Is English Hard to Learn? It Depends on Your First Language

Short answer: English is moderately hard to learn, and which parts are hard depends mostly on the language you already speak. Its grammar has few word forms, although articles and phrasal verbs only feel natural after a lot of use. A Spanish speaker already knows the alphabet and many related words, but has to hear 19 English vowel sounds where Spanish has 5 [1]. Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese speakers have to learn consonant groups and word endings that their languages do not allow.

Second Language, the game our team makes, teaches English to speakers of exactly these four languages, which is why this guide is organized by them. The facts about each language come from the phonology and grammar references listed at the end.

The hardest parts by first language

If your first language is Spanish

Spanish speakers share the most with English of these four groups: the same alphabet and many related words, such as persona and person, fantástico and fantastic, or limón and lemon [1]. Reading English words you have never heard is still risky, but many longer words will look familiar.

The Colorado Department of Education’s comparison chart counts 19 English vowel sounds and 5 Spanish ones [1]. Pairs like "ship" and "sheep", or "full" and "fool", can sound like one word until you have heard the difference many times. Spanish also has no separate v, z, or sh sound [2], so "vote" and "boat" can come out the same. The th of "think" depends on where your Spanish is from. Speakers in northern and central Spain have it, written z or c as in caza, while speakers in Latin America do not [3].

According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), only five consonants (l, r, d, n, and s) end Spanish words, and no Spanish word ends in a group of consonants [2]. English does this all the time: "asked" ends in s-k-t, and "texts" in k-s-t-s. At the start of a word, Spanish speakers tend to add a vowel before s plus a consonant, so "school" becomes "eschool" [4].

In grammar, Spanish has articles but uses them in different places. Spanish uses "the" for general ideas, as in la vida es difícil [5], where English says "life is hard" with no article.

If your first language is Korean

Korean speakers have the longest list of new consonants of the four. ASHA lists 11 English sounds that Korean does not have, including f, v, z, both th sounds, ch, j, r, and w [6].

Korean has one sound where English has l and r. It sounds like an l at the end of a syllable and like a quick tap at the start [6]. That is why "rice" and "lice", or "right" and "light", need deliberate listening practice.

Korean allows no consonant groups at the start or end of a word, and only seven consonants can end a syllable [6]. An English word like "street" starts with three consonants in a row, which no Korean word does.

Korean has no words for "a" or "the" [7], and it puts the verb at the end [8]. English puts the verb between the subject and the object, and that order is what tells you who did what: "the dog saw the cat" and "the cat saw the dog" use the same words.

If your first language is Vietnamese

Vietnamese speakers start with the Latin alphabet and with a v sound, which Korean and Chinese speakers have to learn. ASHA lists only four English consonants that Vietnamese lacks: the two th sounds, the ch of "church", and the j of "judge" [9]. Vietnamese spelling also uses ch, but for a different sound.

Vietnamese has no consonant groups, most words have one syllable, and only six consonants can end a word [9]. In a study at Can Tho University, 36 Vietnamese university students tended to simplify English groups of three consonants by dropping the first or second one, and sometimes both [13].

This matters because English puts grammar on the last sound of a word. Vietnamese words change form very little; the World Atlas of Language Structures classifies it as having "little affixation" [10]. So the -s in "she works" and the -ed in "walked" are easy to leave off, and then the past sounds like the present.

Vietnamese is tonal: each syllable has a tone that changes its meaning [9]. In English, pitch does not change what a word means, though a rising voice at the end of "You’re coming?" turns it into a question without changing any word.

If your first language is Chinese

Mandarin speakers face the same word-edge problem as Vietnamese speakers, with even fewer possible endings. According to ASHA, only n and ng can end a Mandarin word (not counting the -r of Beijing-style erhua), Mandarin has no consonant groups, and English v, z, sh, both th sounds, the ch of "church", and the j of "judge" are missing [11]. Pinyin ch and j stand for different sounds.

ASHA’s sheet also lists common substitutions by Mandarin speakers learning English: s for the th in "think", f or w for v, and dropping final consonants [11]. A dropped final consonant also drops grammar: "walked" becomes "walk" and "books" becomes "book".

Mandarin has no articles. Shuo Feng, who tested 53 intermediate and advanced Chinese-speaking learners of English, describes Mandarin as article-less, with a demonstrative word that does part of the job of "the" [12]. If your language has never needed "a" or "the", English can seem to add them for no reason, and the rules take a long time to feel natural.

Hard for every learner

Four things are hard whatever your first language is: spelling, irregular verbs, phrasal verbs, and fast speech.

Spelling often does not tell you the sound. "Though", "through", "tough", and "cough" all end in -ough and are said four different ways. 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 [14].

English has around 180 irregular verbs [15], and they include the verbs you use most: be and was, go and went, see and saw. No rule produces these forms, so you learn them one at a time. Our list of irregular English verbs is useful for checking.

Phrasal verbs, a verb plus a small word like "give up" or "take off", often mean something the parts do not explain, and one can have several meanings: a plane takes off, and you take off your coat. In a 100-million-word collection of British English, Gardner and Davies found that 100 phrasal verbs make up more than half of all phrasal verb uses, and those 100 have 559 possible meanings [16].

One syllable in each English word is strong and the others shrink: PHO-to-graph, pho-TO-gra-pher. Small words shrink too, so "I want to go" comes out as "I wanna go", and a phrase you know on the page can be hard to pick out by ear.

Parts of English that are easier than they look

• Nouns have no gender, and adjectives never change: a big house, two big houses.
• Verbs have very few forms. In the present tense most verbs have two (walk, walks), and a regular past form is the same for every subject: I walked, she walked, they walked.
• Most plurals add -s. A short list of common nouns change instead (man and men), and a few do not change at all: one sheep, two sheep.
• There is a huge amount of English to hear and read. W3Techs found English on 49.5% of websites whose language it could identify in October 2026 [17].

Why our course teaches "the" as a lesson

Second Language’s English course has 250 words, and "the" and "a" are not among them. Korean and Chinese have no articles to translate them into [7][12], so a vocabulary card for "the" would teach nothing. Articles are instead the first of 15 short grammar lessons, written in your own language, and the first lesson appears when you enter the starting village. It covers points like the choice between "a" and "an", which follows the sound and not the letter: "an hour", but "a university". After that you meet "the" all the time; about 3 in 10 of the course’s example sentences contain it.

Each of the 250 words comes with 10 example sentences (4 easy, 4 medium, and 2 hard), for 2,500 sentences in all; you can read every one on our English course page. The last 150 words were chosen by how often they appear in film and TV subtitles. Every word and sentence is translated into Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese (simplified or traditional), and each sentence can be played in two generated voices.

The grammar lessons are the same for every first language and come in the same order, so a Spanish speaker, whose language has articles, still gets the article lesson first. None of the 15 lessons covers pronunciation, so the sound pairs in the table above are practice you add yourself.

What to practice first

• Take your row from the table and pick one sound pair you confuse, such as ship and sheep, rice and lice, think and sink, or vote and boat. Listen to both words until you can tell them apart, then practice saying them.
• Say the last sound of every word when you read aloud, especially -s, -ed, and groups like -sks and -sts.
• Learn a new word by ear before you look at its spelling. Even the letter names do not match their sounds; see the English alphabet.
• Learn the most common words first. Understanding about 98% of the words in spoken English takes 6,000 to 7,000 word families, but the first 1,000 do much of the work: in one novel they made up about 81% of all the words [18]. Our 100 most common English words are a good start.
• Learn prepositions and phrasal verbs inside whole phrases ("in June", "on Monday", "at five o’clock") rather than alone. See common English phrases.
• Spend most of your practice time hearing English you can mostly understand, which is called comprehensible input.