Is English Hard to Learn? What Is Actually Difficult, and What Is Easier Than You Think

English is easy to start and hard to finish. The grammar is small: nouns have no gender, and verbs barely change. The hard parts are spelling that does not match the sound, many vowel sounds, irregular verbs, phrasal verbs, and small words like "the" and "on." You are not alone. About 1.5 billion people speak English, and around 1.1 billion of them speak it as a second language [1]. Most English speakers learned it the way you are learning it now.

We make Second Language, a game for learning English, Spanish, and Mandarin. Some of what follows is why we built it the way we did.

What is genuinely hard

Spelling does not tell you the sound

In Spanish, you can usually read a new word aloud correctly. In English, you often cannot. "Though," "through," "tough," and "cough" all end in "ough," and each one sounds different. A study of children learning to read in English and 12 other European languages found that basic reading developed more than twice as slowly in English as in languages with regular spelling [2].

So learn a word by ear first and by spelling second. When you already know the sound, the spelling is something to remember, not something to guess. The English alphabet is a good first step: even letter names like "h" and "w" do not sound like the letters in words.

Vowels and missing sounds

Spanish has five vowel sounds. One common teaching count gives English 19 [3]. Pairs like "ship" and "sheep," or "full" and "fool," are different words in English, but they can sound the same if your language has one vowel where English has two.

Each language also misses some English consonants. Spanish has no separate v sound, so "vote" and "boat" can come out the same [4]. Korean has no f, v, z, or English r, and one Korean sound covers both l and r, so "rice" and "lice" take practice [5]. Mandarin has no v, z, or th [6]. The th sounds in "think" and "this" are also missing from Korean and Vietnamese [5][7]. It is a short list, and you fix it by hearing the words many times.

Word endings

English words can end in groups of consonants. "Asked" ends in s-k-t, and "texts" ends in k-s-t-s. Mandarin words can end only in n or ng, and Mandarin has no consonant groups at all [6]. Vietnamese has no consonant groups and only six consonants that can end a word [7]. Korean has no consonant groups at the start or end of a word, and only seven consonants that can end a syllable [5]. In a study of Vietnamese university students, learners often shortened groups of three consonants by dropping sounds [8]. Spanish words do not normally start with s plus another consonant, so Spanish speakers often say "school" as "eschool" [9].

This matters because English puts grammar in its endings. Drop the last sound, and "walked" becomes "walk" and "books" becomes "book."

Stress and rhythm

In an English word, one syllable is strong and the others are weak. The strong syllable can move: PHO-to-graph, pho-TO-gra-pher, pho-to-GRAPH-ic. Weak syllables often shrink to a short "uh" sound, and so do small words. In fast speech, "I want to go" sounds like "I wanna go." This is why many learners can read English well but cannot follow a fast conversation. The words are the same. The sound is not.

Irregular verbs

Most English verbs form the past with -ed: walk, walked. About 180 do not [10], and they include the verbs you use every day: be and was, go and went, see and saw, say and said. No rule tells you these forms. Our list of irregular English verbs is a useful reference, but you will remember them best from sentences you hear.

Phrasal verbs

A phrasal verb is a verb plus a small word, like "give up," "find out," or "take off." The meaning is often not the sum of the parts, and one phrasal verb can mean several things: a plane takes off, and you take off your coat. A study of a 100-million-word collection of English found that just 100 phrasal verbs make up more than half of all phrasal verb uses, and those 100 have 559 possible meanings [11]. The list of common ones is short, but you need context to know which meaning is meant.

"A," "the," and prepositions

Korean has no words like "a" and "the" [12], and neither does Mandarin [13]. If your language works without them, English can seem to add them for no reason. Spanish has articles, but it uses them in different places. Spanish says "la vida" where English says just "life" [14], so it is easy to say "the life is hard" when English wants "life is hard."

Prepositions are similar. English says "in June," "on Monday," and "at five o’clock." They rarely match your language one to one, so learn them inside whole phrases.

What is easier than you think

• No grammatical gender. A table, a book, and a house are not masculine or feminine, and adjectives never change: a big house, two big houses.
• Verbs barely change. In the present, most verbs have two forms: walk and walks. A regular past form is the same for everyone: I walked, she walked, they walked. A Spanish verb has six forms in the present tense alone.
• Plurals are mostly just -s.
• Pronouns are one of the few places where English still changes form (I and me, he and him), and the whole set fits on one page: see English pronouns.
• English is everywhere. About half of all websites are in English [15], and there is more English music, video, and podcasts than you could ever finish.

How to make the hard parts smaller

• Learn the most common words first. To understand about 98% of the words in spoken English, you need around 6,000 to 7,000 word families, but the first 1,000 do most of the work. In one novel, they made up about 81% of all the words [16]. Start with the 100 most common English words.
• Listen far more than you study. Choose material you can mostly understand, and listen to a lot of it. This is comprehensible input, and it teaches the sounds, the rhythm, and the phrasal verbs at the same time.
• Learn sound before spelling. Hear a word, say it, and only then look at how it is written.
• Learn phrases, not single words. Articles, prepositions, and phrasal verbs make sense inside phrases. Common English phrases are a good place to start.
• Say the endings. When you speak, pay attention to the last sound of each word, especially -s and -ed.

This is the reasoning behind Second Language’s English course, which is for speakers of Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese. Every sentence has native-speaker audio, explanations are in your own language, and you move forward only after you show you understood what a character said. The free intro course has 250 words and 2,500 practice sentences, on iPhone, Android, and desktop web. You can see every word and sentence in the course before you play.

So, is English hard to learn?

It is uneven. The grammar is simpler than many people expect. The sounds and spelling take real time, and which parts are hardest depends on your first language. But almost everything that is hard about English gets easier with more listening, and English gives you a huge amount to listen to. If you hear a lot of English at a level you can follow, it will feel familiar sooner than its reputation suggests.

For more word lists and guides, see all our English learning resources.