Why Is English So Hard To Learn

10/5/2015
WhyIsEnglishSoHardtoLearn?
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226 Is English So Hard to Learn?
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Its often said that English is one of the hardest languages to learn. (/learn-english-in-oxford)
You should also read

Why I Love the English Language
(/articles/love-english-language.html)
14 Common Mistakes in English Grammar
(/articles/15-common-grammar-gripesavoid.html)
Given the fact that many of the words we use in English stem from Latin
and Ancient Greek words (/articles/history-english-language.html) in
common with many other European languages what is it about
English that has attracted this reputation for being so fearsomely
difficult? And is it really even that difficult, when so many other
countries adopt it as their second language and speak it a lot more
fluently than we Brits speak other languages (https://www.oxfordroyale.co.uk/articles/studying-languages.html)? Well leave you to make
your own mind up
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It just makes no sense!

One of the reasons why English is known for being difficult is because
its full of contradictions. There are innumerable examples of
conundrums (/articles/efl-difficulties.html) such as:
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to improve their academic English skills and
prepare to take the IELTS exam, residential
in Oxford.
There is no ham in hamburger.
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Neither is there any apple nor pine in pineapple.

If teachers taught, why didnt 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.
This makes no sense.
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As native speakers, we rarely stop to think how illogical many of the

things we say really are were just used to them. Unless youve been
brought up speaking English, how can you possibly begin to learn all these oddities? Its little wonder that people trying to
learn English end up feeling confused. But it gets worse.
(/tag/efl)Exceptions to rules
One of the hardest things about English is that although there are rules, there are lots of exceptions to those rules so just
when you think youve got to grips with a rule, something comes along to shatter what you thought you knew by
contradicting 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 its 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 isnt just a question of learning the rules its about learning the many exceptions to the rules. The
numerous exceptions make it difficult to apply existing knowledge and use the same principle with a new word, so its
harder to make quick progress.
The order of the words

Native English-speakers intuitively know what order to put words in,
but this is hard to teach to those learning the language. The
difference between the right and wrong order is so subtle that its
hard to explain beyond simply saying that it just sounds right. For
example, we often use more than one adjective to describe a noun,
but which order should they go in? We would say an interesting little
book not a little interesting book. Both are technically
grammatically correct, but the first just sounds right. Its a bit of a
nightmare for those who are trying to learn, and it may prove one
nuance too much. (In fact, there is some method to this particular
English madness but its quite involved, and beyond the scope of
this article to explain it.)
This, on the other hand, is a big, interesting book.
Pronunciation
As if the spelling (/articles/improve-english-spelling.html) wasnt hard enough, English pronunciation is the cause of much
confusion among those trying to learn English. Some words are very low on vowels, such as the word strengths, which is
hard to say when youre not accustomed to English pronunciation. Whats more, words that end in the same combination of
letters arent 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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Why are there so many words that begin with a silent K, such as knife? Or even a silent G, such as gnome? If its not
pronounced, whats the point of including that letter in the first place, if it only adds to the confusion of both native speakers
and learners? And dont get us started on the number of hapless tourists who dont know where to begin with pronouncing a
town name such as Worcester. Sadly, many English learners have to learn the hard way when it comes to our confusing
pronunciation; if you pronounce something incorrectly, most Brits willdemonstrate the correct way to you but not without
a little chuckle at your expense.
Emphasis
To make matters even more complex, the way in which you
emphasise certain words in a sentence can subtly change its meaning.
For example, consider the different ways of emphasising the sentence
below:
I sent him a letter a plain statement.
I sent him a letter used to imply that you sent him the letter
someone else didnt send it (or you didnt send it, I did).
I sent him a letter this could imply I sent him a letter, but Im not
sure he received it.
I sent him a letter used to imply that you sent him the letter
you didnt send it to someone else (perhaps even you werent meant
to read it).
Another option: I sent him a letter he wasnt the one who

sent a letter to me.
I sent him a letter you sent him a letter, not anything else.
When youre not used to speaking English, these may all sound the same to you. Its only by constantly being exposed to
English that you start to pick up on these subtleties.
Homophones
Confused yet? If not, you will be after this next point. English is absolutely full of homophones words that sound the same
but have different meanings or spellings. Weve already dedicated an article to homophones (/articles/eflhomophones.html), but if you dont 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 when
pronounced woond).
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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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 the
second desert means the dry, sandy environment with camels, and
is pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable).
Homophones exist in the English language that has no fewer than

seven different meanings namely words that sound like course and
raise. Most have only two or three meanings such as there, their
and theyre but thats still enough to add an extra level or two of
complexity for those trying to master the English language.
You probably wouldnt want to desert this dessert.
Synonyms arent necessarily interchangeable

Flick through a thesaurus and youll see countless groups of words
that supposedly mean the same thing (/articles/ridiculous-englishsynonyms.html). Youd think that this would mean that they were
interchangeable but youd be wrong. Even words whose definitions
are seemingly in the same ballpark differ subtly or apply to
something completely different, because English words can have
multiple meanings. You cant always swap words with the same
meaning, and this means that its easy to end up using a word in
completely the wrong way. For example, you watch television, and
you can either watch a film or see a film but you dont see
television. But youre not a watcher when youre doing this youre
a viewer, even though you dont view television or view a movie.
To take another example, I could talk about a swans elegant neck,
but I couldnt 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! If
you were learning English, though, you wouldnt necessarily know
that.
Other synonyms for elegant are cultivated, discerning and

decorous none of which can be used to describe a swans
neck either.
Idioms
English is a very old language, and over the course of many centuries, interesting sayings have been incorporated into
everyday language that make little sense if you havent grown up with them. Barking up the wrong tree, the straw that
broke the camels back and raining cats and dogs are all examples of idioms (/articles/bizarre-english-idioms-meaninghttps://www.oxfordroyale.co.uk/articles/learningenglishhard.html
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origins.html) that add colour to the English language. If you find yourself starting to use idioms when you speak English,
well done: youve mastered it!
Traces of archaic English

Though English does move with the times, there are still plenty of archaic words floating around that you may well
encounter (and they may not be in your English dictionary (/articles/english-words-not-learned-yet.html)). Alas (an
expression of grief or pity) is one of the more common ones, but language of the sort traditionally used in the Bible is also
still commonly understood, such as Thou shalt not kill in the Ten Commandments. This means You will not kill in modern
lingo, but the Ten Commandments usually retain this old language. Old-fashioned words such as apothecary (someone who
prepares medicine) and shilling (an old form of English currency) will crop up in historical dramas that you watch on
television. Youll also see old literary and poetic references cropping up in popular culture, such as Shakespeares To be or
not to be or Burns My love is like a red, red rose.
Regional dialects
Wed imagine that all languages have regional dialects, but when you
add the bizarre pronunciations and unique additional vocabularies of
the UKs many regional dialects, they dont exactly help the poor folk
trying to learn English. Its bad enough for us southerners to
understand people from Glasgow, or even for people from Edinburgh
to understand people from Glasgow. Theres a broad north/south
divide in the pronunciation of certain words, a good example being
bath, which is pronounced with a short A by those up north and a
long A (barth) by those down south. Of course, every Englishspeaking country also has its own way of speaking the language; the
USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa all have their
own distinctive way of pronouncing words. Which you end up using
when your native language isnt English probably depends on
whereabouts your English teacher is from, or whereabouts in the
country youre learning.
The Glaswegian accent is famously hard to understand.
Is it really the hardest language?

As weve seen, then, English is pretty challenging. But its not the only contender for the Worlds Most Difficult Language.
Other notoriously tricky languages include Finnish, Russian, Japanese and Mandarin. Mandarins tone system, for instance, is
famously tricky (but when you look at the Emphasis section above, youll see that English can be just as bad!). Finnish is
held to be difficult because of its numerous cases; Arabic because, among other things, its script has four different variations
for each letter depending on where in the word it sits. Written Japanese differs from spoken Japanese, and there are three
different writing systems including 2,000 to 3,000 kanji characters that must be learned by heart. It makes English sound
easy in comparison!
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Ultimately, though, its down to the individual whether or not a

particular language is difficult to learn. Some people have a natural
aptitude for languages and pick them up quickly; children, of course,
absorb new languages much more easily than adults. The difficulty of
a language also depends on its similarity to your own language. Youll
probably find it easier to pick up French if youre Italian, because
these languages use many of the same roots, and the same alphabet.
If youre used to the Roman alphabet then you may struggle to learn
oriental languages that rely on symbols, such as Japanese. English
isnt so bad once you get used to it, and its probably only commonly
talked about as being hard because so many people are trying to
learn it. If you want to take your English to the next level, join us at
Oxford Royale Academy (/course/oxford-summer-english-16-18) for a
summer of turbocharging your English skills.
Japaneses complicated writing system is one of the things

that makes it so hard to learn.
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Image credits: banner (https://www.flickr.com/photos/francisco_osorio/8424416853); pineapple (https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnloo/4213423771);big book

(https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamiesrabbits/5586332532); postbox (https://www.flickr.com/photos/bluesky4691/3440214269); dessert
(https://www.flickr.com/photos/kimberlykv/5346439937); swan (https://www.flickr.com/photos/mcveja/3466788426); Glasgow
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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 is
for example more difficult to form the plural of a word as in English. In English, you simply add in most cases an s behind the
words , whereas a word in german has many different endings. For example: house houses / Haus Huser , Drink Drinks /
Getrnk Getrnke , pizza pizzas / Pizza Pizzen , airport airports / Flughafen Flughfen , table tables / Tisch Tische , chicken
chickens / Huhn Hhner . and so on . Another difficulty of german are the three genders : Der Die Das ; this genders can be
changed into : Der Des Dem and Den
Reply (https://www.oxford-royale.co.uk/articles/learning-english-hard.html?replytocom=17802#respond)
January 25, 2015 at 3:15 am, Ariel said:
> I simply cant agree more with you. Im still studying German now, and to be honest its really confusing to learn the new
vocabularies 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 can
really make you struggle to even memorize all four of them from just only one word.
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 hard
english people are thinking very differently that is th real problem
one day I hope Ill speak english well,,,,,,,,,,amin
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June 11, 2015 at 6:43 pm, L said:
> Dude.. plural of chicken is chicken
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 entertainers
4: Pretty forgiving and uniform (plurals and especially conjugation: I have, you have, she/he has, we have, you all have, they
have)
5: 26 consistent letters (sure Hawaiian has only 12, but doesnt German have more than that?)
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 to
learn how the vowels are spoken in the word since the letter e has multiple was of being said as does the others. By
including an accent it pinpoints a specific sound and actually makes it much easier to speak, it is a little tricky to learn
accents at first, when I was learning French it was difficult at first. Also learning the in German started off more tricky,
but when you understand it you realise it is much easier than if there wasnt the umlauts above the letter and meant you
didnt have to remember what sound to make when reading a word.
3. February 02, 2015 at 9:13 pm, Jerry Rogers said:
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Alan Greenspan I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, youve probably misunderstood what Ive
said.
English is extremely easy to learn and very difficult to advance past a 6th grade reading level. Politicians talk to the cameras
on a level that everyone will understand and write laws that only a handful can comprehend. The duality of English is one
of the greatest accomplishments the world has ever seen.
4. March 11, 2015 at 8:18 am, Steve Jones said:
I had little trouble learning German. Russian was much more difficult. Icelandicforget about it. Sigh
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 a
person 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 new
languages. May God bless you all. Goodbye.
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, the
food that they brought with them was called a hamburger. In French it is also called un hamburger.
2. To be honest, Id say that a preacher would have preached (never praught), but Id perfectly accept your sentence if you
said 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, youll find that the majority doesnt 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, itd be that the adjectives that are more like verbs go
first. Youd sooner find a book being interesting than youd 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 Id accept teached if someone told me a sentence. Well, Id probably accept winded instead of wound too.
6. Emphasis. To be honest, this one logically makes sense. Its basically asking for clarification but with a tone of voice. Other
languages have this too. Jaime glace. Pardon, tu aimes quoi? Jaime glace.
7. Synonyms yes this is weird, but it isnt vital to get this right. If you said someone was seeing or viewing the TV, Id
understand what is going on.
8. Idioms and Synonyms. All languages have these silly expressions of thought using references, and some are worse than
English. I dare you to translate Il pleut comme vache qui pisse.
9. Dialects dont matter too much, people can still understand you if you live in one region and you visit another one that
speaks English too.
10. Simplicities of English: No accents, no changing accents when conjugating, no word gender, no gender conjugations, no
word combinations based on vowels, simple present-tense conjugation, and even though some words past/future tense have
special conjugation, the non-special form is still acceptable.
And yes I am a native speaker.
May 01, 2015 at 9:51 am, Aaron Franke said:
> #7 is supposed to be about homonyms, not synonyms, sorry
7. May 08, 2015 at 6:50 pm, Isa Eufrsia 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 studying
it,and not only,the most important is to practice more.
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May 16, 2015 at 5:18 am, Billy said:

> You, sir, have proven the point of most of the posters above. You might think its not so difficult, but your post sounds like
an 8 year-old or a semi-intelligent robot typed it.
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. I
thought I was quite talented as regards languages, then I tried Polish after three months apart form the usual pleasantries
dzien dobre and other simple things like whats your name etc, I could not put a decent sentence together. So as far as Im
concerned the difficulty of English is a Myth. Ok there may be a few oddities but the the amount of verb terminations
genders noun cases etc in other languages means that the native english person has got to commit to memory a is collosol
in comparison with what foreigners have to learn when studying English.
9. May 27, 2015 at 9:15 pm, Marc C said:
American English speaker here (native) Im 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 in
the hundreds, if not thousand, and cant usually be understood in terms of their separate parts. Verbal phrases are unique to
English and can wreak havoc on someone learning English as a second language, even more so than say, the order of
multiple adjectives before a verb.
Ive been studying Spanish for 5 years now and it was weird at first trying to express action without using phrasal verbs
(Example saying cllete instead of shut up), but with a little practice I realized its not that hard to do. We can even
express 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 some
South 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. Its bad enough having to conjugate
Spanish verbs with sex, formal/informal and number in mind, but then you have to consider other factors other than just
past, present, and future. It becomes very confusing quick but with practice Im slowly getting there.
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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.
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 dont knowing it. Im sure you
all know the expression it looks Greek to me and what it means, so I think you should reconsider as to which language is
really 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
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 a
bare handful of them ever reaches proficiency level. English is assumed to be an easy language to learn because it is the
most 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 the
cameras on a level that everyone will understand and write laws that only a handful can comprehend. The duality of English
is one of the greatest accomplishments the world has ever seen.
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 know
English, 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, no
conjugation, easy sentence structure that is easy to get used to. The only thing that is hard is the writing structure. Learning
Hiragana and Katakana is easy, but every Kanji (complicated letter) is an effort, and considering the sheer amount used every
day, 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%
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 is
NEVER 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 is
easy, because they are surrounded by English music, film and culture, as well as English expressions used in there own
language. So its a matter of listening and repeating. However, it is a language often butchered and spoken incorrectly by
those who do not know the lack of rules or changes.
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 the
second 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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(/course/oxford-summer-english-16Oxford Summer English

An intensive English language summer

An intensive English language summer

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(/course/oxford-summer-english-13Oxford Summer English

(/course/academic-writing-ieltsAcademic Writing with

It just makes no sense!

A summer programme for students who wish

There is no ham in hamburger.

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Neither is there any apple nor pine in pineapple.

This makes no sense.

As native speakers, we rarely stop to think how illogical many of the

The order of the words

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

Another option: I sent him a letter he wasnt the one who

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

Homophones exist in the English language that has no fewer than

You probably wouldnt want to desert this dessert.

Synonyms arent necessarily interchangeable

Other synonyms for elegant are cultivated, discerning and

Traces of archaic English

The Glaswegian accent is famously hard to understand.

Is it really the hardest language?

Ultimately, though, its down to the individual whether or not a

Japaneses complicated writing system is one of the things

Image credits: banner (https://www.flickr.com/photos/francisco_osorio/8424416853); pineapple (https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnloo/4213423771);big book

22 Responses to Why Is English So Hard to Learn?

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