One roadblock on the highway of learning guitar is the barre chord. The newbie guitar player tries it and it hurts. If you persevere, the discomfort will lessen and eventually go away altogether. Too many people allow barre chords to stop their progress as guitarists. You had to get callouses on your fingers at the beginning of taking your guitar lessons. You got over that hump, you can get over this one.

First, the difficulty with barre chords could be just due to the fact that your guitar's action is too high. This could be the case with a beginner's acoustic guitar. If you take it to a guitar store or to a guitarist that you know, they will be able to tell you if the guitar is at fault. With an acoustic guitar it might be a matter of putting in a shallower bridge bone and filing the grooves in the nut a little. With an electric guitar the action can be adjusted.

If you are seriously put off by learning barre chords, you can back off a little and try alternatives like completely ignoring chord changes. That sometimes works when you accompany yourself singing. Another alternative is to stay with the open version of your chords. This could make your guitar playing a little awkward depending on the style of guitar playing you are getting into, but you could try it.

Another approach to chords is telling yourself that they are all basically three notes: the first, third and fifth notes of the scale. So a three note F chord is made up of the notes F, A and C. You can play the notes in any order, not necessarily from lowest to highest. If you try finding three note chords for yourself you might learn something about the notes on the fretboard. While we are on the subject of playing fewer notes, you could just play the first and fifth notes of the chord. These are your basic power chords.

As barre chords are open chords with some notes fretted by the first finger, you could try just moving the open chord up the fretboard and only playing the notes that are not using the barre finger. For example you could just move the open E chord up one fret to make an F and don't play the open strings.

To play barre chords you might need to build up some strength in your fingers that you don't have already. The best way to do this is to devote a little time every day to practicing your barre chords. Learn your basic barre chord shapes based on the open E, A, C, G and D chord shapes. Don't be too hard on yourself, there are five shapes to practice, and you can fool around with trying out how they sound in relation to each other, and your changes don't have to be quick. Once you have done fifteen minutes a day on barre chords for a week or so, you will be seeing improvement enough to motivate you to finish the job. Like getting callouses, once you can play a barre chord, you will never slide back.