Is SAP ABAP hard to learn?

The language itself is not the hard part.

ABAP is a verbose, readable, strongly typed language with a syntax that reads almost like English. If you have written any C, Java, Python or even VBA, the basics will feel familiar within days. Loops, conditionals, subroutines and structured data all behave roughly as you expect.

It also has one genuine convenience that modern languages make harder work of. Internal tables, which are ABAP's in-memory tables, are a first class part of the language, so reading a database table into memory, sorting it, looping over it and aggregating it is a handful of readable statements rather than an exercise in library selection. People coming from other languages usually find this pleasant.

So if the question is whether the syntax will defeat you, it almost certainly will not. Newer additions such as inline declarations, string templates and table expressions have made the language more concise, and the modern style is genuinely nice to write.

What is actually hard.

The difficulty in ABAP is contextual rather than syntactic. You are not writing a standalone program, you are writing inside a very large system that already has opinions about almost everything.

None of those four are conquered by reading. They are conquered by working on a real system with real data volumes, which is why access to a live system matters far more than the number of hours in a syllabus.

Modern ABAP raised the ceiling, not the floor.

One thing changed in the last few years that beginners should understand before choosing a course. ABAP on HANA moved the centre of gravity of the language. Instead of pulling data into the application layer and processing it there, you push the work down into the database using CDS views and, where needed, AMDP. On top of that, the RESTful Application Programming model, RAP, is how new applications are built and exposed as OData services for Fiori front ends.

This does not make classical ABAP obsolete, and every serious project still has plenty of it. What it means is that a course teaching only classical ABAP prepares you for maintenance work and not for new development. The starting point is still the workbench, the dictionary, internal tables and reports, and that is what our SAP ABAP course covers, with an introduction to CDS and OData. Once you have that, SAP ABAP Advanced is a separate course that takes you properly into CDS view entities, RAP, Clean Core and BTP.

Who finds it easy, and who finds it hard.

How long it really takes.

The taught portion runs over several months, and at the end of it a diligent beginner can write reports, build ALV output, handle data migration and work with the dictionary confidently. That is enough to be hired as a junior developer.

Being genuinely useful on a project takes longer, usually the first several months on the job, and it is mostly the data model and the extension model catching up. Nobody skips this stage, including people who found the course easy. Expect it, and choose a first role where somebody senior reviews your code, because that is what compresses the timeline.

The most common reason people fail is not difficulty. It is trying to learn ABAP without a system to write it on, which is like learning to drive from a manual. If you take one practical decision from this page, make it that: confirm you get your own system login and find out how long it lasts.

The questions people actually ask.

The course this guide points to.