Is English Hard To Learn? (Answered!)

English is widely considered very difficult to learn. It can be easy to pick up, but as your level advances in the language it becomes more and more difficult to master. It naturally depends on what your native language is and many will have an easier time than others, but English is among the most difficult to learn.

There are many reasons why English is one of the trickiest languages to learn which we will get into.

In general, though, it takes people a long time to get to grips with English fully.

It’s easy to forget this when it is so widely spoken across the world, but most have considerable difficulty learning it.

Let’s find out why.

How difficult is English to learn?

English is widely considered to be among the most difficult of all languages to fully master.

Now, for native speakers, this is obviously very difficult to imagine since you have spoken it all your life and so it just seems inherently simple.

Certainly, when English speakers engage with a language like Serbian, for instance, with its multitudinous cases and pronouns, English can seem comparatively simple.

But the more you think about, the more English almost always breaks its own rules.

Of course, how difficult a language is to learn depends on the native tongue of the person learning.

It’s helpful to understand language families to put this into perspective.

English is a Germanic language, and Germanic languages are part of the wider Indo-European family, which includes all but a handful of the languages spoken natively in Europe.

The closer your own language is to English, the easier it will be to learn.

Still, though, learning any language is a difficult task that takes time.

So, even for a speaker of a language as closely related to English as possible, learning the language is going to be difficult.

The grammatical rules of English are very often broken, so you need not only to learn the rules, but when they don’t apply.

The alphabet can often be confusing for speakers of languages that use a different script.

Pronunciation and spelling, too, are notoriously difficult aspects of English.

Indeed, this can even be difficult for native speakers.

Essentially, English is full of contradictions as a language, and so you both have a lot of rules to learn, and you also have to learn when to disregard them.

How long should learning the language take, then?

How long does it take to learn English?

Naturally, the answer to this depends on the native language of the learner.

Estimates range from around 1,100 hours to up to 2,000 hours just of study in order to get to grips fully with the language in a way that you can use it and speak to people in English.

But this, really, is only half the battle.

Once you’ve done your studying, as with any language, you’ve then really got to go out and immerse yourself in the language in order to get fully to grips with its complexities and nuances.

Estimates, again, can vary, but most agree this will take up to four or five years.

At this point, having spent your time studying and then fully immersed yourself in the language and speaking it every day, most people will be more or less fluent if not native level speakers.

Again, getting to grips with all of English’s confusing rule contradictions, weird pronunciations, and spellings, will take time outside of your lessons.

It all depends, then.

Something to remember, though, is that however difficult a language is to learn, many have done so before you, and they have the exact same ability to learn as you do.

Is English the hardest language to learn?

While most would agree English is among the most challenging languages to learn in the world, it is probably not the most challenging—this title usually goes to Mandarin.

That said, it always depends on the person learning, and for a Mandarin speaker, English will probably be just as hard to learn as Mandarin would be for an English speaker.

Again, it’s the question of learning the rules and then having to learn when they don’t apply.

This applies to all aspects of the language—grammar, spelling, and pronunciation.

Is English harder than Spanish?

Most would agree English is harder to learn than Spanish.

Spanish possesses some complexities which English does not, but overall its internal consistency makes it generally much easier to learn than English.

Of course, again, it depends on the language of the speaker.

Spanish is a Romance language, making it more closely related to French, Portuguese, and Italian. For speakers of these languages, they may have a harder time learning English than a Dutch or Norwegian speaker.

Generally speaking, though, English is among the most difficult languages to learn no matter what your native tongue is.

Spanish can be picked up a lot easier by most people—but learning languages is always hard and no one learning Spanish is likely to say it was easy!

So, while it can be all but impossible for native speakers to truly imagine how hard it is for non-speakers to learn, English is in fact one of the hardest languages in the world to learn.

It is likely not the hardest, but nonetheless it is among the most difficult learning processes of all languages.

It’s capable of great expressive depth and while some of its rules are relatively simple, there are typically many exceptions to any rule in English.

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