People almost always ask the exact same question:

“Is Afrikaans hard to learn?”

If you’re an English speaker, I have some fantastic news for you.

Afrikaans is widely considered one of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn.

Because both languages belong to the West Germanic language family, they share a massive amount of vocabulary and history. In fact, many people who start studying Afrikaans are shocked by how quickly they can start having basic conversations.

While every foreign language takes time and effort to master, Afrikaans skips a lot of the frustrating rules that make other languages difficult.

I’ll explain exactly what makes it so easy, a few things you might find tricky, and what you should expect as a beginner.

Why it’s an easy language to learn

Because Afrikaans and English are essentially linguistic cousins, they share a lot of “cognates.” Cognates are words that sound similar and mean the exact same thing in two different languages.

When you start learning Afrikaans, you actually already know hundreds of words without even trying.

Here’s a quick look at some basic Afrikaans vocabulary that will look incredibly familiar to you:

The grammar is super simple

If you’ve ever tried to learn Spanish, French, or German, you probably remember spending hours memorizing verb conjugations and struggling to remember if a table was masculine or feminine.

You can throw all of that out the window with Afrikaans.

Here are three reasons Afrikaans grammar is a beginner’s dream:

• No grammatical gender: There are no masculine or feminine words. The word for “the” is simply die.
• No tricky verb conjugations: Verbs don’t change based on who is doing the action. The verb stays the exact same whether it’s “I”, “You”, “He”, or “We”.
• Easy past tense: To make almost any verb past tense, you just add the prefix ge- to the verb and use the helping verb het (have).

Look at how simple it’s to use the verb speel (to play) in Afrikaans compared to other languages:

Spelling and pronunciation make sense

English spelling is notoriously terrible. Words like “through”, “tough”, and “though” look similar but sound completely different.

Afrikaans is a phonetic language. This means that once you learn the rules of the alphabet, you pronounce words exactly the way they’re spelled. There are no silent letters hiding at the end of words to trick you.

The only slight hurdle for English speakers is mastering a few new sounds.

You’ll need to learn how to roll your “r” slightly. You’ll also need to learn the guttural “g” sound, which is pronounced in the back of the throat (similar to the “ch” in the Scottish word loch).

Once you get your tongue used to making these sounds, reading out loud becomes incredibly easy.

A few things that make it challenging

While Afrikaans is arguably the easiest language for an English speaker to pick up, it does have a few unique rules that take some getting used to.

The double negative

When you want to say a negative sentence in Afrikaans (like “I don’t know”), you have to use the word nie (not) twice.

The first nie goes after the verb, and the second nie gets placed at the very end of the sentence.

The sentence structure (word order)

Word order in Afrikaans can sometimes feel backwards to an English speaker.

Afrikaans uses a specific word order rule that teachers often refer to as STOMPI. This stands for Subject, Verb 1, Time, Object, Manner, Place, Verb 2.

If a sentence has a helping verb and a main verb, the main verb gets kicked to the very end of the sentence.

(Literally: I will tomorrow the book read).

Regional variations to know about

When learning Afrikaans, it helps to know that the language sounds a bit different depending on where you are in South Africa or Namibia.

The most noticeable variation is Kaapse Afrikaans (Cape Afrikaans), which is spoken widely in the Western Cape region around Cape Town.

Kaapse Afrikaans is heavily influenced by English and older Southeast Asian languages. Speakers of this dialect frequently “code-switch,” seamlessly mixing English and Afrikaans words together in the same sentence.

If you’re a beginner using a textbook or a standard app, you’re learning Standard Afrikaans. This is understood perfectly everywhere. However, if you travel to Cape Town, don’t be surprised if the local slang sounds a bit different than your study materials!

Summary of the learning experience

So, is Afrikaans hard to learn?

Absolutely not.

Thanks to its lack of verb conjugations, no grammatical gender, and thousands of familiar words, English speakers have a massive head start. While the double negative and word order will require a little bit of brainpower, the learning curve is extremely gentle compared to almost any other language.

If you’ve been thinking about learning Afrikaans, there’s no better time to start.