I was reading through "The easiest language in the world?"

And it got me thinking, - what makes a language easy?

Some things are obvious:[LISTO]
No genders, - learning the nouns are hard enough no reason to learn genders for them as well
Use the verbs the same way (i.e. not like I _am_ but you _are_
The pronounciation of a word must follow it's spelling
No irregular verbs and only one way of making different tenses (like -is, -as, -os, -i, -u and -us)
Pronounciation must be "easy" (which of course differs depending on which language/sounds you know already)[/list]English:
One gender: YES
Use verbs same whay: YES (With the exception of "to be")
Pronounce like spelling: NO
No irregular verbs: NO
Same way of making different tenses: NO
Pronounciation must be easy: Depends. For Danish people it's not to hard

Danish:
One gender: NO
Use verbs same way: YES
Pronounce like spelling: NO (better than English, but not much I think)
No irregular verbs: NO
Same way of making different tenses: NO
Pronounciation must be easy: Guess not for must foreign people. We have a few more vowels. Æ and Å are fairly easy to learn for most, but Ø is giving most people a hard time.

Please add your thoughs
And fill out the tabel for the languages you know.

A regular grammar is crucial!!!
Amike,
Harri.

DaDane:Use verbs same way: YES (With the exception of "to be")

Actually, verbs aren't used in the same way eg: I run, he RUNS, or in the changing of tense in: I rAn, I departED.

French:
One gender: NO
Use verbs same way: NO
Pronounce like spelling: NO
No irregular verbs: NO
Same way of making different tenses: NO
Pronounciation must be easy: NO

So french doesn't seem to be easy xD

DaDane:I was reading through "The easiest language in the world?"

And it got me thinking, - what makes a language easy?

Some things are obvious:[LISTO]
No genders, - learning the nouns are hard enough no reason to learn genders for them as well

I dunno about this one. It depends on what the rules are. E.g. Russian and German both have three genders. But, in German it's catch as catch can, really. Russian, on the other hand has basically three rules which cover probably over 90% of all nouns: Ending is a consonant, it's masculine; if it's -o, -e, or -mya, it's neuter; if it's -a or -ya (other than -mya) it's feminine.

gaeilge (irish)
one gender: NO
use verbs the same way: not sure
pronounce like spelling: NO WAY, JOSE
no irregular verbs: NO
same way of making tenses: not sure
easy pronunciation: OMG, JUST LOOK IT UP. IT'S HORRENDOUS.

nun[/quote]Ha!!

Well, actually, there are only about eleven irregular verbs in Irish. The rest fall under one of two types, basically one syllable roots and two syllable roots.

They do work the same throughout.

The pronunciation is very much like the spelling. It`s just that there are only five or six sounds that actually match the English, and the spelling rules are very different.

But it`s still really hard.
The rules may be very regular, but there are many rules. The language just handles things differently... very differently.

For example the Verb/Complement-Object/Subject phrase order is very rare in world languages. As is declining prepositions.

So here we find that regularity does nothing for us!

DaDane:And it got me thinking, - what makes a language easy?

I think it's important to distinguish:
[LISTO]
small difficulties that mostly annoy beginners.
and long term difficulties, even after years of studying the language.[/list]Let's take the case of the Esperanto accusative for example. It's fair to say that it's a difficulty at first when learning Esperanto: many beginners tend to forget it, or they need to think about it when speaking. But it's not that difficult since it's regular. So I classify it as a small difficulty for beginners.

On the other hand, being able to tell whether a verb is transitive or intransitive is more of a long term difficulty in Esperanto, since you need to learn it for each verb (even if it's obvious for many of them).

Small difficulties are very obvious to beginners and may make the language look hard for beginners but they are not very important in the end. They sometimes even make the languages easier to study in the long term: the Esperanto accusative actually helps listening comprehension in my opinion.

Long term difficulties on the other hand often don't seem to be a big deal for beginners but only show their ugly face later!

English seems fairly easy for beginners because it does not have many small difficulties. But it has many long term difficulties in my opinion (lots of idioms, difficult listening comprehension, irregular grammar or lack of). So English is not as easy as many beginners think it is.

To your list of things that make language hard or easy to study, I would add:

Ease of vocabulary learning

Learning the vocabulary is probably the harder thing in learning a language.

Esperanto words pezo, peza, malpeza are obviously easier to learn than their English equivalent weight, light, heavy. I don't speak Chinese but from what I understand, Chinese has fairly regular rules for building vocabulary.

Listening comprehension

Ability to read and understand spoken words can be quite different. English scores badly at ease of listening comprehension I would think. English words are often short without much redundant information. A bit of redundant information helps a lot to recognize the words. Adding plural to adjectives for example in Esperanto is (mostly) redundant but helps to recognize sounds. I studied Italian far less than English but I find listening comprehension easier in Italian than in English. Ranking languages with their ease of listening comprehension is hard though because it can be subjective and because it depends a lot on your mother tongue.

Complex writing system

A small alphabet (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic...) is certainly easier than the thousands of Chinese ideograms or Japanese kanjis. I don't think that the presence of Latin diacritics really matters. Some say that Esperanto accents (ĉĝĥĵŝŭ) make it hard, but I fail to see why. How long does it take to learn 6 accents with regular pronunciation? 1 or 2 minutes? Esperanto diacritics make writing Esperanto prettier in my opinion.

Amount of idioms

English also scores badly here. It has many expressions where knowing the definition of each word does not help to understand the whole expression or sentence. And this is a real difficulty because looking it up in the dictionary may not help.

Mutating words

Words can mutate in some languages depending on numbers (regular plural form in -j in Esperanto), functions (accusative in Esperanto), or other context.

English scores fairly well: words are immutable except for their singular vs plural form. And plural form is mostly regular: add an -s most of the time, even if there are exceptions.

French and Italian are also fairly OK. They have more rules than English for plural forms with some exceptions but I don't think it's too irregular.

Nouns and adjectives can mutate based on their gender though in both French and Italian. It's a small difficulty at first, but in the long term, it helps listening comprehension in my opinion.

German and Latin have complex mutation rules based on function (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, ablative) and they have different groups of mutations. It takes a while to learn and get used to it, but in the long term, it may actually also help listening comprehension.

In Breton (as in other Celtic languages), the first consonant of words often changes depending on the word before it (article, preposition...) or gender. I'm beginning to study Breton and I find it to be a real difficulty. The Breton word tad ("father") for example becomes ma zad ("my father"), da dad ("your father") and it gets more complex than that.

But all this complexity and diversity is what makes languages fun to study

I agree with Dominique. Although when it comes to overuse of idioms I'd like to add 'Chinese' because they also have many idioms.

Esperanto
-one gender: yes
-use verbs the same way: yes
-pronounce like spelling: yes
-no irregular verbs: yes
-same way of making tenses: yes
-easy pronunciation: yes and no. There are some marginal 'clusters' of sounds which can be unfair on learners, even if English also has these, most English speakers learn these throughout a whole childhood.
-ease to learn vocabulary: yes and no. There is the question of verb/noun/adjective roots which throw learners.
-easy listening comprehension: yes
-easy writing system: yes
-lacks commonplace complex idioms: yes
-easy/lack of word mutation: yes (easy)

Chinese
-one gender: yes
-use verbs the same way: yes
-pronounce like spelling: not really
-no irregular verbs: I highly doubt it
-same way of making tenses: no
-easy pronunciation: no, unless you have a computer in your head that handles tones for you
-easy to learn vocabulary: yes and no. Vocabulary is fine as long as you can associate the tones and characters with the word. E.g. 'ni hao' is easy to remember, but 'ni3 hao3' is harder and 你好 is hardest.
-easy listening comprehension: I really can't answer for this one. Chinese is stressed evenly, but the tones can be hard
-easy writing system: no. But it is probably the coolest and prestigious (as in you are blessed to be able to read it due to the literature knowledge recorded in it) writing system around.
-lacks commonplace complex idioms: no
-easy/lack of word mutation: yes (lack of)

HTML
-one gender: yes
-use tags the same way: yes, except with CSS/Java
-pronounce like spelling: no
-no irregular verbs tags: no
-same way of making tenses: there is only the 'imperative' tense in HTML, so I guess so.
-easy pronunciation: for the most part. I still have trouble with "a href=".
-easy to learn vocabulary: if you speak English you aren't learning anything
-easy listening comprehension: yes
-easy writing system: yes
-lacks commonplace complex idioms: yes
-easy/lack of word mutation: yes (lack of)

Well I hereby declare Esperanto the easiest on the list.

ceigered:
HTML

-widely spread: yes

qwertz:

ceigered:
HTML

-widely spread: yes

good point, HTML is probably THE most widely spread 'language' ever at the moment.