Why Are Some Languages Easier to Pronounce Than Others?

Why is English widely considered such a hard language to pronounce? The answer might shock you: it’s the very nature of our alphabet. In fact, writing systems and pronunciation go hand in hand more than you might think. 

While there are dozens of different writing systems all over the world, I’d like to focus on just two today: alphabets and syllabaries. An alphabet can be used to describe any writing system with graphemes (characters) that are broken into consonants and vowels. Syllabaries are used to describe writing systems where each grapheme is one syllable. 

English and Korean - two languages considered difficult to pronounce - use an alphabetic writing system. 

T (Eng Consonant). U (Eng Vowel)

ㅈ (T, Korean Consonant). ㅏ (A, Korean Vowel).

Japanese and Cherokee are considered two languages with “easy” pronunciations, and they use a syllabary.

 か (KA, Japanese Syllable) た (TA, Japanese Syllable). 

Ꭸ (GE, Cherokee Syllable) Ꮘ (QUI, Cherokee Syllable) 

However, isn't any language that's not your native language hard to pronounce? Well yes, but also no. Confused? Let’s go a little deeper. 

Alphabets work by combining consonants and vowels to create a wide variety of words. Because you’re creating sounds (or phonemes) with separate consonants and vowels, the sheer number of combinations you can make is a lot. 

Don is pronounced one way, but Done will change the length of the vowel, meaning the pronunciation is different. 

Korean works similarly, where the amount of phonemes are varied and large because of the nature of the writing system. From Korean language blog Fluentu, “...at the beginning of a word the letter ㅅ is pronounced with a “s” or “sh” sound, like in 사랑 (sarang — love) or 시간 (shigan — time), but at the end of the word ㅅ makes a hard “t” sound, like in 뭣 (mot — what).”

Japanese and Cherokee work differently because a syllabary means a limited amount of phonemes. Because consonants and vowels are not being used to create new syllables, the language has a fixed set of sounds. 

The Japanese character せ (SE) will always be pronounced as SE, even when in conjunction with other characters. Same with Cherokee character Ꮁ (HU). 

So even though Japanese and Cherokee might be difficult to pronounce to you, in a linguistic sense they’re really not that difficult. For English and Korean learners… I wish them good luck.