What are some factors that make language learning difficult? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

Fundamentally, language is a tool that we use to communicate in order to accomplish tasks. With very few exceptions, adults are competent speakers of their first language (referred to as their “native language”) using it adeptly to get things done—from negotiating business deals to ordering food in restaurants. Nearly everything we do requires that we use language in some way, by listening, reading, writing, or speaking. And for the most part, it comes naturally–we feel our thoughts easily come out as words in our native tongue. However, when we try to learn ANOTHER language, one in which we do not have that level of comfort and command, it can feel very challenging, frustrating, even exhausting.

A parallel example might make this more clear: Imagine you’ve driven a car with an automatic transmission most of your life, and then, one day, as an adult with dozens of years of driving experience under your belt, you find yourself needing to drive a car with a manual transmission. All of a sudden, driving, something at which you thought you were an expert, becomes absolutely impossible. You sit there, with the car bucking and the engine revving, breaking out in a cold sweat as it dawns on you that you can’t drive anymore. The same thing happens when a native speaker of any language goes to learn a language with which he or she has had no prior experience, and sadly for language learning, the learning curve is much steeper than getting the hang of driving a stick.

When the language itself is very different from your own first language, learning it can be especially hard. The Foreign Service Institute categorizes languages in terms of difficulty based on how different they are from English AND how many years of studying it takes native English speakers to acquire them on average. Languages that require learners to master a new writing system (e.g., Arabic), learn a new way of manipulating tone (e.g., Mandarin), manipulate pitch (e.g., Swedish), or master a grammatical concept absent from English (e.g., the notion of “aspect” in Russian) are more difficult for native English speakers than, say, learning Spanish, which is closer to English in all of those ways.

Many factors affect the difficulty of mastering individual words—including those described above—but especially, the relevance of those words to a particular language learner’s context and how often he or she has heard/seen/used them. If you are a pilot, then it will be easier for you to learn words about flying and airplanes and aircraft mechanics than it will be for you to learn words about marine biology or gardening or anything else with which you are less familiar. In addition, words that have nonstandard spellings, colloquial meanings, multiple definitions, or include smaller words might be harder to master, all other things being equal.

Finally, an ineffective teaching methodology makes learning a new language especially hard. It is relatively easy to teach people about how a language works—having them memorize lists of vocabulary words or grammar rules—but this doesn’t actually help them use the language to communicate effectively in real life. Someone who has spent years memorizing verb conjugations or the difference between the passe compose and the imparfait may try to use the language to, say, have a conversation in a cafe and realize that he can’t say anything. That discouraging moment is when the language learning process feels uncomfortable, challenging, and more tiresome than if the learner had been more prepared with a more effective language training program.

This question originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Quora:

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