Is Bengali Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)

For an English speaker, Bengali is considered a relatively difficult language to learn. It has many complex rules of grammar and pronunciations, as well as its sounds and spelling rules. Learning any language is hard, but Bengali will be a particular challenge, although admittedly not as difficult as some other languages.

Learning Bengali will certainly be challenging, then, but at the same time you’ll benefit enormously from this endeavor.

It will take time, patience, and perseverance, but you have precisely the same capacity to learn languages as anyone else does.

If you’ve got the commitment, then you can certainly learn Bengali.

Let’s find out more.

How difficult is Bengali to learn?

Learning Bengali is considered quite difficult for an English speaker.

There are many aspects of the language that make it tough to learn which we will look at in more detail later.

In general, though, there are a few rules of thumb you can use to determine how difficult it will be to learn a given language as an English speaker.

The first, and perhaps most broadly helpful, is understanding language families.

As you might expect, English and Bengali are not very closely related.

English is a Germanic language, putting it in the same category as languages like German, Dutch, or Danish.

Bengali is in the Eastern group of languages, part of the Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian language groups.

Both Germanic and Indo-Iranian languages are Indo-European ultimately, but this is about as distant as two languages can be related.

Generally speaking, the more closely related to your own language the language you’re trying to learn is, the easier time you’ll have learning it.

Bengali, then, is going to be difficult for an English speaker because you’re more or less working from the ground up.

Your knowledge of English will not be a particular leg up in learning this distantly related language.

Again, though, this is only a rule of thumb, and just a helpful metric to understand where you are starting from.

It’s important to be aware that learning any language, however closely related to your own it may be, is never easy.

It will take months of study and commitment in even the easiest of circumstances.

So, while it’s important to recognize that Bengali is difficult to learn, you should also take comfort from the fact many have learned it before you—and you’re just as capable of learning as they were!

Let’s consider how long it might take you to learn.

How long will it take to learn Bengali?

It’s going to vary somewhat from person to person, but there is a good baseline that we can look at to give you an idea of how long you might spend studying the language.

The FSI categorizes languages based on their relative difficulty for English speakers to learn and gives guidelines based on this to give a rough idea of how long it might take to learn a given language.

There are five language categories, with category five languages being the most difficult to learn and taking the longest.

Bengali is a category three language, meaning that it is not the most difficult to learn, but it’s also far from the easiest.

Category 3 languages generally take around 44 weeks of study initially to reach the point that you’re able to conduct yourself in the language to a reasonable degree.

This, though, is far from the complete picture.

Depending on how well you want to grasp the language, fluency will take a lot of extra time to reach.

After you’ve completed your initial study period, you would then ideally spend a good few years living in the country and absorbing the language every day to improve your ability to speak it.

Depending on the situation, 3-5 years of living in the country and speaking the language every day will leave most people with some level of fluency—though this will, of course, vary from person to person.

What is the hardest part of learning Bengali?

Most tend to agree that the hardest part of learning Bengali is the many different sounds that it uses as well as its complex and varied spelling rules.

You’ll have to get to grips with a lot of sounds that you would never hear or use in English, and this pronunciation can be a trial for English speakers.

On the other hand, you’ll also have to learn an entirely new script if you want to read and write in the language.

Is it worth learning Bengali?

It is absolutely worth learning Bengali.

The language is spoken by an estimated 300 million people across Bangladesh and India, with an additional 40 million speaking it as a second language.

It’s a rich and storied language that is often called one of the “sweetest” languages in the world.

The answer to this question always depends on what you want out of the language, but if you’ve got the right goals and aims, it is definitely more than worth the effort of learning Bengali.

Again, learning even the easiest language is still a difficult task—so learning Bengali is going to be really quite a tough challenge.

However, you have more than the capacity needed to be able to learn it, and if you want to do it and you have the commitment, then doing so is well within your grasp.

You’ll benefit in many ways from learning what has been commonly called “the sweetest language in the world”—so put your doubts aside and give it a try!