Why is English Hard to Learn?

why is English a hard language to learn and let me clarify I'm not saying that English is a super hard language or that it's harder than other languages uh I'm saying what are the elements that make English hard because every language that you might learn has certain elements that make that language hard to learn to an extent uh for you certain languages might be easier than other languages to learn however every language has its hard elements the elements that make it hard so let's talk about three things uh in my opinion that make English a

hard language for many people um three elements that uh cause problems for English Learners and uh hopefully uh I don't discourage you with this video hopefully I can kind of motivate you to get over these uh obstacles these hurdles as we say so um I'm going to talk about three different elements that make English a hard language and the last one the third one is by far the hardest in my op opinion so make sure you watch until the end because the third one is really the hardest thing and uh I want to kind of

encourage you with that thing and really help you understand it a little bit more I think after um hearing me talk about it uh you'll have a better understanding of the English language and I think um you'll be better equipped mentally to uh approach English with um the right ideas uh the right um mindset let's say so uh let's talk about the first thing that makes English uh harder uh than some other languages uh specifically uh for this element which is phrasal verbs okay I know that uh English Learners uh spend a lot of time

worrying about phrasal verbs and this is one of the questions I get the most people ask me about phrasal verbs how do I learn phrasal verbs uh why are there so many phrasal verbs what tips do you have uh for English Learners who want to learn phrasal verbs I get this question over and over again and there are a few reasons why phrasal verbs cause problems for people um but really they shouldn't be seen as so daunting so scary okay so the first thing I want to mention is that English Learners have an idea of

phrasal verbs um that is not the best idea or the best way to think about them I'm not saying every English learner has this but many people have this and that is uh English Learners think of phrasal verbs as being uh a verb plus a preposition and uh each element the verb and the preposition have their own meaning and you combine them and they create a new meaning and it sounds really complicated when you think of it like that and I get questions like this from students where they say why do you put up on

the end of bring for example why the up there why does up need to be there what does it have to do with up right and you can see that they don't have the right mindset when it comes to phrasal verbs because let me tell you a phrasal verb is just a vocabulary phrase okay that's all it is it's a vocabulary phrase meaning don't don't think of the two separate elements just think of the entire phrase and think of it as another vocabulary word it just has two words or three words okay so I know

that in many of your languages this doesn't exist this concept of phrasal verbs either doesn't exist or it's just not like it is in English um but that's okay if you come at it with the right mindset then it won't seem as hard um however it is hard in the sense that the fact that we have phrasal verbs means that we have more vocabulary in English Okay let me tell you why that is um that's because many phrasal verbs are synonyms for other words that are just like one word so for example bring up the

phrase I just used a minute ago uh bring up is kind of like a synonym for mention in some contexts bring up can have different meanings but one of the meanings is to mention I can say why did you bring up that topic why did you mention that topic so the fact that we have the phrasal verb bring up uh means that we have more vocabulary because mention already exists and now you have another vocabulary phrase bring up so it just adds more words more vocabulary to the language uh if a language doesn't have all

of these phrasal verbs that are synonyms okay um right like go in and enter for example right uh you can think of tons of them um if a language doesn't have all of those synonyms with phrasal verbs there's going to be less vocabulary overall so yes one thing that makes English hard is that there's more vocabulary because there are tons of phrasal verbs okay um and by the way if you're interested in learning phrasal verbs and getting practice with phrasal verbs I have a very exciting announcement which is that I'm going to be releasing specific

phrasal verb podcast episodes uh once a week starting I think um August 2nd I think it is I'm forgetting uh the the date of the first one but uh very soon I'm going to be releasing phrasal verb episodes in addition to my my normal podcast episodes and so uh I'm going to help you learn phrasal verbs in a natural way through listening uh how you're supposed to learn phrasal verbs okay so um phrasal verbs are tricky but uh you don't have to um think of them as being really scary or some really complex uh element

just think of them as vocabulary words that have more than one word it's a vocabulary phrase and I'm going to help you learn phrasal verbs so just start listening to my phrasal verb episodes once a week okay um so the first thing um is phrasal verbs that's the first thing that I wanted to mention that makes English hard the next thing is the irregularity of English what does this mean this means that English is not very consistent in a lot of its rules and in the whole system in general so this is the case for

multiple languages like French for example I'm learning French and French is also pretty irregular uh and in some other languages there's a lot more regularity it's the opposite like Spanish for example Le Spanish in my opinion is a very logical regular language for the most part of course there are some irregularities here and there but really by and large languages like Spanish are pretty regular versus languages like English English is not regular at all and one big reason for that is because English has major influence from other languages right like Latin and French and Greek

and English is a Germanic language so think of that it's a Germanic language that's how it's classified but it has tons of influence from Latin and French and Greek and probably some other languages and so you have uh a system and you have different elements like spelling which are completely irregular right they really don't make sense a lot of the time because they come from or different the spelling of different words uh comes from these different influences these different languages okay so some words have like a really weird spelling and you realize because uh it's

like a French word word that we've kind of appropriated right um so things like that uh so you can probably think of some examples like uh the word cough versus coffee right how do you spell those two words very differently right one is c u g cough and the other c f f but they sound almost the same cough and coffee so why would they have such different spellings well you can understand why now because of the irregularity the influence from different languages um English can be hard for that reason and it's It's Tricky right

because you don't really know how certain words are spelled until you see them right or you don't really know some of the irregular forms or whatever uh until you hear them many times because it doesn't follow a very regular consistent pattern a lot of the time so that's a big thing with English the irregularity of the language definitely causes issues for English learners but this is something that you should should embrace meaning you should accept this and welcome this because it's kind of an interesting element of English the irregularity the influence from multiple different languages

this is one of the cool things about English I think yes it can be tricky because of the irregularity but it's also a rich language because of its irregularities right now I'm learning French and French has a lot of irregularities because uh it has uh like English some pretty heavy influence from other sources right um and because of that there are some things that look very strange in French for example or you think is that really a word and um I've learned to just kind of accept this and embrace it and say oh cool you

know it's uh something that makes French more interesting to learn this variety this irregularity so I think that you can do that for English as well you can just U learn to accept it to embrace it and to not get frustrated by it and say why uh uh do we have these words like though tough through thorough taught that all kind of look somewhat similar and have these silent letters these gh's Etc right if you get frustrated by that and you stay frustrated your language learning process is going to be harder right but if you

say whoa this looks kind of crazy but I want to learn it anyway if you have a better attitude about it it won't be that hard okay because the way you're thinking about it uh puts obstacles in front of you if you have the mindset that this is so hard this doesn't make any sense English is super irregular I hate this if you have that mindset then it's going to be a lot harder for you okay so try to come at English approach English with a mindset of accepting the weird stuff okay accepting the irregularities

okay all right this is the the one you've all been waiting for what is the hardest thing about learning English for me this as an English teacher with years of experience teaching uh training uh people learning languages comparing languages for me it's not even a question it's no doubt for me what is the hardest element of English and that is the stress timing of the language what does that mean some of you already know if you've heard me talk about this in uh different podcast episodes but I'm sure many of you have no idea what

I mean by stress timing so some languages are what we call syllable timed languages this basically means that each syllable in every word every sentence has more or less the same or a similar length Okay so there isn't a big difference in how long the syllable is how stressed each syllable is um so you can clearly hear all of the different syllables in the language so Spanish is a great example of this Spanish is a syllable timed language so there isn't a huge difference in length between the different syllables in Spanish however some languages are

not syllable timed they are stress timed English is one of the extreme examples of this so it's an extremely stress timed language so what does that mean a stress time language is a language um in which the stressed syllables are way longer than the unstressed syllables we're talking like almost four times longer if I'm not mistaken so like imagine a stress syllable is held for like let's say three times the length of an unstressed syllable that means that many syllables in English are going to sound so fast that you have a hard time hearing them

if you're not really advanced in the language and this also affects not just your listening but your pronunciation because if you don't have this Variety in the stress of different syllables the length of different syllables then you're not going to be pronouncing words correctly so this affects your listening your comprehension and it really affects your pronunciation as well and the other thing about stress timed languages uh it's not just that the length of the syllables is very different it's that the length of time the amount of time between stressed syllables uh should be about the

same between every stressed syllable regardless of how many unstressed syllables are between those stress syllables I know that sounds crazy or it sounds hard to understand let me show you a very clear example of this so let's imagine the phrase sadly no okay so someone asks me have you ever been to Japan and I say sadly no I have three syllables the first syllable is stressed and the third syllable is stressed sadly no okay I have sad and no those are my stressed syllables and I have one syllable in the middle that doesn't have primary

stress however because it's just one syllable in between these two stress syllables um we don't have a lot of reduction we don't reduce that syllable too much okay you can still hear it clearly sadly no however imagine we had more uh syllables in between those two stress syllables so let's say we have the phrase fortunately no so now listen fortunately no we have five syllables there the first one is stressed four and the last one is stressed no but now we have three syllables in the middle that don't have stress so like I just said

a minute ago it doesn't matter how many syllables are in the middle of the stress syllables it needs to be the same length as the other phrase sadly no that had just one unstressed syllable in the middle so those three unstressed syllables in fortunately no have to be really fast they have to be reduced they have to sound really really short in order to keep the proper stress timing in order to have the same amount of time between the two stressed syllables so listen to the difference sadly no fortunately no it's basically the same amount

of time between between that first stress syllable and the last but in the second phrase there are three syllables so I have to say them really fast fortunately no right so I sayun fortunately no sadly no fortunately no do you hear that it's pretty much the same length sadly no fortunately no okay so I hope you understood that because uh this is a really really important Concept in English I can't stress this enough I know some of you for some of you this might sound boring like what is this guy talking about but this is

the main or one of the main reasons why a non-native English speaker um does not sound like a native speaker even if they say everything correctly they have perfect grammar even if they pronounce all of the uh different letters correctly all the vowels correctly and the consonants if they don't have the correct stress timing they don't sound like a native speaker and unfortunately this is something that you can't just Master very quickly this is something that takes a really long time to master in the sense that if you want to sound like a native speaker

it's going to take a really long time and I don't want to discourage you here because I know that sounds negative but uh I don't think that your goal for most of you should be to sound like a native speaker because that's such a big unrealistic goal because of this stress timing um that you're always going to be frustrated because it's gonna feel like you can never sound exactly like a native speaker it's not just like follow these three rules and then you'll have the perfect stress timing in your language no it doesn't work like

that um so what I recommend is that you become aware of this of this concept uh By the way when people watch my listening practice seminars or my uh pronunciation seminars usually they have this realization of like wow I've never even heard of this before and it changes their whole way of thinking about the sound system and the stress system in English so um this is something that usually people never hear about they never learn about but if they can just become aware of this it really helps them kind of visualize the language better you

can understand why it's so hard to understand something in English even when you can read it and understand it I'm sure that's happened to you many times where you can read something in English and you understand it but if you heard that same sentence without seeing it then you wouldn't understand like 60 or 7 7% of it right why is that if you know the words why can't you understand it and that's usually because you're not um understanding all of the individual sounds that have been reduced because they're unstressed syllables okay so uh I don't

mean to discourage you with this like I said I know I'm talking about how hard this is um I know I'm saying that uh this is something that takes like a lifetime to master but that's not a problem because again your goal shouldn't be to sound like a native speaker you should try to sound as close to a native speaker as possible right that's a a healthier mindset uh not to say I need to sound like a native speaker because the stress timing the stress system of English is so complex that if you're not a

native speaker uh you know if you didn't grow up speaking this language it's very hard very hard to master it some people have gotten close I've heard some really impressive uh language Learners and polyglots that uh have learned English as an adult and they sound really good but if you listen to them long enough like they might sound like a native speaker for 10 seconds but if I keep listening to the video after 30 seconds or 40 seconds I can tell huh that didn't sound right because of some um issue with the stress they overly

stressed a certain syllable or um they didn't reduce a syllable enough or didn't stress a syllable enough or whatever um sooner or later something comes up in speech that shows that they're not a native speaker so you know even the greatest language Learners who have done an amazing job learning English as an adult even for them it's very very hard to just sound like a native speaker 100% of the time because English is very complicated in terms of its stress timing that whole system okay so I would encourage you to have healthier mindset a healthier

goal uh to try to um get better and get closer to sounding like a native speaker but don't expect to be able to be exactly like a native speaker 100% of the time you'll be frustrated because it'll feel like you're just not there okay so I do want to recommend that if you're interested in learning more about the sound system the stress system I should say in English then I highly recommend that you check out my listening practice seminars and my pronunciation seminars because this is what we do we practice with these types of things

that are very challenging uh related to stress and reduced speech and things like that and so if you're interested in that make sure to sign up for my membership it's just $2 a month to sign up if you want my listening practice seminars and then $3 if you want the pronunciation ones as well and then $4 if you also want my uh Advanced podcast episodes in which I speak at normal speed and my sound training videos in which we look at some difficult sound patterns in English and I help you with them so all of

that you can access by clicking on the link down below and I hope that I didn't discourage you like I said with this video I just wanted to discuss some of the elements that I think uh make English challenging especially this third element right uh but uh I want to encourage you to continue practicing continue doing your listening your speaking all of that and little by little these challenges are going to become a little bit less challenging okay I hope you enjoyed this video I'm really enjoying this format I feel like I'm just talking to

a friend of mine so I hope you like these videos and uh you can always activate the automated subtitles I'm not going to subtitle these videos but if you click on the settings button down in the bottom right hand corner you can activate the automated subtitle and it will be correct most of the time so feel free to do that if uh you need help understanding me in these videos all right thank you for watching this video and I'll talk to you in the next one