In an increasingly globalized world, many people are willing to expand their professional and cultural possibilities by learning new languages. But the challenge to start from scratch in an unknown language is scary and consequently many people shy away from that. With that in mind, we separated some languages which can be easier to learn for Portuguese speakers.
Language Families
An important concept to define easier-to-learn languages is the language family. A linguistic family is a set of languages that originated from one same ancestor, that is, a language which, over time, gave rise to several others. Languages from the same family have several characteristics in common and therefore it is easier to learn them when we already speak one of them.
For Portuguese speakers
Portuguese is part of the Indo-European family, more specifically, the Romanic branch. Other Romanic languages with expressive number of speakers around the world are Spanish, French and Italian; since they have many common points with Portuguese, these languages usually are easier for a Brazilian to learn. But we should also consider other factors: English, for instance, has a widely spread and strong cultural presence, being disseminated in movies, songs and series, to name a few. Thus, most people have already had some contact with English in their lives, which may facilitate the learning thereof.