Is English the Hardest Language to Learn?

It’s a common refrain that English is the hardest language to learn. It’s something that native English speakers themselves love to say despite having learned the languages themselves as babies.

There’s no doubt that learning any language is challenging. There are a million things to remember, from vocabulary words to grammar to pronunciation.

But is English really the hardest language out there?

What makes a language difficult to learn?

Learning a new language is always a challenge. It can take years to reach fluency, and many people give up before they reach that point.

Different languages present different challenges. As an English speaker, if I try to learn Spanish, its writing system is similar enough to English’s that I won’t have too hard of a time reading the language. If I learn Russian, on the other hand, the writing system is entirely different, and I’ll have to devote more time to learning what sound each character represents before I can read anything. That’s extra time spent on top of things like vocabulary and grammar, and it’s not even touching the fact that Spanish grammar is also similar to English grammar.

But the key thing is that Spanish’s writing system is only easier for me to learn compared to Russian’s because I’m an English speaker. It’s not because the Russian writing system is inherently harder than Spanish’s. Spanish speakers would also have an easier time learning the English alphabet compared to the Russian one, generally speaking. Bulgarian, on the other hand, has a writing system similar to Russian’s, so Bulgarian speakers would find Russian easier to read.

These differences and similarities are one of the biggest factors in how difficult a language is to learn, and they depend entirely on your native language or other languages you’ve already learned. In this respect, the “most difficult” languages to learn varies greatly.

However, there are some aspects of languages that make them particularly challenging to learn. For example, English has a phonetic writing system, which allows you to guess what letter to use when writing even if you don’t have the spelling memorized. (Of course, English is also kind strange with this as we use the same letters for multiple sounds, but overall, you can sound things out.) On the other hand, Chinese isn’t written phonetically. To read or write it, your only option is to memorize the characters. This can present an extra level of challenge as it also means you have thousands of characters to memorize compared to the 26 found in English.

Grammar systems also vary in difficulty. Russian is one language that has a very complex grammar system, which can make it challenging to learn.

However, there is a catch here because, again, just how difficult it is depends on your native language. Japanese uses some of the same characters as Chinese, which can be helpful for Japanese speakers learning Chinese, and other Slavic languages, such as Ukrainian, have similar grammar rules to Russian, which means Slavic language speakers will have a bit of an easier time learning Russian.

If that’s the case, then maybe the language least related to any others might be the most difficult to learn. After all, if there are no similar languages, then no one would have an advantage. There are some so-called language isolates, languages that don’t seem to be connected to other languages.

However, this gets complicated as well. Japanese is one of these languages, with the only language related to it being Ryukyuan, an indigenous language of the Ryukyu islands in Japan. But despite this, Japanese has borrowed one of its three writing systems from Chinese.

Korean is another isolate, but while it is generally considered a difficult language to learn, it’s writing system is entirely phonetic and is sometimes considered one of the easiest in the world to learn. (The system itself, hangul, was created by a Korean king to solve illiteracy in his kingdom by creating a simpler writing system.)

English, meanwhile, is a Germanic language and not at all close to being an isolate. Dutch, German, and Norwegian are just some of the languages that it’s closely related to.

The fact of the matter is, choosing a language that’s most difficult to learn for everyone is near impossible, and if we were going to do it, it's doubtful that English would come out on top.

How long does it take to become fluent in English?

Becoming fluent in any language always takes a lot of time and effort, but there are many factors that affect just how long it takes. Someone who is constantly surrounded by a language will probably have an easier time learning it than someone who isn’t, and of course, what languages you already speak play a role. Then there’s how much time someone has to study, what study materials they use, whether they have English speakers to talk to, and so on.

As a former English as a foreign language teacher myself, I can attest that the time it takes any given person to reach fluency in English varies so wildly that it’s almost not worth giving an average. But, keeping that in mind, it takes around 480 hours of study for speakers of languages similar to English and 720 hours of study for speakers of languages that are very different from English.

That means that if a Spanish speaker studied English for 5 hours every week, it would take them 96 weeks, or nearly two years, to reach fluency. If a Chinese speaker studied English for 5 hours every week, it would take them 144 weeks, or nearly three years, to reach a similar level of fluency.

However long it takes, it’s clear that learning a new language to fluency takes a lot of dedication and commitment.