For Spanish speakers, the easiest languages to learn are the Romance languages (the languages that evolved from Latin).
That’s because Spanish is a Romance language. So, the other Romance languages are in the same language family as Spanish, and they have lots of vocabulary words that are similar to Spanish, in addition to similar grammatical structures.
Alongside Spanish, the family of Romance languages includes Portuguese, Italian, French, Romanian, and Catalan, and a few others that are less widely spoken.
Therefore, the easiest languages to learn (for Spanish speakers) are Portuguese, Italian, French, Romanian, and Catalan.
People usually don’t start learning five new languages at once, so you might be wondering what is the easiest language to learn when you are a native Spanish speaker.
This becomes a bit more difficult to determine because the difficulty levels are fairly similar, and there are additional factors that depend on the individual student, such as their affinity for the cultures of the countries that speak these languages.
Perhaps you love Brazilian music (like Samba or Bossa Nova), Italian Opera composers (like Puccini, Verdi, and Donizetti), or French fashion brands (like Dior, Chanel, and Yves Saint Laurent).
The first case might make Portuguese easier for you to learn, the second case could give you extra motivation to learn Italian, and the third case might inspire you during French classes.
These subjective factors can play an important role, depending on the individual. But here, let’s focus on objective factors in our search for the easiest language for Spanish speakers to learn.
There exists an objective metric to measure how similar two languages are in terms of their vocabulary. And, as you can imagine, memorizing new vocabulary words is a big part of learning a new language.
To see how similar two languages are in terms of their vocabulary, linguists calculate a number called the lexical similarity coefficient.
The possible values for this coefficient range from 0 to 1. A value of 1 would mean that the two languages have a complete overlap in their vocabulary; a value of zero would mean that the two languages have no words in common.
| Language Pair | Lexical Similarity Coefficient |
|---|---|
| Spanish-Portuguese | 0.89 |
| Spanish-Catalan | 0.85 |
| Spanish-Italian | 0.82 |
| Spanish-French | 0.75 |
| Spanish-Romanian | 0.71 |
The largest lexical similarity coefficient between Spanish and the other major Romance languages is 0.89 (and it is between Spanish and Portuguese).
So among the major Romance languages, Portuguese is the closest to Spanish in terms of vocabulary.
Spanish nouns have grammatical genders (either masculine or feminine). Portuguese, French, and Italian also have the same two grammatical genders as Spanish. But Romanian has kept the three grammatical genders that existed in Latin (masculine, feminine, and neuter).
Given that Romanian has also borrowed some Slavic vocabulary words in addition to its Latin-based vocabulary words, it is probably reasonable to say that Romanian is not the easiest language for Spanish speakers to learn.
French has some rather difficult pronunciation rules. It is less of a phonetic language than Spanish or Italian, meaning that the spelling of French words is less closely aligned with their pronunciation (lots of silent letters, and so on).
So French is probably not the easiest language for Spanish speakers to learn.
Catalan is rather close to Spanish (it’s a language that resembles both Spanish and French). But Catalan is less widely spoken than the other Romance languages, so there are fewer opportunities to practice the language (particularly if you do not live in Europe).
That leaves Portuguese and Italian as the two possibilities for the easiest language to learn when you are a native Spanish speaker.
Between the two it is very close, and it will depend on the affinities of the individual learner. But for most Spanish speakers, the easiest language to learn is probably Portuguese.
See our lists of the thousand most common vocabulary words for Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, and Romanian.
See our language comparisons of Spanish and French, Spanish and Italian, or Spanish and Romanian.