Duolingo is a language learning tool that offers more than 35 language courses for English speakers to learn. The ease of learning a language through these courses on Duolingo will vary from person to person, depending on a range of factors. These factors include the number of prior languages already learnt, access to learning resources and interest in each language.

Below is information on the easiest language to learn on Duolingo, and the answer may surprise you.

I have used Duolingo for a number of years, across several languages, including German, Spanish and Russian. I have also spent some time on Duolingo using German (not my native language) as my ‘base language’, to learn Spanish. This is quite an experience and helps to improve both my Spanish as well as my German skills at the same time.

This post will look specifically at the easiest language course offered on Duolingo for native English speakers to learn. While this might be useful if you are not a native speaker as well, you may find that other courses are easier for you because of your background in other languages.

Alternative posts will give you information if you are wondering how effective Duolingo is for learning a language, or what you should do to continue learning a language after completing Duolingo.

What Is The Easiest Language For A Native English Speaker To Learn On Duolingo?

For native English speakers, the easiest language on Duolingo is actually Esperanto, an artificial language created in 1887. This is because of the way the language was created, making it quite easy for native English speakers to learn.

Esperanto was created with the intention of becoming a universal language that could be quickly learnt and spoken as the lingua franca (the main language used for communication across different people groups), of the world.

Because of the intended use of Esperanto, it was designed to be easy to learn, and it shows. From a native English perspective, the language is influenced by languages including Latin, German, French and Russian. This means that for a native English speaker, there is no new alphabet to learn, and phonetics is already known to a large extent.

In some ways, Esperanto could be seen as a simple language, as there are no genders for nouns, and no cases to worry about as well. Even better, there are no odd plural forms of nouns, which can be confusing and difficult to learn quickly in other languages.

Esperanto strives to be as simple as possible, which means that verbs are also simple. Esperanto only has three tenses, past, present and future, with the same verb conjugation changing only to show a different tense, without having to worry about anything to signify the subject (I, you, he/she/it etc).

It’s starting to sound like the perfect language isn’t it? This is what makes Esperanto the easiest language to learn on Duolingo!

How Long Does It Take To Learn Esperanto?

It is difficult to quantify exactly how long it will take to learn a language because there are so many factors. This post explains this concept more fully, but for the purpose of discussing Esperanto, the short answer is that everyone learns differently and an hour of study will be spent differently amount different learners.

The US Foreign Service Institute gives a list of the number of hours needed to master a language, ranking languages in order of difficulty. The easiest category gives a guide of 600 – 750 classroom hours. Unfortunately, the Foreign Service Institute does not include an estimate of the hours required to learn artificial languages.

From looking at various sources, it appears that the time taken to learn Esperanto varies between claims that it takes 10% of the time taken to learn Spanish (one of the easiest category languages), which would be 60 – 75 classroom hours. Other sources claim variously that it took 6 months – 2 years for fluency using self-paced learning.

One anecdotal source claimed that using 15 minutes per day on Duolingo, they from complete beginner to B2 fluency (C2 being native-level fluent). Perhaps the most reasonable source claimed it took about 300 hours of self-paced learning.

All of this is unfortunately anecdotal, however, it is important to note that these times were all based on self-paced learning rather than classroom hours, but were all quite a lot faster than the 600 – 750 classroom hours for the easiest languages listed in the Foreign Service Insitute.

Presuming that an hour in the classroom is a more efficient method of learning, the indication is that learning Esperanto will take significantly less time to learn than other languages.

Is It Worth It To Learn Esperanto?

There are some who would prefer to learn a language that is at least considered the official language of a country. There are thought to be about 2 million Esperanto speakers in the world, but they are not living in one specific area of the world.

Because Esperanto is not exclusively spoken in any part of the world, you may find that its use is limited if you were out travelling. It is not quite the same as learning German or French where it is fairly obvious where you could travel in order to practice the language or immerse yourself in the German or French culture.

Once you have gained some mastery in Esperanto, you will probably start looking for some language-specific media to consume. Although there is some, you may find it somewhat lacking compared to the variety and availability in other languages.

While there are some books in Esperanto as well as at least two magazines that are regularly published, this is sorely limiting compared to other languages. Some movies have been made specifically in Esperanto, and there is some music in the language as well.

Despite this, there are definitely resources you can use to learn the language and to enjoy media using this language. If you have your mind set on learning Esperanto, all power to you.

What Is The Easiest Non-Artificial Language To Learn On Duolingo?

Although Esperanto is the easiest language to learn on Duolingo, I feel that this is somewhat of a cop-out answer. It is likely not the answer you are looking for, and you are possibly wanting to know the easiest non-artificial language that could be learnt using Duolingo.

Using the US Foreign Service Institute, there are 9 languages in the easiest category (600-750 class hours). The easiest languages to learn are Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Swedish.

This means that any of these languages should be roughly equally as easy for a native speaker to learn.

I do not believe it is a coincidence that all 9 of these languages are available on Duolingo. This means that any of the above-mentioned languages are theoretically equally as easy to learn on Duolingo.

If all of these languages are equally as easy to learn, you will then need to consider which of these languages you are most interested in learning. Luckily, you can dip your toe into any and all of these languages before deciding.

Each language contains different features that you may find more or less difficult than others. For example, the pronunciation of words in Spanish is fairly straightforward, while you may find the pronunciation of Dutch or Norwegian words more difficult.

If this is your first language learning experience, I would recommend that you consider starting with a Romance language first, such as Spanish, Portuguese or Italian.

The reason for this is that Romance languages are usually easier to learn and contain more similarities to English.

Although French and Romanian are also Romance languages, they are slightly more nuanced and contain extra difficulties with pronunciation and letters. Because of this, unless you are set on learning one of these two languages first (motivation dramatically increases learning effectiveness), I would recommend avoiding these languages in the first instance and coming back to them when you have some experience learning languages.

How Long Will It Take To Learn A Language Using Duolingo?

Now that you know which language is the easiest to learn on Duolingo, and you have decided the language you will learn, you may want to know how long it will actually take to learn a language. Because you are looking at one of the easiest language courses on Duolingo, the time to learn will be relatively short. I saw relatively because learning a new skill, particularly one as immersive as a new language can still be quite long.

Unfortunately, the amount of time it will take to learn will vary depending on several factors, including the effectiveness of the time you spend learning. The US Foreign Service Institute states it will take 600 – 750 classroom hours to learn one of these languages.

This means that through non-classroom learning it will likely take longer. If you want to find more information about the time taken to learn languages and how to effectively use your time, I recommend reading this post here.

If you are set on learning a language, being lured into learning just the easiest language may not be the best way to go. If you heart isn’t in it, the ease of learning is not going to be as present as it may be for other languages. You could also consider the most spoken languages in the world as this may also influence your decision.

It’s important to note that it’s never too late to learn a new language, no matter how old you are. You can learn languages at home, using various techniques that are more traditional, as well as utilising conversational AI technology such as ChatGPT in order to help drive your language learning further.

Further Information: How To Make The Most Out Of Learning On Duolingo

You may be wondering if Duolingo is useful for learning a new language. In short, I would completely recommend using Duolingo for any language, particularly if you are not sure if you wish to actually learn the language and are still deciding.

While using Duolingo for language learning is a great first step and shouldn’t be discounted there are ways of making sure that you are effectively using your time on Duolingo. One of these is to take the vocabulary you are learning on Duolingo and create your own vocabulary list that you are revising outside of Duolingo.

Ways to practise vocabulary include writing words, both individually (don’t forget the article words!), as well as together in simple sentences. This will help you solidify the sentence structure of the language, which Duolingo is teaching. There are also forum posts, stories and podcasts available through Duolingo that you can look into that will also help you learn your language using more natural contexts rather than quiz-style questions.

Although Duolingo is a great learning tool, you may want to consider investigating other methods of language learning to work alongside Duolingo. There is some further information you can find on Duolingo and language learning below.

If you are wondering how much of a language you can learn through Duolingo, I recommend reading further on this post here. There is also further reading about languages that may not be the easiest to learn on Duolingo, but can be considered hidden gem languages that can still be learned through the app.

Duolingo is a useful tool, particularly for learning beginner vocabulary, which includes many common words in your target language. This makes Duolingo a particularly powerful early tool. You can read more about other apps to help with vocabulary learning, as well as the process of learning vocabulary, here.

You may wonder if features such as Premium Duolingo is necessary to make the most out of Duolingo. While this section provides some insight, there is some further reading that you can do to understand if Duolingo is good for learning a new language.

Besides the nitty gritty of learning a language, using Duolingo and its courses, or through other methods, you will also need to keep in mind the importance of learning the culture of speakers of your target language too. While you will learn some of the culture of the language naturally, it may be useful to be thinking about this throughout your language-learning journey.