An agglutinative language starts with a word root, and creates new words by “gluing” small, meaningful parts (prefixes or suffixes.)

An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) remain, in every aspect, unchanged after their unions.

Additionally, English is moderately analytic, and it and Afrikaans can be considered as some of the most analytic of all Indo-European languages. However, they are traditionally analyzed as fusional languages.

An example of an isolating language is Chinese, with almost no morphology at all. But English is also relatively isolating compared to other European languages.

Since Japanese cannot be easily proven to belong to any language family, most scholars consider it a language isolate. The only languages that Japanese is related to are the languages spoken in Ryukyu islands lying South–Southwest of Japan, but the linguistic affiliation of the Ryukyuan languages is not known either.

An extinct language is one that has no speakers or is no longer in use. Latin is one of the most popular dead languages still in use today. Other examples of dead languages include Sanskrit, Biblical Hebrew, Middle English, Pali, and Armaic. Hebrew is an example of a revived language.

Russian is rather a synthetic language, not analytic, and being a synthetic language it is flective, not agglutinative, which means that it uses a lot of prefixes, suffixes and flections and it can express in one word what analytic language like English has to use three words for; but unlike agglutinative languages.

Latin, Spanish, German, Greek and Russian are synthetic languages.

There are, for example, languages that are completely analytic meaning that they do not use any kind of inflection (e.g. Mandarin Chinese) but on the other hand, there is no completely synthetic language (although some come pretty close to that).

Therefore, Modern English is mostly an analytic language. Modern English has far fewer inflections that almost all other Indo-European languages, such as Spanish, German, and Russian.

Examples of fusional Indo-European languages are: Sanskrit, Pashto, New Indo-Aryan languages such as Bengali, Hindustani, Kashmiri, and Punjabi; Greek (classical and modern), Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Irish, German, Faroese, Icelandic, Albanian, and all Balto-Slavic languages.

English is an analytic language. All languages, however, tend to move slowly from synthetic, to analytic. English started as a synthetic language with a lot of inflection. Slowly, it dropped the inflection and started using word order as a means of distinguishing the meaning.

Analytical Grammar teaches English grammar, punctuation, and usage. This innovative and logical method is not only extremely effective, but makes learning grammar fun. Analytical Grammar is an easy-to-follow, step-by-step approach that will prepare your student for more strenuous high school and college-level work.

So, generally speaking, analytic languages would be easier to learn for speakers of analytic languages, and synthetic languages would be easier to learn for speakers of synthetic languages (all other factors being equal, which is, unfortunately, an unrealistic situation).

Indo-European languages

In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone). They are very highly inflected languages.

The underlying cause of many of the differences between the languages is their typology: Swahili is a polysynthetic language, English is an inflectional language.

Isolating, which is the term you were looking for to describe Mandarin, is the extreme end of the morphemes/word axis, meaning that words are composed of single syllables. On the other extreme of the axis is polysynthetic, where a single phonological word contains multiple morphemes.

Navajo is sometimes classified as a fusional language and sometimes as agglutinative or even polysynthetic. In terms of basic word order, Navajo has been classified as a subject–object–verb language. However, some speakers order the subject and object based on “noun ranking”.

Yes, Duolingo is completely free, you can learn the languages at No Cost on your computer and also sync it with free apps for the mobile device. You can also use Duolingo for Schools if you are a student or having students to track. You can log in with the same account.

They’re both very effective tools for learning language. But if you want something more concrete, a study in 2012 found that people actually learned faster with Duolingo. The study suggests it takes 34 hours of Duolingo lessons to learn the equivalent of one college semester, but 55 hours of study with Rosetta Stone.