Is English Hard to Learn? | Difficult & Easy Features

The question Is English hard to learn? doesn’t have a simple answer. When considering whether English is a difficult language (and therefore how long it takes to learn a language like English), much depends on the learner’s first language: If English is relatively “close” to someone’s mother tongue, learning it will typically be relatively easy.

Like every language, English has both complicated and simple features, with the more difficult ones balanced out by the easier ones. As the well-known linguist David Crystal observes:

“All languages have a complex grammar: there may be relative simplicity in one respect (e.g. no word endings), but there seems always to be relative complexity in another (e.g. word position). People sometimes think of languages such as English as ‘having little grammar’, because there are few word endings. But this is once again the unfortunate influence of Latin, which makes us think of complexity in terms of the inflectional system of that language.”

(David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 3rd ed., 2010)

Motivation also plays a key role in how easy a language is to learn. For many learners, English isn’t just another foreign language—it’s a necessity. Its role as the world’s predominant lingua franca provides a powerful incentive, and its global reach makes it easy to find engaging learning resources and opportunities to practice.

How hard is English to learn?

How hard English is to learn depends a lot on your first language. If it’s relatively similar to English compared to most other languages, then learning it will be relatively easy. A Japanese speaker will generally find English much harder to learn than Korean, for example, because English is a much more “distant” language in terms of:

• The sounds it uses
• How words are formed
• How sentences are put together
• How meaning is expressed

Like any language, English has some parts that are simple by comparison and others that are more complicated. It’s those complex parts that often cause specific difficulties for learners.

Some of these challenges matter more for just getting your message across, so they’re more relevant to beginners. Others become more significant as you progress towards an intermediate level and want to improve your accuracy, participate in more complex communication, and understand more advanced speech and writing.

Hard-to-learn features of English

Aspects of English that are comparatively complex and that significantly affect basic communication, meaning they’re particularly relevant to beginners, include:

• The irregular link between spelling and pronunciation: the same groups of letters can often be pronounced in different ways (e.g., though, through, tough, cough).
• The relatively high number of vowel sounds: English has around 20 distinct vowel sounds, while Spanish, for example, has only five.

As learners work on sounding more natural, writing more accurately, handling complex conversations, and understanding more advanced material, these are some of the trickier features of English that start to come into play:

• The way English uses aspect in verb forms to convey the speaker’s view of an event—whether it’s connected to the time of speaking, has duration, is repetitive, or completed (e.g., the difference between “It’s been raining” and “It’s rained” or “I’d seen it” and “I saw it”)
• The large number of near-synonyms with very subtle differences in usage (e.g., “ask,” “inquire,” and “question”) because of its Germanic and French roots as well as Latin borrowings
• The large number of phrasal verbs, whose meanings are often highly context-dependent (e.g., “put off,” “give up,” and “get on”)
• The many varieties of English around the world, which differ in vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar in subtle ways (e.g., British English vs American English)
• The tendency of English speakers to “reduce” vowels in natural speech, turning them into the schwa sound (/ə/)—the first syllable of “about” or “ago” as they’re typically spoken—instead of pronouncing the full vowel (e.g., “Do you want to come?” becoming “Də ye want tə come?”)

Easy-to-learn features of English

These are some of the comparatively simple features of English that most learners don’t struggle with:

• Nouns don’t have grammatical gender. Unlike languages such as French, Spanish, or German, English nouns are not classified as masculine, feminine, or neuter. You don’t need to know a gender for every noun or change articles and adjectives to match.
• You don’t need to change many words based on grammatical case. English only shows case in a limited way—mainly with pronouns (e.g., changing “I” to “me”) and possessive forms (e.g., “the school’s” instead of “the school”). In many other languages, such as Russian or German, several parts of speech change depending on their role in the sentence.
• How verbs change depending on the subject is relatively simple. For instance, in the simple present tense affirmative (e.g., “I/you/we/they like pizza”), with most verbs, the verb only changes in the third-person singular (e.g., “She/he/it likes pizza”).
• The word order in English is fairly straightforward, generally following a subject–verb–object pattern in affirmative statements (e.g., “He likes ice cream”), unlike languages that allow much freer word order but require changes in the case or the verb to communicate who is doing what.

These features make the “mechanics” of English relatively easy to explain to beginners, and they can give the impression that English is an “easy” language—especially if someone is used to learning languages in traditional ways that rely heavily on explanation rather than practice and exposure.

Frequently asked questions about if English is hard to learn

What are some hard words to spell in English?

These are some frequently used hard words to spell for English learners at the beginner level, because they contain sounds that are spelled in irregular ways.

• Know (the sounds represented by “Kn” and “ow)
• Said (the sound represented by “ai”)
• Does (the sound represented by “oe”)
• One (the sounds represented by “o”)
• Two (The sound represented by “wo”)

Such irregular spellings are relevant to the question of whether English is a hard language to learn.

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What are some hard words to pronounce in English?

The following are hard words to pronounce for many English learners because they contain sounds that are relatively uncommon in other languages.

• Think (the “th” sound)
• That (the “th” sound)
• World (the “orl” sound)
• Girl (the “irl” sound)
• Rural (the “r” sound)

English has some relatively uncommon pronunciation features that are relevant to the question of whether English is a hard language to learn.

QuillBot’s Translate supports over 50 different languages and is a powerful tool for language learners.