Are Vowels or Consonants Easier to Learn?
Hands down, vowels are more difficult to learn in American English than consonants. Why? Because in American English, most consonants have one sound associated with them whereas, there are five letters in English that represent our vowels system but there are about 22 pronunciations of those vowels.
Even if you know all the vowels sounds and have mastered them, what further complicates the situation is that there are multiple spellings that represent each sound. There is quite of bit of memorization that needs to be learned. In other words, there are a few rules a person can learn to know how to spell or pronounce but a lot of words just need to be memorized.
This is not an easy task for the second-language learner. I empathize. Even though I know English, I recently planned a trip to Hawaii and because the names of the cities, volcanoes, rivers, etc. broke all the rules that I know when it comes to English. The words looked liked a foreign language and I had no idea how to pronounce a word with four vowels together. So, I spent some time trying to learn their pronunciation. I failed miserably in the short time I spent learning before my trip. I arrived with an American accent and some rather embarrassing pronunciations. When you look at a word, it is so hard to know how to pronounce it.
Here is the reason why:
Hawaiian has only eight consonant phonemes: /p, k ⁓ t, ʔ, h, m, n, l ⁓ ɾ, w ⁓ v/ and some variations about how they are pronounced.
And this part was interesting about the vowels: 
“Depending on how one analyzes the inventory of Hawaiian vowel phonemes, it has either 5 or 25 phonemes.[27] The minimum figure of 5 is reached by counting only /u/, /i/, /o/, /e/, and /a/ as phonemes. Diphthongs and long vowels are analyzed as being sequences of two vowels.
The short vowel phonemes are /u, i, o, e, a/.
If long vowels are counted separately, they are /uː, iː, oː, eː, aː/.
If diphthongs are counted separately, they are /iu, ou, oi, eu, ei, au, ai, ao, ae, oːu, eːi, aːu, aːi, aːo, aːe/.” Wikepedia
Now I understand why I struggle pronouncing Hawaiian words (I had to even look up how to spell “Hawaiian”). Is it any wonder that a language learner struggles, too?
American English has so many spellings and pronunciations that a non-native English learner has to spend more time on learning vowels to master them. Even though it’s not easy, it is a good idea to learn them since the vowel sounds do carry a lot of meaning in words. Consider the words bat, bet, bought, bit, and bite. These words are meaningful because of the vowel. If used incorrectly, it could be disastrous or just an embarrassing mistake.
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