Is English Really That Hard to Learn?
English is often described as a difficult language, sometimes one of the most difficult ones. This is not hard to understand. There are irregular grammar rules, confusing spellings, and a vast vocabulary! It must surely be impossible to learn for an adult non-native speaker!
You Can Learn English
That’s nonsense, of course. Naturally, if you’re aiming for a very high level, it will take time, but I have met many learners who have studied for just a few months (albeit very diligently) and have been able to converse rather freely in English after that time. Continue such a project for a year, and you will probably reach what most people would call fluent.
If you want more encouragement and factors that make English easier to learn, you should stop reading this article right away and check this one instead:
English is Actually Quite Hard
Does that mean that all the talk about English being difficult is just hot air? No, it doesn’t. While some learners can reach a decent conversational level in just a few months, others may find it takes longer to reach the same level in English compared to languages like Spanish.
Another way of looking at it is that English isn’t necessarily more difficult per step you have to take; it’s just that there are so many more steps compared to other languages, especially those closely related to your own. In this article, I will outline some of the main reasons why learning English is significantly harder than learning any other European language. Before we do that, though, we need to answer some basic questions:
Difficult for Whom?
The first thing we must get straight is: difficult for whom? It’s meaningless to say how difficult a language is to learn compared to others unless you specify who the learner is. The reason for this is not hard to understand. Most of the time spent learning a new language is used to expand vocabulary, get used to the grammar, master pronunciation, and so on. If you study a language that is close to your own, this task will be much easier.
For example, English shares a lot of vocabulary with other European languages, especially French. If you compare languages that are even closer, such as Italian and Spanish or Swedish and German, the overlap is much bigger.
My native language is Swedish, and even though I have never formally or informally studied German, I can still make sense of simple, written German and often understand parts of spoken German if it’s slow and clear. This is without even having studied the language!
Exactly how big an advantage this is doesn’t become clear to most people until they learn a language that has zero or almost zero overlap with their native language. For an English speaker, learning a language like Mandarin Chinese is a good example of this. There is almost no overlap with English vocabulary.
This is okay at first because common words in related languages are sometimes different too, but it adds up. When you get to an advanced level and there’s still no overlap between your own language and Mandarin, the sheer amount of words becomes an issue. We’re talking about tens of thousands of words that all have to be learned, not just modified a little bit from your native language.
After all, it’s not hard for me to learn many advanced words in English:
| English | Swedish |
|---|
| Political conservatism | Politisk konservatism |
| Supernova | Supernova |
| Magnetic resonance | Magnetisk resonans |
| Epilepsy patient | Epilepsipatient |
| Alveolar affricate | Alveolar affrikata |
Some of these are very logical in another language like French, and in that sense, learning them in French is actually easier if done from scratch compared to English or Swedish. However, that somewhat misses the point. I already know these words in Swedish, so learning them in English is really, really easy. Even if I only knew them in one language, I would automatically be able to understand them in the other. Sometimes I would even be able to say them. Guessing will sometimes do the trick!
It will never do the trick in Chinese.
So, for the purpose of this discussion, let’s focus on how difficult English is to learn for a native speaker of a non-English language, who may or may not have learned another language to some extent, such as French or Spanish. The situation will be almost the same for people in Europe who have learned English apart from their native languages.
What Does “Learn English” Mean? Conversational Fluency? Near-Native Mastery?
We also need to discuss what we mean by “learn English.” Do we mean to a level where you can ask for directions, book train tickets, and discuss everyday topics with native speakers? Do we include reading and writing, and if so, do we include handwriting? Or do we perhaps mean some kind of near-native educated level of competency, perhaps something similar to my level of English?
In another article, I discuss why learning English is actually not that hard if you aim for a basic level in the spoken language. To really flip the coin here, I will look at more advanced proficiency and include the written language. Some of the points here are relevant for beginners and the spoken language too, of course:
Vocabulary and Grammar: English has an enormous vocabulary, and many words have irregular spellings and pronunciations. The grammar rules can be tricky, and there are many exceptions to learn.
Speaking and Writing: As if learning thousands of vocabulary words isn’t enough, you also need to know how to pronounce them, which is not always related to how they are written. If you can pronounce Spanish as a native speaker of English, you can sort of write it too, at least if you learn some spelling conventions. Not so in English. Knowing how to say something tells you very little about how it’s written and vice versa.
Nothing for Free: I have already written about this above. If you haven’t learned English or any other language completely unrelated to your own, you don’t know how much you gain for free when you learn closely related languages. It’s difficult to estimate, but there’s a very big overlap between academic, medical, and technical terms in European languages. You have to learn all that from scratch in English.
Language Variation: English has many dialects and is spoken over a huge area by more than a billion people. There are differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and usage across different regions, making it challenging to master all forms of the language.
Pronunciation and Accents: While basic pronunciation is relatively easy to get down if you have the right teacher and spend the necessary time, accents are really hard to master for most learners. In isolation, yes; in words, yes; but in natural speech without thinking too much about it, no. It’s really hard to feel the difference between words pronounced with different accents. Unless you are very talented, you will probably keep making pronunciation mistakes for the rest of your life. After a while, they won’t really disturb communication that much, but it takes a while and most students never get there.
Listening and Reading: In the article about why English is easy to learn, I listed several things that make it easier to speak, such as no gendered nouns, no verb conjugations for different tenses, and so on. However, this information is still present when you communicate; it’s just not encoded in the written or spoken language. The words look and sound the same. This means that it’s easier to speak because you don’t need to bother that much, but it makes listening and reading harder because you have less information and need to do much more interpreting yourself. Listening is further complicated by the fact that English has a very large number of homophones (words that sound the same but have different meanings), which makes it easy to mix things up.
Culture and Mentality: One of the major obstacles to reaching an educated native level in English is the huge amount of culture you don’t know about. If you study a European language like French, you share most of the cultural history and knowledge about the world with native speakers, and even though you need to fill in the gaps that are particular to that country, the general framework is the same. When most people start learning English, they may not know much about the English-speaking world. Can you imagine how long it takes as an adult to learn everything about the world that you know now through years of schooling, living in the country, reading newspapers, books, and so on? Added to this, the underlying thinking or mentality is sometimes very different. Humor doesn’t always work the same way, what an English person thinks is logical might not be logical to you, and cultural values, norms, and customs are different.
Does It Really Matter How Difficult It Is?
Now you might think that learning English is really impossible, but as I said in the introduction, that’s not really the case. However, as is the case with many other tasks, achieving mastery takes a long time. If you want to approach the level of an educated native speaker, we’re talking about a life-long commitment and a life situation that allows you to either work with the language or socialize in it.
I’ve studied English for many years, and I still encounter things I don’t know daily. I expect this will never stop. Of course, I have learned the language well enough to be able to listen, speak, read, and write about almost anything I want, including specialized and technical areas I’m familiar with.
Almost all learners would have settled for much less. And rightly so, perhaps. You don’t need to spend years or become an advanced learner for your studies to pay off. Even studying just a few months and being able to say a few things to people in English in their own language can make all the difference. Languages are not binary; they don’t suddenly become useful at a certain level. Yes, they become gradually more useful the more you know, but exactly how far you want to go is up to you. It’s also up to you to define what “learning English” means. Personally, I also think that the amount of things I don’t know about the language makes learning more interesting and fun!
Gopinath Patil
Vidhi Sheth
Jigar Bhanushali
