Is English difficult to learn?

If you start at the bottom of English, the point where the language begins, you're looking at learning 44 individual English speech-sounds. This kind of learning is coding. That's fewer than the 50+ Chinese speech sounds since tones with phoneme join to create more Chinese speech sounds than English has.

The English letter system is next on our list of bottom-up things to learn. This kind of learning is called encoding. English speech sounds are represented in total by 135+ graphemes. A grapheme is a letter or combination of letters that represent a speech sound. "Ch"and "tch" represent /ch/ as in watch.

The last step in learning is reading all 44 speech sounds (phonemes) to their 135+ graphemes. This can be learned in a short period of 2 to 3 months or shorter if you spend more days each week on the nine lessons we recommend.