Native Speakers- How hard is it to actually master English?

No native speaker knows the answer to this question. Native speakers come by it naturally. You need to find someone who is fluent in English as a second language who learned it from your language at your age. Ask them how it’s been. PS I think fluency is hard. I’ve learned four languages. I’m not fluent in any of them except for my native tongue English.

I don't really know how to answer that question as a native speaker. As to how to do better - not sure how helpful this will be, because this is a native speaker's perspective - consume and produce the kind of material you want to gain proficiency in. Say you're going to conferences about international law. Law (generally and specifically) has slightly different common uses of English and meanings of words. To become good at it, anyone needs exposure and practice. Same for any specialised area. (If this is too difficult at the moment, work little bits in slowly while you work on things that are appropriately challenging for you. I'd agree with other posters about not relying on Reddit - informal English is often a mess, you'll pick up bad habits)

Don't use reddit. There are way too many native speakers that can't spell and use very specific vernacular. It's a poor reference.

English has different types of mastering. we have college American English, legal English, technical jargon, common English, street, Spanglish. there's also British, Canadian, and Ozzie. I speak a casual west coast English that is friendly and informal. I like to use buddy, bro, and guys when referring to a group of people. I don't speak hip-hop dialect or ebonics. but I understand them.

Read a thousand books.

What would it mean to you to master the language? IELTS 9? Or would you need to achieve some other metric?

I found it really easy… so easy I could do it before I could even read or write… because I’m a native speaker and learned it as my first language as a baby via immersion. You need to speak to fluent speakers who are not native to get a helpful answer.

(Full disclosure, I'm not a native speaker) Immersion is obviously the best way (and maybe the only true way) to learn a language. All of what I've learned comes from watching cartoons, movies, TV shows, and YouTube videos in English, but the process is kind of slow. I've found that for short-term results, being critical (maybe almost hypercritical) of my own sense of the language seems to work best. Often, I'll want to use a tough word which I've only heard a few times and understood from context. So as to not use it in the wrong sense, I'll Google it and learn what it means. Same goes for prepositions, phrasal verbs, idioms and colloquialisms. This turns my sense of "this sounds right/this feels right" into "this *IS* right". Funnily enough, immersing myself in hypercritical environments seems to work quite well too. I post in places where people regularly like to point out each other's grammatical mistakes, and while it's somewhat aggravating, it's helpful in the long run. Since you've given your IELTS exam, I'll assume that you're familiar with practicing the speaking portion of the test. It's helped me rectify my brain-farts and little slip-ups, which in turn strengthens my writing skills. I talk to myself about any arbitrary topic, not just the (comparatively simpler) prompts used for the IELTS exams. Other people might have other methods, and some of my methods might not be great for everyone. But in short, breaking yourself down and building yourself back up is the main way to quickly master the language.

What do you mean by master? Because if you just mean fluent, it's not hard for native speakers. If you mean someone with perfect grammar in writing or perfect pronunciation in speaking, that's not common. If you mean a scholar of English, that's quite rare.

There's a difference between native speakers who use a wide range of vocabulary and have an understanding of the use of correct grammar, and those who do not use grammar correctly, and also have limited range of words. For that reason, speaking to someone who has learnt it as second language, will probably better answer your question.

depends on your starting level and when you start learning. as someone who read books and watched movies in college, my speaking skills weren't up to par and it took me 1.5 years to improve to a C1 level. When I worked in an English speaking office, it was relatively easier to advance to a C2 since I got to speak English regularly. As a language trainer, I've seen people start improving within weeks. Trainees who started out with a strong accent started improving after two weeks and neutralized it in 2-3 months (longer if they have an actual speech problem). Grammar, unfortunately will always take longer. I've encountered trainees who start out crying and afraid because they fear they would embarrass themselves in front of clients. Then I see them half a year later speaking fluently and all perky while entertaining clients.

Native speakers don’t really remember mastering English. We learned it without actively trying from birth. Moreover, babies actually don’t seem to really notice that a particular language is harder to learn. No matter what their language is, babies tend to pick it up in the same amount of time. So learning English for us was no harder than learning your native language was for you. I think it was quite easy to pick up because I learned it without even a bit of active effort. The answer to this question depends on your native language and how similar it is to English, and your personal language learning habits. It’s not really a question we as native speakers can answer, unfortunately.

We don’t know. We were babies when we learned it, so for us it was exactly the same difficulty as every other language in the world.

Most adult learners do not reach "fluency" though that can be partly just semantics. L2 proficiency measures obviously assume one is not native, so the proficiency levels take this into account.  Note that L2 measures are therefore typically inappropriate for measuring native ability; most native speakers wouldn't get a band 9 without similar preparation to non-native speakers, but we wouldn't say they have non-native proficiency (consider also native speakers of a language without a writing system or who are illiterate). Personally I think IELTS band 9 is pretty close to native level though, which makes sense because native speakers do sometimes need to prove their English-language proficiency level (eg, if all their education was in another language). But given the limitations on what it measures, band 9 can be achieved without native proficiency. Generally, we say adult learners have reached native-level proficiency while native speakers are just "native speakers", especially as the term "fluency" describes a certain feature of proficiency in foreign-language teaching. Someone with native-level proficiency may be indistinguishable from a native speaker or they may still make non-native errors or even simply lack the full range of expression of a native speaker while being easily able to disguise that.

English is so easy to learn - just ask any 5 year old. They barely have to even try.

English is the easiest language I've ever learned. Just start when you're 1 and it's a cinch.

Learning to speak English was easy, as others have said, but spelling, that was very difficult, I didn't really master English spelling until I was in my 40s, and I still struggle with some words. Unlike Spanish as a second language: I could spell almost perfectly after 2 years of learning.

Short answer: the more you listen/read/speak in English, the easier it will be. Learning more common words and phrases will be useful in the everyday. More formal evaluations of "language mastery" focus more on rules of language than how well you communicate. Very formal communication styles can feel strange in everyday speaking. Long answer: It depends on what you mean by "grasp the scope of the language." There are different types of "mastery" for any language. If you want to be fluent in writing or conversation, it takes a lot less work than perfecting grammar. Most of the time, even native speakers don't use perfect grammar when speaking or writing, except in the most formal situations. In fact, perfect grammar often sounds strange or stilted in everyday communication, where people use incomplete or run-on sentences, skip punctuation, or forget a word and just use "you know, the thing!" Fluency is about sounding "good" rather than "correct." It also means you have a decent vocabulary of the most common words. If you want to speak like a native speaker then, as others have said, reading/watching/listening to a lot of stuff in that language will help you get a feel for what "sounds right" in a sentence. That's basically how native speakers learn, copying the people around them every day. Proper Grammar, on the other hand, is a different beast entirely. I took 6 years of Grammar classes in addition to English classes, and the difference between them is unbelievable! My "English" classes were about reading, understanding, analyzing, forming and communicating my opinions, writing essays, and getting a cultural background of classic and modern literature. It's also where I picked up a lot of new words and idioms. My "Grammar" classes were all memorizing rules and the names for every type of word (you'd be shocked how many types of verbs there are, nut just tense and number, but also verbs used as nouns/adjectives, etc). Of the two classes, English helped me more in my everyday life than Grammar. I don't need to remember what a "gerund" is as long as the word I used fits in the sentence. Basic Grammar, like what order to put the nouns and verbs in a sentence, is usually included in English courses, and that's enough for most people's everyday use. For things like public speaking and workshops, like you asked about, you're probably better off avoiding "advanced courses" on English grammar. A wider exposure to different types of media will be much more helpful and probably more interesting. Books, TED talks, tv/movies, articles, cooking shows, youtube "video essays" on topics you find interesting (there's plenty of channels talking about science, music, games, woodworking, cars, pretty much anything). If there's a phrase or word you don't understand, stop and look it up, or try to guess from context clues. Eventually you'll start to notice when a sentence seems awkward or "wrong" and figure out a better way to phrase it, even if you don't know **why** it's better that way. It's a lot more fun than studying sentence diagrams or irregular verbs or vocabulary lists.

We learn basic English as we are developing verbal communication skills as children. That is how every person learns their native language. "Mastering English" for a native speaker is a process that is intimately tied to education. The speaker acquires more advanced skills in understanding others and expressing themselves as they progress through their education and develop greater skills in thinking. They gain the ability to understand and communicate in a level that reflects a more informed and nuanced understanding of the world. For most people, that level is achieved by the time they graduate high school or secondary school. A great deal of that advanced language skill is acquired through reading, and it is greatly strengthened by writing in the same language about the things they have read. Pursuing a higher education beyond that level is, in part, about learning the technical and specialized language of a specific field of study. I recall reading somewhere that one of the effects of completing four years of college or university is to double or even triple one's vocabulary, and to vastly increase one's ability to make sophisticated and well-informed arguments based on an established point of view. The effect of focused study at the post-graduate level (beyond the baccalaureate level) is the ability to create brand new points of view that are regarded as valid. This is a progression that is true of nearly every language, not just English.

Every native speaker thinks that their own language is easy and everybody else’s is difficult and weird. If you really want the answer you’ll have to ask a nonnative speaker who became fluent.

A lot of it will depend on your native language, the inner workings of your brain and the way in which you learn English and how deeply immersed into the culture you get. Honestly I would suggest consuming as much English media as possible, songs can be especially helpful for vocab because of the catchy/melodic nature, film because it also adds in visual context, but media in general will be helpful and even as a native English speaker I still to this day learn new words and/or phrases this way

You're asking the wrong people. We learned by growing up with the language, so it's not "hard" at all. Even then, some native speakers are better at (formal) language than others.

I mean, we're native speakers so we can't really give you the best advice You'd have to ask someone who's mastered English while having a different language as their native one

It depends on what you think of as mastering English. Every native speaker is fully fluent in their own dialect of the language, and acquired it naturally in childhood. Being able to produce careful, textbook English is harder; only a relatively small percentage of native English speakers achieve that mastery, because most don't care about it enough to do so. Being able to write excellent prose is another thing, and being able to carefully edit prose to be both textbook-correct and elegantly evocative is yet another -- again, far fewer English speakers ever achieve those types of mastery. Developing a massive vocabulary is something else again, and it has overlap with every other mastery types; for instance, there are both brilliant and mediocre writers who have prodigious vocabularies. For all of these, as I'd guess with the vast majority of other languages, there's no set end point: There are always more terms to learn, more ways to improve, more nuances to explore.

That's the neat part--*you don't.* Take Meryl Streep. She's an **extremely** famous American actress with a career spanning decades--21 Oscar nominations (a record), 3 Oscar wins, 34 Golden Globe nominations (another record) and 3 Golden Globes won. While she was working on the set of *Don't Look Up* (2021) she was confused and annoyed that other people were calling her a goat. She thought they were insulting her age. One of the actors had to explain to her that they were calling her *the* GOAT--an abbreviation for the Greatest Of All Time. Moral of the story: Even if you somehow managed to learn all the words in the English language, people will make new ones and you'll still be confused from time to time.

Based on this post alone, your English skills are already exceptional for it not being your native language. Best advice for learning is to immerse yourself in the language as much as possible with people who can (politely and openly) explain things you may get wrong in the moment. Kudos to you for all of your hard work and perseverance! English is crazy hard if you're not a native speaker!!

The difficulty of mastering any given language depends on what your native language is and how much it has in common with your target language. English is weird in two ways that make it difficult for native speakers of most other languages to master: 1. It has an unusual sound inventory (a large number of vowels, and globally-rare consonant sounds like the two “th” sounds), and 2. its grammar is highly analytic (relies on prepositions and word order to create meaning) while all of its closest relative languages are quite synthetic (rely on changing words to create meaning, for example with cases and agreement). The only languages similar enough to English to make it relatively easy to master are the Scandinavian languages and low country languages (like Dutch), but even native speakers of those languages often have a hard time mastering a native-like accent in English. That said, the path to mastery is the same no matter what your native language is: use English as much as you can. Speaking, listening, reading and writing are all separate skills that, though they will boost each other, each need to be worked on deliberately. Practicing reading will help with your speaking, but you cannot practice speaking by doing more reading. You need to speak to improve your speaking. And finally: You don’t need to sound native to have mastered English. Native English speakers are comfortable listening to a wide variety of accents and will not discount you for sounding foreign as long as you’re speaking fluidly and are readily understood.

Master it... as in become fluent? That happens by the time we start school. Master it in the same way as great writers like William Shakespeare, J. R. R. Tolkien, G. K. Chesterton, or P. G. Wodehouse? Most of us never do. Master it by learning all the formal rules and the names and functions of all the little fiddly pieces? We don't need to. We become fluent through immersion as small children. Sorry I can't give you a better answer. 🥲

Most native English speakers haven't mastered the language.

That’s an amazing achievement—scoring 8.0+ on IELTS is no small feat! Mastering English, like any language, goes beyond test scores; it’s about feeling confident and natural in different situations. Since you’re already participating in MUNs, public speaking, and workshops, you’re on the right track! One way to bridge the gap is through **immersive practice**—surrounding yourself with native content, engaging in real conversations, and getting personalized feedback. This is exactly what we focus on in **Wonderful World English**—helping learners like you **refine fluency, build confidence, and master natural expression** through **live classes and interactive support**. Would you like to try our **7-day free trial**? It gives you access to live lessons and a supportive community where you can practice and improve in a structured yet natural way.

We aren’t the right people to ask, unfortunately because we grew up with this language and came to us naturally. I think, to me, mastering a language would be knowing multiple ways to get your point across and, if you mess up, everyone still understands you(?). This is a tough question for us :/

Well we’re not really the right people to be asking lol because we learned it through immersion as babies. To be honest though from this post & a quick peek at your profile, you seem to have a really really good command of the language If you feel you have difficulty with speaking and listening comprehension, immersion is the best tool to help. If you can’t access English-language spaces easily, try listening to media in English and/or talking to yourself in it

It's not a sensible question to ask native speakers, since we learnt it as babies we could argue its incredibly easy to master, just speak it from birth.

Literature. You already know English, more or less. If you want to master it, read what masters of the language have written.