Anyone moving to Georgia eventually asks this question. The short answer is yes, but probably not for the reasons you have heard.
For what it’s worth, the U.S. Foreign Service Institute does have Georgian on its difficulty list. They put it in the hard category, alongside Russian, Hebrew, Thai, and Greek. About 44 weeks of full-time study to get a diplomat to professional working fluency. That puts Georgian harder than Spanish or German, and easier than Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, or Korean. So it’s hard, but it’s the same kind of hard as Russian, not a unique tier of impossible.
I moved to Tbilisi in 2021 and spent the first three years not really learning the language beyond basic phrases. I tried a few teachers. I tried Anki. None of it worked. It wasn’t until 2024, when we started building EasyGeorgian, that I actually learned Georgian, exactly through the courses we were building. I learned Russian and Spanish before, both through modern audio tools. Georgian is the hardest language I have learned, by a wide margin. But the hardness is uneven. Some parts are genuinely difficult. Other parts are not, but feel difficult because you keep being told they are.
The things that make Georgian genuinely hard
The verbs. Georgian verbs do not work like verbs in any European language. They have what the textbooks call “screeves” (a system of tense-aspect-mood combinations), eleven of them, with patterns that depend on the verb’s class. Verbs also take prefixes and suffixes that mark not just the subject but also the object, sometimes both, occasionally a third thing as well. You will spend the first six months of serious study slowly accepting that the same verb root produces dozens of surface forms before you have it.
The cases. Seven of them. A few are easy if you have done any Slavic language. Two are weirder and unique to Georgian (the ergative is the famous one, used only with one specific kind of verb in one specific kind of tense). The hard part is not memorising what the cases are. It is internalising which case pairs with which verb in which tense, fast enough that you can speak.
The ejectives. p, t, k, ts, ch all have an “ejective” version pronounced with a closed glottis. They sound, to an English ear, almost identical to their non-ejective counterparts. Mishearing them is what makes you catch one word in three the first time you listen to real Georgian at speed.
The lack of resources. This is not Georgian’s fault, but it is part of why it feels hard. No Duolingo. No Memrise. No Babbel. No Rosetta Stone. None of the big language platforms support Georgian. Until very recently, the options were dusty textbooks and private teachers. The hardness compounds when there is nothing to fall back on when you are tired.
The things that are easier than people say
The alphabet. Mkhedruli (the script you actually use) is 33 letters, all phonetic, no capitalisation. It looks intimidating because it is unfamiliar, not because it is complicated. A focused afternoon and you can read it. Most learners take longer because they treat it like a memorisation chart instead of a code to crack.
Pronunciation. Outside the ejectives, Georgian is fully phonetic. One letter, one sound, almost always. You never have to wonder how a word is said once you know the script. Compare to English, where “though, through, thought, tough” share four different pronunciations of the same letters.
No grammatical gender. No masculine and feminine nouns. No tables of agreement to memorise. He, she, and it are all the same word (is). After a year of learning Russian or German, this feels like a vacation.
No articles. No “the” or “a”. You drop them and the sentence still works.
Friendly Georgians. This is not a grammar feature, but it counts. Georgians are extraordinarily generous when foreigners try. The bar for being praised is low. You will say something halfway broken in a taxi and the driver will tell you your Georgian is excellent. This is wrong but kind, and it keeps you talking.
So how hard is it really
If your only goal is conversational, daily-life Georgian, our audio course will get you there in 50 days at one lesson per day. Functional Georgian, ordering coffee, asking directions, holding a basic conversation with your in-laws. Not pretty Georgian, not yet, but the thing they’ve been waiting for.
If you want to read Georgian literature in the original, write essays in Georgian, or follow a heated political argument on TV, that is a multi-year project, the same way it would be in any language.
The mistake most learners make is conflating those two. The textbook treats them as the same goal and starts you on the long road. You spend six months on cases and screeves and quit before you ever order a coffee.
The shortcut is to take the conversational version first, get it working, and only then go back for the grammar. Acquire the language by hearing and using it (which is mostly what audio courses do). Then meet the grammar later, after your ear has built up enough patterns that the rules read like names for things you already know.
So yes, Georgian is hard. But it is not unfairly hard, and most of the suffering you have heard about comes from people who tried to learn it the wrong way around.
