I often hear people compare the difficulty of learning English, Spanish, and French.

“Spanish is easier than French.”
“English is easier than Spanish.”
“French is the hardest.”

After learning and teaching all three languages, I’ve come to a clear conclusion:

None of them is inherently easier or harder than the others. They are difficult in different ways.

Difficulty isn’t absolute. It’s relational.

For example, Spanish feels harder to me than French — primarily because of grammar. Spanish has multiple past tenses used actively in everyday speech, frequent subjunctive usage, agreement patterns, reflexive constructions. The system requires constant precision.

At the same time, I personally find French vocabulary easier — not because French has more cognates than Spanish, but because it often feels more intuitively connected to English.

Both Spanish and French share Latin roots with English. You see this clearly in patterns like:

nation / nación / nation
information / información / information

Those parallels exist in both languages.

The difference, for me, appears in everyday vocabulary.

French words often look and sound closer to English, even when the meanings are not identical. Take this example:

French: raisin = grape
English: raisin = dried grape

They aren’t the same word — but they’re clearly related. Both refer to grapes. The conceptual connection is obvious.

Now compare that to Spanish:

uva = grape

There’s no visible or phonetic bridge to English. You simply have to memorize it.

I’ve noticed that if I don’t know a word in French, I can often think of the English word and slightly adjust it — pronunciation, spelling, stress — and surprisingly often I’m correct. That strategy works much less frequently for me in Spanish with high-frequency everyday vocabulary.

This isn’t because Spanish lacks cognates. It absolutely has them. But many common Spanish words come from Latin roots that didn’t enter English in the same form. English and French, due to centuries of direct contact after the Norman Conquest, share a particularly deep lexical overlap — not just academically, but in many common terms as well.

Research on cross-linguistic influence supports this pattern. Studies show that learners rely heavily on perceived similarity between languages when acquiring vocabulary (Odlin, 1989; Ringbom, 2007). When words look familiar, acquisition and recall are faster.

For other learners, however, French is harder — especially because of pronunciation: nasal vowels, silent letters, liaisons, and the gap between spelling and sound.

And then there’s English.

Interestingly, the only people I consistently hear say English is “easy” are those who began learning it as children.

That observation aligns with research on the Critical Period Hypothesis (Lenneberg, 1967), which suggests that early language acquisition benefits from neurological plasticity. Early exposure often leads to more intuitive pronunciation and grammar development.

For adult learners, English presents very real challenges.

The U.S. Foreign Service Institute classifies French and Spanish as Category I languages for native English speakers, estimating roughly 600–750 classroom hours to reach professional proficiency. That reflects structural similarity — not simplicity.

From my experience teaching English, there are aspects that are genuinely tricky:

• Phrasal verbs (take off, take up, take over — same verb, completely different meanings)
• Spelling vs. pronunciation (though, through, tough, thorough)
• Stress shifts (REcord vs. reCORD, PREsent vs. preSENT)
• A vocabulary system that blends Germanic and Romance roots

These are not small details. They affect comprehension, fluency, and confidence.

So when someone says, “This language is easier,” I always ask:

Easier for whom?

Your native language matters.
Your age when you started matters.
Your exposure matters.
Your motivation matters.
Your learning environment matters.

Every language has elegance.
Every language has logic.
Every language has frustration.

The real difference is not the language itself — it’s the learner’s relationship to it.

And that’s what makes this conversation much more interesting than simply asking which one is “harder.”