Is English Really The Hardest Language to Learn?

Short answer: no. But why not?

I came across this article, What’s The Hardest Language to Learn in The World?, because I had actually recognized the publisher, Fluent in 3 Months, from the beginning of one of my own language textbooks. So, I read what author and founder Benny Lewis had to say about the “hardest language to learn”. 

There is none! He actually offered a really refreshing perspective on this question, because I’m sure almost every native English speaker has bragged about speaking the “hardest language ever”. Essentially, the difficulty of a language comes down to a few things: similarity to your native language, your motivation and willingness to learn, and how much time you’re willing to put into continuing to learn. No one language is harder than another because children are all able to reach fluency in a few years, but languages do become subjectively harder depending on which language you grew up with. 

Benny mainly establishes a lot of ethos in this article, because he states that he has a lot of experience with the language learning process. A quick trip to his profile will tell you that he is not only the founder of Fluent in 3 Months, but a speaker of 11 languages (including english). The correct term for someone like this would be a polyglot, who are people that understandably have a lot of respect in linguistic communities. 

He builds on this by giving the readers personal anecdotes from his processes learning German and Spanish. These anecdotes also touch on Pathos a bit, because he mentions all the cool and exciting people he misses from Berlin. To him, that is what it means to speak a language. Not verbs and conjugations and cases (I would disagree, I love them), but the experience that you have learning the language. He encourages readers to study languages that they are passionate about, that bring them excitement and wonder.

So unfortunately there’s no easy answer to the question posed above, but a more fascinating side to this iceberg looms beneath it.