Is Welsh Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)

Welsh is a relatively tricky language for English speakers to learn. It’s in fact one of the oldest continuously spoken languages in Europe, and has a fairly tricky set of grammatical rules and pronunciations. However, it’s relatively easy to learn compared with many other languages, and is not as difficult as you might think.

So, relatively speaking, Welsh is not as difficult as other languages to learn.

However, learning any language takes time and commitment, and you need to be patient to become fluent.

But being an English speaker will give you something of a head start in learning Welsh.

Let’s find out more.

How long does it take to learn Welsh fluently?

The answer to this question can depend on a lot of things.

The truth is that people learn languages at different rates and with different aptitudes.

It may take you longer or shorter to learn Welsh than the average person, and there’s not a great deal you can do about that.

With that said, there are ways we can judge the average amount of time in terms of the initial period of study that it takes to learn Welsh.

Linguists and language tutors generally agree that learning Welsh would take around 750 hours of studying—or around 30 weeks of studying full-time.

Of course, this isn’t the end of the learning process, though.

At this point, you should be familiar enough with Welsh that you can conduct yourself in Welsh and go about general daily business in Welsh.

Ideally, after this, you should go and live amongst Welsh speakers, and use Welsh every day.

After a year or two of this, depending on the person, you should be at the point where you are more or less fluent in the language.

Even then, most would still say that learning a language is always an ongoing process—there really is no final destination.

However, after six or seven months of studying, plus a couple of years of living in the country, just about anyone who was committed and patient enough with the language would be more or less fluent by this point.

Does being an English speaker make learning Welsh easier?

Is Welsh easy for a native English speaker?

Being an English speaker will certainly give you something of a leg up in being able to learn Welsh.

English and Welsh are both what is called Indo-European languages.

This is an extremely large group of languages, admittedly, and indeed there are only a handful in all of Europe that are not Indo-European.

Nonetheless, it does mean that there are a lot of shared features of both languages.

The more closely related the language you want to learn is to English, the easier it will be to learn—as a general rule of thumb.

This is not always the case.

For example, German is often considered harder to learn than many of the Romance languages, despite being more closely related to English.

With that said, whereas they are both Indo-European, there is still a considerable gulf between English and Welsh.

Whereas English is a Germanic language, grouped with languages like Dutch, German, and Norwegian, Welsh is a Celtic language.

There are only six living Celtic languages in use today, including Welsh.

There are no two ways about the fact that Celtic languages can be difficult.

However, the two languages are still closely related enough that it doesn’t usually cause too much of a problem.

How difficult is Welsh to learn?

Helpfully, in the U.S., there is a system called the FSI rankings which judge the relative difficulty of learning a given language for an English speaker.

This system rates languages on a scale of I-V, with V being the most difficult languages to learn.

Welsh is generally considered to be a category II language.

So, it’s not quite as easy as some more closely related languages, such as Dutch, French, or Spanish, which are category I.

However, it’s much easier than languages like Swahili or Malaysian.

Pronunciations can be difficult at first to get to grips with, which is one thing that makes Welsh difficult to learn.

Overall, though, it’s really not all that difficult. With the time and patience, anyone can learn Welsh to a good degree.

Is Welsh harder than Irish?

As I said, there are only a handful of surviving Celtic languages like Welsh—Irish Gaelic is one of them.

So, which is harder to learn?

Most would agree that Irish is considerably harder for an English speaker to learn.

Welsh is a good deal closer to English, and is less complicated in terms of grammar and pronunciation.

Again, though, this can vary from person to person.

The relative difference of learning Welsh and Irish may end up feeling negligible for some learners.

Overall, though, Welsh is considered a pretty easy language to learn, whereas both forms of Gaelic (Scottish and Irish) are quite a bit more difficult.

But with patience, anything is possible!

All in all, then, Welsh is a bit of a funny one.

There are many aspects of learning the language that can be difficult to get to grips with, but at the same time, it’s a lot easier than other languages to learn.

It’s reasonably closely related to English, which is always a big bonus in learning a language.

In any case, though, you should prepare yourself for a challenge, because learning a language is never fast or easy.

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