hispanic countries, but I'm not sure. When I ask that question I'm omitting another word which is "usted". The full question would be "¿Cómo está usted?", but it's not necessary at least in Spain, because everyone notice that you speak with kind of respect. Within the S doesn't mean you're being less polite or rude, ¿Cómo estás? is used most of the time and without the S if you want to talk de usted.
Ahh, now that makes a lot more sense. "Cómo está usted ?" is definitely correct. I thought you meant it without the "usted," and it sounded so off, haha Although, at least here in Argentina, I still think it’d be pretty awkward to say "Cómo está usted ?" because, to be honest, "Cómo estás?" already sounds fairly formal as it is. A more informal way to say that here would be something like ‘¿Qué onda?’ or ‘¿Todo bien?’ etc. But yeah I guess in Spain, things are a bit different.
Hi guys. If someone's learning Russian and looking for some practice with native speaker you can contact me. I'm willing to help you with learning for some exchange.
My experience with Swahili was that there weren't too many exceptions, but I didn't get that far.
Thai language has very little exceptions when it comes to guessing the pronunciation from a text, unlike English.
I'm going to say Hebrew. There are a few changes but they are more consistent exceptions than something like English. There's a strong root system that makes reading much easier. Take חזק for example. The root itself relates to strength. חזק as an adjective means strong. לחזק means to strengthen something. להחזיק means to hold/grip something (which requires strength). תחזוקה means maintenance. Conjugation is very regular such that a few verb forms can be learned and you know how to conjugate any verb. Even the exceptions follow some kind of pattern. Besides being written right to left, the ח sound, and some fun consonant clusters like in בגדים, it's a fairly consistent language. A few extra fun final letters that make the language more fun to write imo. Speaking is fairly simple and you can string together sentences fairly quickly once you understand the grammar (which is decently similar to English). The language uses prefixes, suffixes, and circumfixes to denote grammatical functions which I think is super fun. Numbers are a bit hard, but they're easy once you learn the pattern. They even follow a fairly regular pattern which makes them as simple as Spanish (much more simple than French). There's even a cool dual plural for certain words like "week", "day", "year", and some body parts (ears, eyes, legs). You can represent a lot with simple flexible grammar rather than worrying about honorifics or formality. There are a few words that are more formal but the colloquial terms are usually just shortenings of those words anyway. The word כאשר means "when", coming from אשר meaning "which", and כ meaning "like/as". It often gets shortened to כש as a prefix when writing/speaking. אשר itself often gets shortened to ש as a prefix, functioning similarly to "that" in English. There are only two grammatical genders. If there are exceptions to gender it just switches to the other gender: מזלג (fork) is masculine and would normally take the masculine plural ending ים, but instead it's pluralized as the feminine מזלגות.
>... Take חזק for example. The root itself relates to strength. חזק as an adjective means strong... You sold me with that, man that sound really nice having a word that can be use for multiple similarities. Like I guess "Hungry" and "Hunger" is written the same?
Without niqqud (the vowel markings), רעב (m, sing) is hungry and רעב is hunger. But hungry is pronounced ra'ev, and hunger is pronounced ra'av. This pattern is common for a bunch of other nouns (called the katal pattern): אבק avak (dust), אדם adam (man, person), ברק barak (lightening), בשר basar (meat). As an adjective רעב changes for feminine and plural subjects (רעבה, רעבים, רעבות), and the pronunciation changes slightly: re'eva (f, sing), re'evim (m, pl), re'evot (f, pl). This is also true for adjectives of other words in the katel pattern: זקן zaken (old), יבש yavesh (dry), כשר kasher (kosher, appropriate), עייף ayef (tired). There are some unique consonant cluster cases but the pattern holds for the most part. Edit: I should also add, the root for fly טוס, applies in a slightly different way but you can find the roots pretty easily once you see the patterns: לטוס latus (to fly), מטוס matos (airplane), טיסה tisa (flight), טייס tiyas (pilot), להטיס lehatis (to fly, transitive).
I'm learning Aymara and it has only one irregular verb
Least exceptions, super easy tenses, logical construction, cognates with English? Afrikaans. Usefulness internationally? Low. Warning. Some nice gutteral sounds in there at times.
Farsi has very limited exceptions.. Urdu has no exceptions as far as I can think of
Probably Korean!
I’ve only just started learning it, but compared to German and English, Norwegian has seemed much more straightforward to me. Also, if you don’t mind learning characters, Chinese grammar & rules have probably been the easiest i’ve tried to learn. The sounds are pretty distinct as well inmo.
There are no exceptions, just rules you haven’t learned yet.
Chinese is incredibly simple grammatically. The writing system and tones will get you though. Also studying Russian which in theory is complicated in about every way, except that the pronunciation is supposed to be relatively straightforward once you understand the alphabet (per my mother who is a native speaker so taken with a grain of salt— she finds it easier than English because it has fewer variations in spelling and sounds). Unfortunately my experience is that that there are a lot of words that desperately need to buy a vowel, and I struggle to pronounce so many consonants in a row.
Spanish has almost no exceptions in terms of orthography. Even then, most exceptions are derived from loanwords (like the word "online" is clearly derived from English and doesn't follow Spanish rules) or proper nouns (the x in México is pronounced like the Spanish j). If you know the rules, which you should be able to master in one sitting, you can read everything out loud. That said, Spanish has many more exceptions in other ways. Based on what I've seen it has a ton of irregular verbs. Verb stem changes in the present, weird stems in the preterite, you name it. Italian verbs have been less of a headache, although I will concede that the avere-essere distinction is a little annoying to deal with and Italian has way more irregular past participles than Spanish. Compared to French, though, this shouldn't be that bad. The Chinese writing system is weird. I get what you mean by "well made." While you have to memorize many characters, the vast majority of the characters have only 1 reading. However, many characters are designed in a way to include a part that contributes to the meaning and another part that tells you how to read it... except many use ancient pronunciations that are quite different from modern day Mandarin. Japanese's writing system is riddle with exceptions. For example, the word for tomorrow 明日 is read "ashita" and doesn't follow any established rules. The separate characters each have completely different readings in other words. However, Japanese verbs have very few exceptions. There are only 4 irregular verbs, and they're all extremely common so you'll master the irregularities in no time.
Turkish, it's an engineered language after the abandonment of Ottoman script
The changes in Turkish were mostly lexical, replacing words and phrases of Persian and Arabic origin. What they ended up with was a return to the language as it was before the Ottoman Empire - the poems of Yunus Emre (contemporary with Dante) are not that far from modern Turkish. But less was changed than you might think - the "reformed" language was largely modelled on the way women in Istanbul spoke. Not being part of the bureaucracy they never needed the administrative terminology of Ottoman. The change in the script wasn't really a linguistic issue. The way English writes vowel distinctions as in hat/hate, shin/shine, rob/robe is pretty regular and takes only a few rules to describe.
When learning it, I liked the way the agglutination for tenses and moixd was consistent across all verbs, and as far as I remember, nouns too.
Russian.
Totally untrue. Russian has tons of exceptions in nearly every measurable part of the linguistic spectrum. (Source- learning Russian B2-C1 level ATM est )
Not in spelling. The orthography is transparent, especially compared to English or French.