Where can I learn Afrikaans for free online?

Why is Afrikaans considered by some to be easier than Dutch to learn for native English speakers?

• The Telegraph had an article about the easiest foreign languages for a native English speaker to learn and Afrikaans was at the top of the list. Dutch was fourth behind French and Spanish. I've, also, come across several websites that have stated the same thing or something similar. The Telegraph Article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationpicturegalleries/9722196/Easiest-foreign-languages-in-pictures.html?frame=2418200 Why is Afrikaans considered by some to be easier than Dutch to learn for native English speakers? Is it due to the "de" and "het" or other grammar issues? Are there more English words used in Afrikaans? Did Afrikaans phonetically evolve in a way that makes it closer to English?

• Answer:

  I'm an Englishman (as in from the U.K. not an Anglophone South African) married to an Afrikaner and have learned Afrikaans. I'm certainly not 100% fluent but I can have conversations with Afrikaans speakers who won't realize I'm not South African. I was pretty hopeless at languages at school, I studied French and German but do not have any degree of proficiency with them today. I would say Afrikaans is a pretty easy language to learn. Historically it's a pidgin language spoken by native African and Malay slaves and passed on to the children of Dutch colonists by the servants who looked after them. Thus it's significantly simplified from the original Dutch. The biggest hurdle is probably pronunciation since Afrikaans uses sounds not present in English (the 'g' and some vowel sounds like 'u' and 'ui') and others not present in my English accent (I have learned to do the Afrikaans 'g' but cannot roll an 'r' for the life of me). Afrikaans grammar is extremely simple compared to many other languages, Dutch included. There are no gendered nouns, for example. I think the single biggest thing that makes it 'easy' is that you do not conjugate verbs at all in Afrikaans. Imagine if English used constructions like "I is", "You is", "he is", "We is", "They is" for every single verb! In some languages such as French this is incredibly complicated and there is no regular system that allows you to work out how to conjugate a newly encountered verb. Afrikaans simply does away with the concept altogether. Afrikaans phonetics is extremely regular so that once you learn the rules of how phonemes are represented you can read and write just about any word phonetically. Tenses are simpler than English and represented using regular rules concerning word order rather than changing the words themselves. That means in practical terms you don't have as much vocabulary to learn as once you know a root word you can figure out how to use it in different grammatical contexts. Finally, colloquial Afrikaans employs a lot of English loan-words and even entire phrases. The vast majority of speakers are able to understand English even if they're not confident speaking it so if you get stuck for a word you can often just drop in the English term and be understood.