> Navajo also has a complex phenology [sic], featuring sounds that don’t exist in many other languages. It counts 33 consonants, including affricates and fricatives, and 12 vowels. (By comparison, the English alphabet has 21 and 5, respectively).<p>Someone else clarified this [0] but got flagged to death for being a bit too harsh, but I do think it's worth mentioning because this is used mistakenly as a prominent example of Navajo's difficulty: the raw numbers of consonants and vowels are not particularly extreme in Navajo, and the numbers that TFA cites for English are wrong.<p>They seem to have done a relatively simple analysis of the alphabet, but that's not how linguists think about phonology. The alphabet is our way of representing a much more complex system that underlies English, and English's vowel system in particular is <i>far</i> more complex than the alphabet makes it appear.<p>Our total number of consonants sits at about 24—the alphabet alone would make you forget about some of <i>our</i> affricates (ch as in charge) and some of <i>our</i> fricatives (sh as in shush, zh as in vision, th as in theme, dh as in though), plus a nasal (ng as in ring).<p>Our vowel system, meanwhile, has anywhere between ~16 in American English to ~25 in Received Pronunciation. Native speakers don't tend to realize just how complicated our vowels are, but getting them wrong is one of the most common ways to get recognized for having an accent.<p>All told, English has between 40 and 49 phonemes (again, depending on accent), which is quite comparable to Navajo's 45.<p>I've no doubt that Navajo <i>is</i> harder to learn for most people than English is, but I don't think the phonology plays a big role in that. English's phonology is plenty difficult.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41097443">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41097443</a>