Malay has the advantages of being phonetic, using the Roman alphabet, and (I think) having a simple grammar, but is category 3. A phonetic alphabetic script is indeed helpful, but grammar isn't much of an issue. Chinese has a very simple grammar but is notoriously difficult to learn (category 5).
In my experience, the main problem in learning any second language is vocabulary acquisition, and for that you have to take into account the first language, which I'm going to assume is English.
Word frequencies follow Zipf's Law, so for any language, you can very quickly read about half the words on any given page. After twice the effort, you might be able to read another quarter, and with three times the effort another eighth, and so on. Most of the vocabulary of any language consists of non-basic vocabulary with high information content.
So which language should you learn? Obviously if you're going to live in Japan or Hungary, you have no option but to learn Japanese or Hungarian. But if your only goal is to learn a second language and you're not too particular about which one, I'd choose one which shares a lot of non-basic vocabulary with English. In practice, that means an Italic language: French, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, or Romanian (all category 1). If you want to optimize on number of speakers, your best choices are Spanish, followed by Portuguese. Alternatives to Italic languages are close relatives of English with simple grammars: e.g. Afrikaans, Dutch, or Norwegian (also category 1). But speaker of those languages generally speak excellent English.
In my experience, the main problem in learning any second language is vocabulary acquisition, and for that you have to take into account the first language, which I'm going to assume is English.
Word frequencies follow Zipf's Law, so for any language, you can very quickly read about half the words on any given page. After twice the effort, you might be able to read another quarter, and with three times the effort another eighth, and so on. Most of the vocabulary of any language consists of non-basic vocabulary with high information content.
So which language should you learn? Obviously if you're going to live in Japan or Hungary, you have no option but to learn Japanese or Hungarian. But if your only goal is to learn a second language and you're not too particular about which one, I'd choose one which shares a lot of non-basic vocabulary with English. In practice, that means an Italic language: French, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, or Romanian (all category 1). If you want to optimize on number of speakers, your best choices are Spanish, followed by Portuguese. Alternatives to Italic languages are close relatives of English with simple grammars: e.g. Afrikaans, Dutch, or Norwegian (also category 1). But speaker of those languages generally speak excellent English.
For more information on language difficulty, see http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lang...