ENGLISH IS NOT AN EASY LANGUAGE

January 13, 2025 - Published

I recently heard someone call English an easy language in an auxlang community, and it kind of surprised me. It's very understandable for a native English speaker to not realize how difficult their own language is, but in a community that's essentially built on the idea of replacing English (often for being too difficult to learn), it was something I expected to be well-known, as a native English speaker myself.

I wanted to compile an article to explain why English is considered a difficult language (especially since it fuels an understanding of why I have my own auxlang proposal), despite English being widely-spoken -- which we all know is not due to its ease of use, but due to very specific historical events. There are some important disclaimers that I have to mention beforehand, though.

First of all, the easiest language for everyone is their first language. The second easiest language is largely dependent on what their first language is, but learning any language is hard in general. English will be much easier for some people, and much harder for others, but we will be talking about general aspects that should be difficult for most people.

Second of all, I'm obviously not saying that English is the MOST difficult language, or even one of the most difficult ones, just that I think it's a lot more difficult than a lot of people realize. In practice, it's actually one of the easier ones to learn just due to the sheer amount of resources that exist.

However, in a vacuum, there is a specific feature that makes a language harder to learn regardless of your first language, and those are exceptions, which English happens to be full of! This is because unless your language has the exact same exceptions (basically impossible), you have to learn every single one of these exceptions from scratch in order to use them properly. We'll start with the orthography since it's a very common thing to poke fun at.

-- SPELLING --

English spelling is a nightmare. It's incredibly inconsistent, and you essentially have to learn the pronunciation of every single word from scratch.

The common example is the -ough ending, which is pronounced differently between "through," "thorough," "cough," and "tough". However, it's a lot more common than one might expect. Depending on your accent, the letter "a" is pronounced differently in "pad" /æ/, "father" /ɑː/, "what" /ɒ/, "water" /ɔː/, "major" /eɪ/, and "about" /ə/. That's 6 different sounds on one letter, and with no rules at all to differentiate them!

If you ever learn a language with consistent spelling, you'll know that it might have several rules, but those rules will get you about 99% accurate for every word in the language. Italian is a famous example of a language with consistent spelling -- the letter C is pronounced differently at the beginning and middle of the word "cappuccino," but that's because there's a rule where ca/co/cu makes C pronounced like the English letter K, while ci/ce make it pronounced like the English CH (the double C just makes the sound longer).

Without consistent spelling rules, it's essentially impossible to guess the spelling of a word just by hearing it, and learning about English pronunciation through text material is also much more difficult than it should be. Someone wrote an entire poem just to show 800 examples of English's bad spelling!

Why is the spelling so weird? It comes down to a lot of things (largely a sound shift that the writing never got caught up on), but part of the reason is that English uses the Latin alphabet despite being a Germanic language, which gives it a lot of uncommon sounds unsupported by the writing system. Oh, am I hearing something about phonology?

-- SOUNDS --

English has a lot of very uncommon sounds. To show you, an English speaker, how difficult it is to gauge this without looking at other languages, let's take the absolute most common word in the English language: "the".

It has 2 sounds, the consonant /ð/ (voiced dental fricative) and the vowel /ə/ (schwa). These sounds are PRETTY rare across languages. According to Phoible, the schwa is in 22% of languages (uncommon but not too bad), while the voiced dental fricative is in 5% of all languages -- only 160 of them total!

That doesn't account for the number of speakers, so let me put it this way. Some big languages that DON'T have /ð/ outside of nonstandard dialects include: French, Italian, German, Russian, Brazilian Portugese, Mandarin Chinese (the language with the second most speakers in the world), Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Thai, and Hindi-Urdu. Spanish and European Portugese technically has it as an allopohone, but that means it's not really a distinct sound to the speakers.

For the majority of speakers, they'll have to learn at least 1 entirely new sound just to speak English, but it's more likely that they'll have to learn many more. Spanish has 5 vowels. English might have 5 vowel letters, but it has about 13 different vowel sounds, depending on how they're counted. They might not be the most difficult sounds to learn by themselves, sure, but to replicate and distinguish consistently?

I know people who have lived in America for decades but still struggle with things like being able to say the vowels in "cop" /ɑ/ and "cap" /æ/ differently and correctly. It's difficult to really express what that's like to a native English speaker, so I encourage you to hear the difference between things like the French words vin and vent.

Oh, and that's only talking about sounds in isolation. English also has uncommonly difficult consonant clusters. A word in English might start with 3 consonants in a row, like "stress," but in a related language like Spanish, they tend to add vowels just to make it easier to pronounce -- "estrés," so it can be separated like es-trés, only having 2 consonants in a row. Non-English speakers are sure to enjoy words like "sixths," which have 4 consonant sounds in a row (k + s + th + s)!

If this is difficult to understand as a native English speaker, just look at words from a language like Polish and try to say, "yeah, bezwzględny looks easy to pronounce" (and yes that is a real word meaning "ruthless," and yes I made sure to choose an example that avoided those tricky-looking digraphs!).

-- GRAMMAR --

In some ways, English grammar is much simpler than its related languages (see the simplified conjugation and nearly nonexistent case system), but there's still a lot that's difficult to non-native speakers.

Bringing back our old friend "the," it's what's called a "definite article." This is something that's completely absent in many languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi-Urdu, Finnish, and most Slavic languages, including Russian. It may be common in Germanic and Romantic languages, but all these other speakers would have to learn how/when to use English's most common word, which doesn't have any functional equivalent in their language!

English is also notoriously inconsistent in its grammar rules. Plural forms of words have loads of exceptions -- even after accounting for general rules (-s by default, -es if ending in -e, -ies if ending in -y, etc.), we still have words that go child -> children, leaf -> leaves, deer -> deer, mouse -> mice, die -> dice, with little to no discernable rules to be able to explain them.

This is also very common for the English past tense, which has many irregular verb forms: see -> saw, go -> went, fly -> flew, run -> ran. Again, this might not be a particularly complicated concept on paper, but someone learning the language would have to memorize every single one of these individually, which takes significantly longer than any more consistent language.

Meanwhile, Mandarin Chinese, very well-known as one of the most difficult languages for an English speaker to learn, has almost no inflection whatsoever, meaning that words don't change from tense or plurality. Makes you think!

-- CONCLUSION --

There are a lot of people that struggle with English, but it's an issue that largely goes unnoticed by native English speakers because, in the modern day, pretty much everyone is pressured into being fluent in English.

By writing this article, I hoped to be able to highlight some common issues that people might run into, in order to create understanding for people's struggles. Many people seem to expect perfect English from everyone they meet under the assumption that it's "not that hard," when it really is a difficult language that's even markedly different from the languages it's most related to.

That being said, I'd also like to mention how it highlights the reason so many people want a simpler, constructed, easy-to-learn international auxiliary language. As controversial as a language like Esperanto may be at times, you only have to learn the alphabet once, and that allows you to read every single word in the language without exceptions. You only have to learn the conjugation rules once, and you can conjugate every verb in the language without exceptions.

It may not be the solution that the world ends up going with, but I do admire the effort some people go through to make sure everyone's experience is accounted for.