What is the Easiest Spoken Language to Learn?

Interesting article in Quora:

What is the Easiest Spoken Language to Learn?
Steven Grimm, uses words for communicationSuggest Bio

882 upvotes by Gregg Galyean, Franck Dernoncourt, Jess Lin, (more)

The Defense Language Institute, one of the USA's top language schools, categorizes languages into four difficulty levels based on the amount of class time they've found it takes native English-speaking students to reach a particular level of fluency. This concerns learning the language as a whole, including the ability to read books, write essays and so on, so not just the spoken language.

• Category I languages, 26-week courses, include Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. 
• Category II, 35 weeks, includes German and Indonesian 
• Category III, 48 weeks, includes Dari, Persian Farsi, Russian, Uzbek, Hindi, Urdu, Hebrew, Thai, Serbian Croatian, Tagalog, Turkish, Sorani and Kurmanji 
• Category IV, 64 weeks, includes Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, Korean, Japanese and Pashto

Imagine 26-weeks and you can read books, write essays and so on, so not just speak the language!