Is Mongolian Hard to Learn for English Speakers?

"Hard" is not a property of a language. It is the distance between the language you already have and the one you want, measured in the things you have to stop doing. For an English speaker learning Mongolian that distance is real — there is no shared vocabulary, no shared ancestor, no shared sentence shape — but it is not spread evenly. Some of it is a week's work. Some of it is paid again on every word you ever say, for a year. Ranking the obstacles by cost rather than by strangeness gives you a very different list from the one most people expect, and a much more useful one.

1. Vowel harmony, because you pay it on every word

This is first, and it is not first because it is difficult. The rule fits on one page and most people understand it in twenty minutes; it is stated, with the two vowel classes and the three-second check that applies it, on vowel harmony, the rule.

It is first because of how often you pay it. Mongolian builds almost everything by suffixing, so the question "which vowel goes in this ending?" comes up every single time you open your mouth. Ten of the common suffixes have four forms each, and the same past-tense suffix surfaces as авсан (took), очсон (went), ирсэн (came), өгсөн (gave) depending only on the stem. Nothing is irregular there; you simply have to perform the check faster than you can speak. Until it is automatic you will hesitate once per word, and that hesitation is what makes beginners sound slow in a language whose grammar is otherwise very regular.

The cost is frequency, not complexity, which has a practical consequence: the earliest hour you spend on this is the best-value hour in the whole language. The forms themselves are gathered in the four-form suffix table, and the handful of endings that ignore the rule are named on the page of exceptions — read that one too, because an exception you have not been told about feels like proof that the rule was a lie.

2. The verb, because English gives you no grid to map it onto

English conjugates very little and leans on auxiliaries: I work, I am working, I used to work, I worked, I had worked. Mongolian does not use auxiliaries for most of that. It attaches a different suffix to the stem, and the result is a single word. One stem from the method behind this guide, ажилл– (work), gives ажиллах (to work), ажиллана (works, will work), ажилладаг (works as a habit), ажилласан (worked), ажиллаарай (do work, please), ажиллавал (if one works) and ажилламаар байна (wants to work) — seven words, one stem, and nothing like the full list, which is set out on the reference table of verb forms.

Worse for an English speaker: the three groups those forms belong to do not line up with anything in English grammar. Mongolian has finite indicatives, participles and converbs — in that order, and the guide names them in that order every time. The everyday past, –сан, is in fact a participle, which is why the same form can mean "worked" and can also sit in front of a noun the way an English relative clause sits behind one. And a sentence with two actions does not use a conjunction: it puts the first verb into a converb form and lets the last verb carry the tense.

This is the largest genuine learning load in the language, and the one that most repays being taken in order: how a verb is built, then the present and future, the four pasts, the participles and the converbs. One consolation, and it is a big one: whichever form you pick, it does not change for person. See the easy column below.

3. The sounds, because two pairs of vowels decide what the word means

English has a large vowel inventory, so English speakers are not usually frightened by vowels. The problem here is specific. Mongolian distinguishes у from ү and о from ө, and an English ear, which has no such contrast to hang them on, tends to hear one sound where there are two — the same two pairs that vowel harmony then uses to sort the entire vocabulary. Length is the other one: a doubled vowel is a different word, not an emphatic version of the same one. үнэ (price) against үнээ (cow); дэл (mane) against дээл (the traditional Mongolian coat).

Two pages carry this: the vowels and the consonants, where the four or five consonants that an English mouth has to be taught are also dealt with. Then there is a second layer that catches nearly everyone out: what is written is not quite what is said. Short vowels inside a word are reduced almost to nothing, a final written vowel is barely sounded, and a long word arrives as a shape rather than a sequence of letters. That gap is the subject of why spoken Mongolian does not sound like the spelling, and it is the reason listening and reading have to be learned side by side rather than one after the other.

4. Word order, cheap to understand and expensive to produce

The rule takes one sentence: the predicate closes the sentence, and every modifier stands in front of the word it modifies. Reading becomes possible almost at once. Speaking is the problem, because you have to hold the verb in your head until everything else has been said, and English trains you to do exactly the opposite — subject, verb, then the rest as it occurs to you.

• Би энэ номыг уншсан.
• I this book-ACC read-PAST
• "I read this book."

There is a second effect, less often mentioned: because the sentence arrives in the opposite order, you cannot translate as you go. Learners who try to speak English sentences with Mongolian words produce something no one understands, while learners who wait and build the Mongolian shape are slower for a month and then faster forever. The shape itself is set out on Mongolian word order, which also notes the one literary licence that lets a subject arrive last, so that you do not conclude the rule is broken the first time you open a real text.

Related, and worth knowing early: whole expressions are built on a different logic, not merely in a different order. Таны нэр хэн бэ? is, word for word, "who is your name?" — see the question words.

5. The Cyrillic alphabet, which is the cheapest obstacle of all

This is the one beginners fear and the one that costs least. There are 35 letters; most of them are a single sound each, and the spelling is regular in the way English spelling spectacularly is not — you are never choosing between five written forms of one sound. A motivated adult reads Mongolian aloud, slowly, after about a week. The real content of that week is not the strange-looking letters, which you meet as new shapes and never confuse with anything, but the ones that look like letters you already know and do not say what an English eye expects; those are set out one at a time on the Cyrillic alphabet. Note also that the vertical script you may have seen on a monument is a separate question and not a beginner's problem at all — the vertical script explains when you would actually need it.

The other column: five things that are simpler than in English

An honest ranking has to include these, because they are not consolation prizes. They are large structural savings, and they are the reason Mongolian grammar can be described compactly at all.

• No articles. There is nothing to choose between "a" and "the", and no rule about when to use neither — the single hardest thing in English for most of the world's learners simply does not exist here. What carries the information instead is on no "a" and no "the".
• No grammatical gender. English has none either, so this costs an English speaker nothing to learn and saves them everything that a learner of French or Russian pays. One pronoun, тэр, does he, she and that: see the pronouns.
• No person agreement on the verb. One form per tense, for every subject. би ажилладаг (I work) and тэд ажилладаг (they work) are the same verb, unchanged. Nothing in Mongolian corresponds to the English third-person s, let alone to a conjugation table.
• No adjective agreement. An adjective never changes, in number or in anything else; its position does all the work. See the adjectives.
• The plural is usually not marked at all, and after a number it must not be: хоёр ном (two books), with the noun in the singular. See the plural.

To which add a sixth that English speakers find disconcerting for a week and then enjoy: the sentence often does without a verb altogether. Би нүүдэлчин is "I am a nomad", with nothing standing where "am" would be — see "to be", and having no verb for "to have".

Two costs that are on nobody's list

So: how hard, in the end

Hard in the way that a regular system with unfamiliar parts is hard: a lot to install, very little to memorise as an exception. Nothing in Mongolian resembles the arbitrariness of English spelling, French gender or Russian verb aspect. What it asks of you is patience at the beginning, when the suffixes are still being checked one at a time, and the discipline to learn the harmony rule before you need it rather than after. If you want the same question answered in hours rather than in adjectives, that is how long it takes to learn Mongolian; if you have already studied Turkish, Korean or Japanese, read the comparison page first, because you are about to get several of these obstacles free.