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It’s NOT correct that you will understand Norwegian and Danish if you learn Swedish. It’s an overstatement. You’ve made a similar statement before about Norwegian and it’s quite irresponsible to give learners false expectations.

In writing it will help a lot, but you will not understand spoken Danish just by learning Swedish. Spoken Norwegian will be easier to comprehend (mostly Eastern Norwegian that matches written Bokmål), but still you will not automatically understand everything. (Referring to the huge variations/dialects in spoken Norwegian and not only spoken Norwegian that matches written Bokmål)

You’ve earlier stated that when you learn Norwegian you get “Swedish and Danish almost for free because they all understand each other”. A more realistic statement would be that you get a “discount” if you already know a Scandinavian language and want to learn another one, because the languages are very similar and you will already know a lot when you start.

I would love to hear your take on spoken Danish being hard to understand even for native Swedish speakers and vice versa, the many Norwegian dialects or the fact that the majority of Norwegians speak in a way that doesn’t match written Bokmål. If we want to understand each other we still need time and exposure, even though it might be easier than between other languages.

Kind regards,
Native Swedish speaker, who speaks Norwegian and used to learn Danish.

As Romanian, I like your enthusiasm about Romanian but six months is a bit short for a native English speaker, especially one with no prior exposure to other foreign languages is short.

Romanian has many tenses (especially for past), declensions,  definite artcle at the end of the word which.may be a problem.

But thank you for the presentation!

I learned Swedish fluently in one year.

Yes, I did move there as a 9-year old, but it was easy. What I learned from learning Swedish in one year is that learning any language would be easy, if I simply wanted to.

Actually, Italian “e” and “o” can be an open or closed vowel, but it is obviously a thousand times easier than English. Plus, on many words they don’t agree on which are open and closed vowels.

as an indonesian, i wouldn't recommend indonesian. yes, you probably can learn the formal language easily. but the version you'll find on social media, its informal form, is much harder. they use so much slang, so many abbreviations, and context-dependent jokes that they can't even explain why something is funny 😭 i only realized this about my own language after learning korean and japanese. but still i have so much respect for anyone who wants to learn it!

I tend to like your content and even have your Japanese book, but I would say you are making absolute statements that are at best relative. The question is, WHO is learning that language? In my Japanese class, the Chinese are running circles around me because of their familiarity with kanji. I'd like to see them do the same thing in Spanish, when I have learnt Latin and French at school. Like I said, it really depends on your background.

I enjoy the unique facts per each language that I didn't know before.

Ca persoană care invața Limba Română și Limba Indoneziană, acest clip îmi face fericit

I'd add in Hindi as a curveball. It's usually put somewhere in the higher difficulty rungs, but I found it much easier to learn than expected. It is very phonetically consistent, with only a small number of exceptions. The script looks harder than it actually is - you can learn how it works in an afternoon, and it doesn't take long to embed. Most of the letters (syllables, really) you see in the script are common and there are only a handful of weird ones you only see rarely, but are of less importance to a learner. Grammatically, it is fairly straightforward without anything massively challenging. Another bonus is that codeswitching/Hinglish is very common, so if you forget a word, just use the English one! The biggest challenges for me are the formality levels - these are a whole other ball game in Indian languages compared to, say, Spanish - and some unusual phonetic sounds we don't have in English.

Second time this happens: the promised attachment (Language Dufficulty Guide in this case) never arrives but you start to get a lot of emails from Olly. Why is this?

Yeah, it totally depends where you are coming from. As ever, with language learning it’s instructive to go to the 4 FSI rankings for difficulty for English learners in order to properly gauge any achievement. For example, entry level 1 (easiest) languages - French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish - can be seen as a relative linguistic stroll in the park. Moving into the foothills with level 2 (moderate) languages - German, Swahili, Indonesian, Malay, Haitian Creole - and you’re noticing things getting trickier. Level 3 (hard) languages - Russian, Greek, Hindi, Polish, Turkish, Czech, Hebrew, Tagalog, Thai - take us into pretty rarefied air where oxygen may be required for some. When you get to level 4 (hardest) - Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean - you are in the true Himalayas of languages. Arabic could be a K2 and Mandarin an Everest! In my own case, I learned 3 languages, all level 1 (French, Spanish, Italian) and the truth is whenever I meet fellow native English speakers who have surmounted level 3 / 4 I always feel a bit of a linguistic fraud in their presence. 3 level 1’s don’t seem to equal 1 level 4. Utmost respect to those English speakers who become truly fluent in Arabic, Mandarin et al. ✊

It talks about languages with an aspect easier than English. And also the Swahili and Italian sections fall under the same category of pronunciation-which Indonesian is the same when it comes to phoneticity. Swahili and Romanian are hard grammar-wise

Romanian is easy to learn? Rly? Romanian grammar is a nightmare. Noun and adjective cases, tricky plurals, many verb tenses (half of which are hardly used), the subjunctive (hello, Spanish) and exceptions, EXCEPTIONS everywhere...

From the phonetical point of view, Spanish is easier than italian. In the standart form (the one spoken in the North-Center of Spain) we have only five pronounced vowels corresponding to the five written ones. Only three consonants have different sounds ( "c","g" and "r" ), but the rules of their pronuncation are clear, and the "h" is not pronounced, except in the combination "ch" (which sound exactly like in cheese in English). Except for the "h", every letter is pronounced. Our Academy decided tu supress  a lot of "y", so we write psicología /sicología (both ara correct), wich simplifies the orthography, and the use of graphical accents marks the stress of the word.

6:52 I thought you are still talking about Indonesian here because we also say "lebih"+adjective to say comparisons. But in informal Indonesian we use adjective+"-an" in the similar way to English "-er".

As a French person, I English is nowhere near we thinking is the easiest language and much harder for us to even speak correctly in

I'm not surprised to see Swedish on this list more or less because my cousin didn't start learning it until her mid 20s and me in my early teen years. Unfortunately I don't get much exposure whereas she now lives there and took Swedish for immigrant courses. One day I hope to continue on my journey learning it half way across the world. Met some Swedes that came into my workplace couple days ago, it takes me a second to recognize it and speak after having last lived there 10 years ago and also helping guests in Spanish at the same time.

Didn't knew Brian Johnson did the languages sidequest too, next to the 'living forever' mainquest.

My issue with reading unfamiliar words in Italian is occasionally stressing the wrong syllable which makes the pronunciation sound ridiculous.