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Why Is English So Hard to Learn?17 June, 2014

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You should also read…

This makes no sense.

It’s often said that English is one of the hardest languages to learn. (/learn-english-in-oxford)

Given the fact that many of the words we use in English stem from Latinand Ancient Greek words (/articles/history-english-language.html) – incommon with many other European languages – what is it aboutEnglish that has attracted this reputation for being so fearsomelydifficult? And is it really even that difficult, when so many othercountries adopt it as their second language and speak it a lot morefluently than we Brits speak other languages (https://www.oxford-royale.co.uk/articles/studying-languages.html)? We’ll leave you to makeyour own mind up…

It just makes no sense!One of the reasons why English is known for being difficult is becauseit’s full of contradictions. There are innumerable examples ofconundrums (/articles/efl-difficulties.html) such as:

Why I Love the English Language(/articles/love-english-language.html)

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14 Common Mistakes in English Grammar(/articles/15-common-grammar-gripes-avoid.html)

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There is no ham in hamburger.•

Neither is there any apple nor pine in pineapple.•

If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught?•

If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?•

“Overlook” and “oversee” have opposite meanings, while “look” and“see” mean the same thing.

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This, on the other hand, is a big, interesting book.

As native speakers, we rarely stop to think how illogical many of thethings we say really are – we’re just used to them. Unless you’ve beenbrought up speaking English, how can you possibly begin to learn all these oddities? It’s little wonder that people trying tolearn English end up feeling confused. But it gets worse.

(/tag/efl)Exceptions to rulesOne of the hardest things about English is that although there are rules, there are lots of exceptions to those rules – so justwhen you think you’ve got to grips with a rule, something comes along to shatter what you thought you knew bycontradicting it. A good example is the rule for remembering whether a word is spelt “ie” or “ei”: “I before E except after C”.Thus “believe” and “receipt”. But this is English – it’s not as simple as that. What about “science”? Or “weird”? Or “seize”?There are loads of irregular verbs, too, such as “fought”, which is the past tense of “fight”, while the past tense of “light” is“lit”. So learning English isn’t just a question of learning the rules – it’s about learning the many exceptions to the rules. Thenumerous exceptions make it difficult to apply existing knowledge and use the same principle with a new word, so it’sharder to make quick progress.

The order of the wordsNative English-speakers intuitively know what order to put words in,but this is hard to teach to those learning the language. Thedifference between the right and wrong order is so subtle that it’shard to explain beyond simply saying that it “just sounds right”. Forexample, we often use more than one adjective to describe a noun,but which order should they go in? We would say “an interesting littlebook” not “a little interesting book”. Both are technicallygrammatically correct, but the first “just sounds right”. It’s a bit of anightmare for those who are trying to learn, and it may prove onenuance too much. (In fact, there is some method to this particularEnglish madness – but it’s quite involved, and beyond the scope ofthis article to explain it.)

PronunciationAs if the spelling (/articles/improve-english-spelling.html) wasn’t hard enough, English pronunciation is the cause of muchconfusion among those trying to learn English. Some words are very low on vowels, such as the word “strengths”, which ishard to say when you’re not accustomed to English pronunciation. What’s more, words that end in the same combination ofletters aren’t necessarily pronounced in the same way. Why is “trough” pronounced “troff”, “rough” pronounced “ruff”, “bough”pronounced “bow” (to rhyme with cow) and “through” pronounced “throo”? There are silent letters at the start of words, too.

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Another option: I sent him a letter – he wasn’t the one whosent a letter to me.

Why are there so many words that begin with a silent “K”, such as “knife”? Or even a silent “G”, such as “gnome”? If it’s notpronounced, what’s the point of including that letter in the first place, if it only adds to the confusion of both native speakersand learners? And don’t get us started on the number of hapless tourists who don’t know where to begin with pronouncing atown name such as “Worcester”. Sadly, many English learners have to learn the hard way when it comes to our confusingpronunciation; if you pronounce something incorrectly, most Brits will demonstrate the correct way to you – but not withouta little chuckle at your expense.

EmphasisTo make matters even more complex, the way in which youemphasise certain words in a sentence can subtly change its meaning.For example, consider the different ways of emphasising the sentencebelow:

– I sent him a letter – a plain statement.

– I sent him a letter – used to imply that you sent him the letter –someone else didn’t send it (or “you didn’t send it, I did”).

– I sent him a letter – this could imply “I sent him a letter, but I’m notsure he received it”.

– I sent him a letter – used to imply that you sent him the letter –you didn’t send it to someone else (perhaps even “you weren’t meantto read it”).

– I sent him a letter – you sent him a letter, not anything else.

When you’re not used to speaking English, these may all sound the same to you. It’s only by constantly being exposed toEnglish that you start to pick up on these subtleties.

HomophonesConfused yet? If not, you will be after this next point. English is absolutely full of homophones – words that sound the samebut have different meanings or spellings. We’ve already dedicated an article to homophones (/articles/efl-homophones.html), but if you don’t have time to read that, here are a few examples…

A bandage is wound around a wound (“wound”, pronounced “wowned” is the past tense of “wind”, as well as an injury whenpronounced “woond”).

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The door was too close to the table to close (the first “close” is pronounced with a soft “S” and means “near”, while the•

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You probably wouldn’t want to desert this dessert.

Other synonyms for elegant are cultivated, discerning anddecorous – none of which can be used to describe a swan’s

neck either.

Homophones exist in the English language that has no fewer thanseven different meanings – namely words that sound like ‘course’ and‘raise’. Most have only two or three meanings – such as “there”, “their”and “they’re” – but that’s still enough to add an extra level or two ofcomplexity for those trying to master the English language.

Synonyms aren’t necessarily interchangeableFlick through a thesaurus and you’ll see countless groups of wordsthat supposedly mean the same thing (/articles/ridiculous-english-synonyms.html). You’d think that this would mean that they wereinterchangeable – but you’d be wrong. Even words whose definitionsare seemingly in the same ballpark differ subtly – or apply tosomething completely different, because English words can havemultiple meanings. You can’t always swap words with the samemeaning, and this means that it’s easy to end up using a word incompletely the wrong way. For example, you “watch” television, andyou can either “watch a film” or “see a film” – but you don’t “seetelevision”. But you’re not a “watcher” when you’re doing this – you’rea “viewer”, even though you don’t “view television” or “view a movie”.To take another example, I could talk about a swan’s elegant neck,but I couldn’t swap the word “elegant” for the word “classic” or “chic”(both suggestions I found in the thesaurus when I looked up“elegant”) because these are words that apply to fashion, not birds! Ifyou were learning English, though, you wouldn’t necessarily knowthat.

IdiomsEnglish is a very old language, and over the course of many centuries, interesting sayings have been incorporated intoeveryday language that make little sense if you haven’t grown up with them. “Barking up the wrong tree”, “the straw thatbroke the camel’s back” and “raining cats and dogs” are all examples of idioms (/articles/bizarre-english-idioms-meaning-

second is pronounced with a hard “S” and means “shut”).

I decided to desert my dessert in the desert (the first “desert” means“abandon” and has the emphasis placed on the second syllable;“dessert” is pronounced the same but means a pudding; and thesecond “desert” means the dry, sandy environment with camels, andis pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable).

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The Glaswegian accent is famously hard to understand.

origins.html) that add colour to the English language. If you find yourself starting to use idioms when you speak English,well done: you’ve mastered it!

Traces of archaic EnglishThough English does ‘move with the times’, there are still plenty of archaic words floating around that you may wellencounter (and they may not be in your English dictionary (/articles/english-words-not-learned-yet.html)). “Alas” (anexpression of grief or pity) is one of the more common ones, but language of the sort traditionally used in the Bible is alsostill commonly understood, such as “Thou shalt not kill” in the Ten Commandments. This means “You will not kill” in modernlingo, but the Ten Commandments usually retain this old language. Old-fashioned words such as “apothecary” (someone whoprepares medicine) and “shilling” (an old form of English currency) will crop up in historical dramas that you watch ontelevision. You’ll also see old literary and poetic references cropping up in popular culture, such as Shakespeare’s “To be ornot to be” or Burns’ “My love is like a red, red rose”.

Regional dialectsWe’d imagine that all languages have regional dialects, but when youadd the bizarre pronunciations and unique additional vocabularies ofthe UK’s many regional dialects, they don’t exactly help the poor folktrying to learn English. It’s bad enough for us southerners tounderstand people from Glasgow, or even for people from Edinburghto understand people from Glasgow. There’s a broad north/southdivide in the pronunciation of certain words, a good example being“bath”, which is pronounced with a short “A” by those “up north” and along “A” (“barth”) by those “down south”. Of course, every English-speaking country also has its own way of speaking the language; theUSA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa all have theirown distinctive way of pronouncing words. Which you end up usingwhen your native language isn’t English probably depends onwhereabouts your English teacher is from, or whereabouts in thecountry you’re learning.

Is it really the hardest language?As we’ve seen, then, English is pretty challenging. But it’s not the only contender for the World’s Most Difficult Language.Other notoriously tricky languages include Finnish, Russian, Japanese and Mandarin. Mandarin’s tone system, for instance, isfamously tricky (but when you look at the ‘Emphasis’ section above, you’ll see that English can be just as bad!). Finnish isheld to be difficult because of its numerous cases; Arabic because, among other things, its script has four different variationsfor each letter depending on where in the word it sits. Written Japanese differs from spoken Japanese, and there are threedifferent writing systems – including 2,000 to 3,000 kanji characters that must be learned by heart. It makes English soundeasy in comparison!

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Japanese’s complicated writing system is one of the thingsthat makes it so hard to learn.

Ultimately, though, it’s down to the individual whether or not aparticular language is difficult to learn. Some people have a naturalaptitude for languages and pick them up quickly; children, of course,absorb new languages much more easily than adults. The difficulty ofa language also depends on its similarity to your own language. You’llprobably find it easier to pick up French if you’re Italian, becausethese languages use many of the same roots, and the same alphabet.If you’re used to the Roman alphabet then you may struggle to learnoriental languages that rely on symbols, such as Japanese. Englishisn’t so bad once you get used to it, and it’s probably only commonlytalked about as being hard because so many people are trying tolearn it. If you want to take your English to the next level, join us atOxford Royale Academy (/course/oxford-summer-english-16-18) for asummer of turbocharging your English skills.

 

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22 Responses to “Why Is English So Hard to Learn?”1. January 10, 2015 at 10:19 pm, Leon said:

In my opinion, German is much more difficult than English, although it belongs to the same language family. in German, it isfor example more difficult to form the plural of a word as in English. In English, you simply add in most cases an s behind thewords , whereas a word in german has many different endings. For example: house houses / Haus Häuser , Drink Drinks /Getränk Getränke , pizza pizzas / Pizza Pizzen , airport airports / Flughafen Flughäfen , table tables / Tisch Tische , chickenchickens / Huhn Hühner …. and so on . Another difficulty of german are the three genders : Der Die Das ; this genders can bechanged into : Der Des Dem and Den

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January 25, 2015 at 3:15 am, Ariel said:

> I simply can’t agree more with you. I’m still studying German now, and to be honest it’s really confusing to learn the newvocabularies in German. In English, you can learn the English and the meaning of it, and be done with it. But in German,you gotta study the German vocabs, the meanings, the genders, and the plural forms all at the same time. Which often canreally make you struggle to even memorize all four of them from just only one word.

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March 22, 2015 at 3:40 pm, georgian said:

> german french russian turkish and other languages are hard when you start but then becomes easy,,,but english, english is easy when you start but then it becomes hard and hard,,,,,,,,english grammer is easy but english is hardenglish people are thinking very differently that is th real problemone day I hope I’ll speak english well,,,,,,,,,,amin

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2. January 26, 2015 at 2:52 am, Lawri said:

5 Reasons Why English is Easy to Learn

1: No genders (they are so annoying)2: No accents on letters (also annoying)3: Popularly spoken by well-known entertainers4: Pretty forgiving and uniform (plurals and especially conjugation: I have, you have, she/he has, we have, you all have, theyhave)5: 26 consistent letters (sure Hawaiian has only 12, but doesn’t German have more than that?)

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3. February 02, 2015 at 9:13 pm, Jerry Rogers said:

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June 11, 2015 at 6:43 pm, L said:

> Dude.. plural of chicken is chicken…

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May 21, 2015 at 5:35 pm, Anonymous said:

You would think that the accents not being included is a good thing but that means anyone learning a new word has tolearn how the vowels are spoken in the word since the letter ‘e’ has multiple was of being said as does the others. Byincluding an accent it pinpoints a specific sound and actually makes it much easier to speak, it is a little tricky to learnaccents at first, when I was learning French it was difficult at first. Also learning the ‘ö’ in German started off more tricky,but when you understand it you realise it is much easier than if there wasn’t the umlauts above the letter and meant youdidn’t have to remember what sound to make when reading a word.

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Alan Greenspan – I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I’vesaid.

English is extremely easy to learn and very difficult to advance past a 6th grade reading level. Politicians talk to the camerason a level that ‘everyone’ will understand and write laws that only a handful can comprehend. The duality of English is oneof the greatest accomplishments the world has ever seen.

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4. March 11, 2015 at 8:18 am, Steve Jones said:

I had little trouble learning German. Russian was much more difficult. Icelandic…forget about it. Sigh

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5. April 11, 2015 at 8:46 am, Michael Green said:

Let us exclude the English language for a moment and concentrate on a variety of languages. The languages such as French,Spanish, Japanese, Manderan, etcetera can all be difficult to learn. Nothing falls on the right side of a silver coin. But, if aperson wants to truly learn a language rather be English or Spanish they have to practice. What is the old fashioned saying?Practice makes perfect. Hope my English is not too horrible. I pray to God that you all have patience with learning newlanguages. May God bless you all. Goodbye.

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6. May 01, 2015 at 9:46 am, Aaron Franke said:

To be honest, English is a pretty loose language. To address your points specifically:

1. Hamburgers came from a German town called Hamburg, whose inhabitants were called Hamburgers, and so, gradually, thefood that they brought with them was called a hamburger. In French it is also called “un hamburger”.

2. To be honest, I’d say that a preacher would have preached (never praught), but I’d perfectly accept your sentence if yousaid “teached”, or if you used regular conjugation with other words. Heck, some people in the southern US used the word“learned” not even 100 years ago.

3. About the “cei/ie” rule… yeah, come and ask anybody at my town, you’ll find that the majority doesn’t consider it a rule,since it makes no sense to have a rule with so many exceptions.

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4. The order of the words… if I had to guess what the “rule” would be, it’d be that the adjectives that are “more like” verbs gofirst. You’d sooner find a book “being interesting” than you’d find anything “being little”.

5. Pronunciation and Homophones… yes I agree this is very dumb, though I think this can be “fixed” easily… in my #2 point,I said that I’d accept “teached” if someone told me a sentence. Well, I’d probably accept “winded” instead of “wound” too.

6. Emphasis. To be honest, this one logically makes sense. It’s basically asking for clarification but with a tone of voice. Otherlanguages have this too. “J’aime glace. Pardon, tu aimes quoi? J’aime glace“.

7. Synonyms… yes this is weird, but it isn’t vital to get this right. If you said someone was seeing or viewing the TV, I’dunderstand what is going on.

8. Idioms and Synonyms. All languages have these silly expressions of thought using references, and some are worse thanEnglish. I dare you to translate “Il pleut comme vache qui pisse.”

9. Dialects don’t matter too much, people can still understand you if you live in one region and you visit another one thatspeaks English too.

10. Simplicities of English: No accents, no changing accents when conjugating, no word gender, no gender conjugations, noword combinations based on vowels, simple present-tense conjugation, and even though some words past/future tense havespecial conjugation, the non-special form is still acceptable.

And yes I am a native speaker.

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7. May 08, 2015 at 6:50 pm, Isa Eufrásia Alberto Vasco (http://google) said:

I think english is not so difficult to learn,it some one is interrested to learn a language,he must spend his most time studyingit,and not only,the most important is to practice more.

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May 01, 2015 at 9:51 am, Aaron Franke said:

> #7 is supposed to be about homonyms, not synonyms, sorry

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8. May 16, 2015 at 6:53 pm, Martyn Gaynor said:

I studied Spanish and became quite fluent in relatively short space of time and I have a good working knowledge of French. Ithought I was quite talented as regards languages, then I tried Polish after three months apart form the usual pleasantriesdzien dobre and other simple things like whats your name etc, I could not put a decent sentence together. So as far as Imconcerned the difficulty of English is a Myth. Ok there may be a few oddities but the the amount of verb terminationsgenders noun cases etc in other languages means that the native english person has got to commit to memory a is collosolin comparison with what foreigners have to learn when studying English.

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9. May 27, 2015 at 9:15 pm, Marc C said:

American English speaker here (native)… I’m surprised no one mentioned phrasal verbs (ex. stand by, shut down, give in,pass out, look after, tee off, etc.). They may be an afterthought with native speakers but these word combinations number inthe hundreds, if not thousand, and can’t usually be understood in terms of their separate parts. Verbal phrases are unique toEnglish and can wreak havoc on someone learning English as a second language, even more so than say, the order ofmultiple adjectives before a verb.

I’ve been studying Spanish for 5 years now and it was weird at first trying to express action without using phrasal verbs…(Example – saying “cállete” instead of “shut up”), but with a little practice I realized it’s not that hard to do. We can evenexpress a lot of things in English without using them – like say, “Silence!” or “be quiet” in place of the phrasal verb “shut up!”However, in order to truly be fluent in English one will have to learn these many combinations eventually.

As for me, the hardest part about Spanish by far is trying to comprehend native speakers (especially individuals from someSouth American countries). As with English, some accents are heavier and faster than other.

I also struggle with Spanish tenses. In English we only have three. Spanish has several. It’s bad enough having to conjugateSpanish verbs with sex, formal/informal and number in mind, but then you have to consider other factors other than justpast, present, and future. It becomes very confusing quick but with practice I’m slowly getting there.

May 16, 2015 at 5:18 am, Billy said:

> You, sir, have proven the point of most of the posters above. You might think it’s not so difficult, but your post sounds likean 8 year-old or a semi-intelligent robot typed it.

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10. June 06, 2015 at 6:21 am, George said:

Nobody here has ever tried to learn Greek, although all of you use greek words(!!), most of you don’t knowing it. I’m sure youall know the expression “it looks Greek to me” and what it means, so I think you should reconsider as to which language isreally difficult to learn. For us, Greeks, Chinese is a really hard language to learn, that is why we use the above expression as“it all looks Chinese to me”……

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11. June 08, 2015 at 5:31 pm, Nikola said:

I am a teacher of English although I am not a native (my mother tongue is Serbian). While many people use English only abare handful of them ever reaches proficiency level. English is assumed to be an easy language to learn because it is themost widespread language in the world.I agree with what Jerry Rogers has said:“English is extremely easy to learn and very difficult to advance past a 6th grade reading level. Politicians talk to thecameras on a level that ‘everyone’ will understand and write laws that only a handful can comprehend. The duality of Englishis one of the greatest accomplishments the world has ever seen.”

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May 27, 2015 at 9:34 pm, Marc C said:

Sorry I meant “the ordering of multiple adjectives before a NOUN… Not a verb.

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June 10, 2015 at 3:09 pm, Louis Kim said:

Still, English is freaking hard. Especially if one wants to speak and write it in an academical level. Many of us do knowEnglish, but only a few people have a good command of English.

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12. June 21, 2015 at 10:14 pm, Harry said:

As a native English speaker learning Japanese, I can honestly say that it is a pretty easy language: no genders, no plurals, noconjugation, easy sentence structure that is easy to get used to. The only thing that is hard is the writing structure. LearningHiragana and Katakana is easy, but every Kanji (complicated letter) is an effort, and considering the sheer amount used everyday, its ridiculous. Latin lettering is so much easier to learn. Take modernising Turkey, going from the Arabic writing system,to latin letters, and in 2 years the literacy rate went from 10% to 70%

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13. August 15, 2015 at 2:54 pm, carol said:

In regard to the first comment, English is a perfect example of how complicated it is when making a noun a plural. It isNEVER just adding an “s”, many times it is “es” or sometimes a completely different word. For example, goose /geese,mouse/mice, chicken/chicken (no change), child/children. There are many more like that. Many people believe that English iseasy, because they are surrounded by English music, film and culture, as well as English expressions used in there ownlanguage. So it’s a matter of listening and repeating. However, it is a language often butchered and spoken incorrectly bythose who do not know the lack of rules or changes.

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14. August 24, 2015 at 9:20 am, Phanes said:

“The door was too close to the table to close (the first “close” is pronounced with a soft “S” and means “near”, while thesecond is pronounced with a hard “S” and means “shut”).”

Really? I pronounce the “S” in the second “close” with a “Z” sound. I always have. The first “close” would have a softer “S”sound than the second.

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