What is the Most Difficult Language to Learn and Why?

If you are a native speaker of the English language, then you deserve a level of congratulations on your ability to communicate in your native language. Why? The reason is that English is considered to be the single most difficult language for people to learn. If you are a non-English speaking person then you stand less of a chance of learning English than an English speaking person does of learning to use your language. As with any good dilemma, the reasons for the difficulty in learning to speak English have their derivations in both problems of quantity and also problems of quality.

The English language has more ways to express a single subject then almost any other language in the world. We have all heard that there are some languages that have dozens of ways to say the word love, but in the English language there are hundreds and thousands of combinations of words you can use to express love. What makes English the most difficult language to learn, is that there are over one million words in the English language and that number keeps growing every year. Communication in a language with so many variations and options can become almost impossible if you are trying to learn the language for the first time.

In many Asian countries people have developed a unique and fun way to learn English:  through song.  Karaoke is huge and folks learn the language while singing along with the music for karaoke.

Every language has its rules and then it also has the exception to those rules. What allows efficient communication in any language is an understanding by all parties of those rules and how those rules apply to the topic being discusses. With English, there are just as many exceptions as there are rules and that can cause a great deal of confusion for someone trying to learn the language and communicate in it. As an example, take two very small words that should not cause any problems at all. The word “go” has what is referred to as a short “o” sound at the end and that causes the word to be pronounced correctly as “go” with only one “o” sound at the end. The word “do” has a long “o” sound and that causes the word to be pronounced correctly as “doo” with the sound of an extra “o” at the end. If you add in the word “due” which is pronounced exactly the same as “do” but with a completely different meaning, then you get the idea of the difficulty of learning to communicate in English.

Maybe there is a good reason why more people in the United States are speaking Spanish than ever before.