Where English Gets Hard

Which language is especially difficult to learn? People ask this all the time, but the question is too broad. Mastering a language involves four different skills: understanding, speaking, reading and writing. And they can differ enormously in difficulty.

For this article, I looked specifically at reading and writing: How reliably can you work out the pronunciation from the spelling—and the spelling from the pronunciation? Linguists describe this relationship as a regular or transparent orthography.

Regular means that a rule keeps working

A regular spelling system does not necessarily have to look simple.

The French ▶eau consists of three letters but is pronounced like a single o. At first, that seems absurd. Once you know the rule, however, it is reliable.

Things become difficult when the same sequence of letters sounds completely different from one word to another—or when the same sound can be written in many different ways. Learning the rules is no longer enough. You have to memorise every individual word together with its pronunciation or spelling. And that is precisely where English becomes particularly difficult.

The two directions of regularity

Spelling and pronunciation can be connected in two directions.

1. Spelling → pronunciation

I see an unfamiliar word. Can I predict how it is pronounced from the way it is written?

In Spanish, this works extremely well. German and Greek are also largely regular in this direction.

In English, it works surprisingly badly:

• ▶though
• ▶through
• ▶thought
• ▶tough
• ▶cough
• ▶bough

The same sequence of letters—ough—is pronounced differently in every case. Even if you know all the sounds of English, you still cannot always work out how an unfamiliar word is pronounced from its spelling.

2. Pronunciation → spelling

I hear an unfamiliar word. Can I predict how it is written?

That is a different—and often more difficult—question.

In French, once I have learned the rules, I can often pronounce a written word reasonably well. But if I only hear a word containing the sound /o/, I still have no way of knowing whether it is written as o, au, eau, ault or eot.

Reading is also considerably easier than spelling in Greek. The sound /i/ can be written as ι, η, υ, ει, οι or υι, among other possibilities. One study estimated the regularity of Modern Greek at roughly 95 percent for reading, but only around 80 percent for spelling.

Comparing the languages

The following table shows estimated transparency figures from studies (share of regular mappings) for the languages I have experience learning so far.

Language and writing system	Spelling → pronunciation	Pronunciation → spelling	Typical difficulty
Greek 2	95 % →	80 % →	Several spellings, particularly for /i/ and /o/
Spanish 1	85 % →	67 % →	Some sounds have several spellings
German 1	78 % →	69 % →	Vowel length, length markers, doubled consonants and morphological spelling
French 1	80 % →	28 % →	Many silent letters and numerous spellings for the same sound
English 1	31 % →	36 % →	Many competing rules and numerous word-specific exceptions

Among the major European languages written with the Latin alphabet, English is an unusually irregular outlier. This is why children learning to read Spanish or Greek achieve basic reading accuracy much faster than children learning to read English.

Spanish: You can pronounce unfamiliar words

Spanish comes fairly close to the ideal of phonetic spelling. Once you understand the rules for letters such as c, g, j and r, you can usually pronounce even an unfamiliar word correctly—or at least come very close.

The other direction is not entirely unambiguous. b and v are pronounced alike in most varieties, h is silent, and depending on the dialect, s, c and z may also merge.

Even so, the system remains highly transparent overall. You learn the rules—and those rules take you remarkably far.

German: More complicated, but predictable

German does not have a one-to-one relationship between letters and sounds either. Sch, ch, ie, ei, eu and tsch all consist of several letters. Vowel length may be marked by an h, a doubled vowel, ie, or indirectly by the consonants that follow.

This looks complicated, but the rules are relatively stable. Once you know them, you can usually make a sensible attempt at pronouncing an unfamiliar German word.

Spelling is more difficult. If you only hear Wal, you cannot automatically know whether the word is Wal or Wahl. Rat and Rad end in the same sound in standard German, but they are spelled differently. Then there are capitalisation, word division and the morphological principle: Rad is spelled with a d because of Räder, even though it ends in a /t/ sound.

German is therefore more regular when reading than when writing.

Greek: Easy to read aloud, harder to spell correctly

At first, the Greek alphabet may look like the main obstacle, but it can be learned quickly. Once you know the letter combinations and can see where the stress falls, the pronunciation of a word is almost always predictable.

The many spellings for the same sounds are a result of linguistic history. Vowels that were once pronounced differently have merged in Modern Greek, while their historical spellings have remained.

Greek is therefore a textbook example of an asymmetrical orthography: highly transparent from spelling to pronunciation, but considerably less transparent from pronunciation to spelling.

French: It looks worse than it is

French words can look enormous and sound remarkably short. Several letters may combine to represent a single sound, while many endings are not pronounced at all.

At first, this can seem completely opaque. Much of it, however, follows consistent rules:

• eau and often au produce /o/
• ou produces /u/
• ch normally produces /ʃ/
• certain final consonants are usually silent
• sequences such as -ent are not pronounced in the relevant grammatical function

Once you know these rules, you can pronounce many unfamiliar words correctly. French is not as transparent as Spanish or Greek when reading, but it is far more systematic than its spelling initially suggests.

Writing reveals the other side of the system. A great deal of grammatical information appears on the page without being audible. Words and endings that sound identical may be spelled differently. French therefore has a strong asymmetry between reading and writing.

English: You have to learn every word twice

English is difficult in both directions.

When reading, I cannot reliably predict which pronunciation belongs to a sequence of letters. When writing, I cannot reliably predict which sequence of letters belongs to a sound.

The long /iː/ sound, for example, appears in:

see – sea – scene – machine – people

At the same time, identical letters can sound completely different depending on the word. English certainly has rules, but they compete with other rules, historical spellings, loanwords and countless word-specific exceptions.

English words therefore often have to be learned twice:

This is what the word looks like. And this is what it sounds like.

That is not an unavoidable property of the language itself. It is a property of its writing system. Comparative research accordingly shows that acquiring basic reading skills takes considerably longer in English than in most other European orthographies.

A language can be easy to speak and hard to read

A language being difficult to read or write tells us very little about how difficult it is to speak.

• Spanish spelling is transparent—but fast spoken Spanish can still sound like one continuous stream at first.
• French spelling is complex—but its pronunciation still follows many clear rules.
• And English uses just 26 ordinary letters—then turns them into one of the most unpredictable writing systems in Europe.

So the better question is not: Which language is difficult? It is: What exactly is difficult about this language—understanding it, speaking it, reading it or writing it?