The State Department has categorized languages based on how long it takes to gain proficiency. Category I languages are the easiest. Category I languages include languages that are most closely related to English. Since English is a Germanic language, almost all of the Germanic languages are easy to pick up because the grammar is similar, and basic, everyday English is mostly Germanic in vocabulary. It also includes the Romance languages since English absorbed a lot of French vocabulary while England was under Norman rule and used Latin root words to form new words during the scientific revolution. That resulted in English vocabulary being almost 60% Romance, but many of those words are not used in everyday conversations. German is unique in being a Germanic language that is classified as Category II instead of I because German's grammar is more complex. Other languages in Category II include languages that are not related to English, but they're pretty simple in structure. I've heard that Indonesian is easy to learn. I've studied Swahili for a bit, and it's a relatively basic language. Foreign Language Training - United States Department of State If you're looking to work for the government in an international job, these are the critical languages. Among the listed languages, Portuguese and Romanian should be the easiest for a monolingual English speaker to learn. The next easiest would be Swahili, Malay, and Haitian Creole. Critical Languages | nsepgov If you're looking to work domestically for the government, Spanish is the easiest critical language for the FBI. FBI — All About FBI Linguists FBI — FBI Offers Job Opportunities for Foreign Language Speakers
The list isn't exhaustive, so if you want to know which living language is most closely related to English, it's Frisian. But, I don't think too many employers are looking for Frisian speakers. It's only spoken by a half a million people.
Back in the day, the Air Force used the Defense Language Aptitude Battery to determine your ability to learn a foreign language. They would then use the score to determine how tough of a language you could get. As I recall, Russian and Arabic were at the top of the scale, and Spanish was at the bottom. But just getting was tough, no matter what language you got. (Mluvil jsem česky.)
"Easy" languages can be difficult and "difficult" languages can be easy. It definitely depends on the person. And exactly what is meant by fluency. It's theoretically possible to have the vocabulary and skills to negotiate a business contract easily while being completely unable to navigate ordering at a restaurant.
The thread is about jobs. Can you perform the job? The federal government is usually looking for working proficiency. If you're discussing taxes with the general public, do you know business and financial vocabulary? If you're performing clandestine operations, do you have a native level of fluency that won't make you stand out? There's no point in arguing what an individual might find easier or harder. The Foreign Language Institute systematically collected data on the average training times needed to get English speakers to working proficiency. In the natural sciences and social sciences, if we focused on every individual situation, we would get nothing done.
Hebrew has a reputation for being a hard language to learn but the Israelis have honed teaching Hebrew as a Second Language to a fine art. I think Japanese would be very difficult as would be the "tonal" Chinese languages for the exact opposite reason. I think Arabic would be especially hard to learn to read and write but there's a surprising number of cognates between Hebrew and Arabic. It's just endlessly interesting, though, isn't it? One poster here undertook Navajo. That would be...hard.
One problem with learning Arabic is that it's a family of languages that aren't necessarily mutually intelligible, rather than a single language spoken from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf.
If I ever decide to make aliyah I will spend a year learning modern Hebrew first. Not likely to happen, though, at my age.
Although that does raise the question whether North American Jews often purposefully retire to Israel.
It's not unknown. The Government of Israel promotes retirement there through the Jewish Agency. It makes sense in a way; American and Canadian retirees usually have a passive income stream that contributes to the economies of wherever they live. There are also darker demographic reasons for the policy; remember, Jews and non Jewish descendants and spouses of Jews may emigrate to Israel and receive immediate citizenship. Not so with Arabs.
Aliyah from North America remains unusual outside of the most Orthodox communities. There is some debate as to whether Israel would really like North American Jews to descend (well, technically "ascend") en masse to Israel. A sudden multimillion person increase in the country's population might be destabilizing. The U.S. and Canada are historically remarkably Jew-friendly and those who have made their lives here for generations are not quick to give all that up. But there are hard-core Zionists who demand that every Jew "come home" and are pretty quick to condemn those who choose to remain in "Babylon".
I have known a handful of Liberal Jews who moved there and lived for some time only to return to the U.S. permanently. North American Jews really don't like living in a theocracy. There are other cultural differences as well that make living there more of a challenge than you might think.
According to nefesh b nefesh there were 500 olim retirees from North America and the UK in 2019. Not unknown but not very common either.
