The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) has created a list to show the approximate time you need to learn a specific language as an English speaker. After this particular study time you will reach “Speaking 3: General Professional Proficiency in Speaking (S3)” and “Reading 3: General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3)”
Please keep in mind that this ranking only shows the view of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) and some language students or experts may disagree with the ranking.
If there is a language in this list you would like to learn and it is in a high difficult category, don’t let this stop you from learning it. Even if they are ranked as difficult, it does not mean that they are impossible to learn and maybe it is not hard for you at all. We offer many tips on how to best learn a language that will surely help you to tackle even the most difficult language on this list.
Additionally, we also offer free language lessons for the most popular languages and a Top 10 language app overview with all currently available professional language products on the market with reviews by us and our readers.
| Category I: 23-24 weeks (575-600 hours) Languages closely related to English | |
|---|---|
| Afrikaans Danish Dutch French Italian | Norwegian Portuguese Romanian Spanish Swedish |
| Category II: 30 weeks (750 hours) Languages similar to English | |
| German | |
| Category III: 36 weeks (900 hours) Languages with linguistic and/or cultural differences from English | |
| Indonesian Malaysian | Swahili |
| Category IV: 44 weeks (1100 hours) Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English | |
| Albanian Amharic Armenian Azerbaijani Bengali Bosnian Bulgarian Burmese Croatian Czech *Estonian *Finnish *Georgian Greek Hebrew Hindi *Hungarian Icelandic Khmer Lao Latvian | Lithuanian Macedonian *Mongolian Nepali Pashto Persian (Dari, Farsi, Tajik) Polish Russian Serbian Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Tagalog *Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek *Vietnamese Xhosa Zulu |
| Category V: 88 weeks (2200 hours) Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers | |
| Arabic Cantonese (Chinese) Mandarin (Chinese) | *Japanese Korean |
Hi, this list is very accurate, I live in South Africa, here are many languages, but Xhosa and Zulu should be under the Category 1, its really not that difficult, my mother toung is Afrikaans, very easy too!! At the moment im learning Tagalog, if anyone have any suggestions, i’ll gladly accept them.
Ty
I am a German speaker myself and it makes sense to me. German is between category 1 and 2. It is definitely harder than Italian or Spanish and thats why it take on average 150 hours more to learn.
I believe German should be in Category 1.
Why isn’t Hungarian in Column 3? Isn’t its absolutely flexible word order hard to acquire for native speakers of English? No matter what the order of the words in a sentence is, it still remains grammatically correct, but may well mean completely different things! Not to mention the vowels that are unique to Hungarian such as “á,é,ó,ö,ő,ú,ü,ű,í” and some consonants: “ty, gy, ny, sz, zs, dzs, dz, ly, cs” don’t tell me it’s as easy as Bulgarian or Icelandic… Vowel length is a distinctive feature, and should not be verlooked either.
Can anyone tell us the reasons why it is in Column 2? 🙂
i think Japanese should be in category 2, even though it is completely different than English it is very simple and Thai should definitely be in category 3 because it is tonal which can be a very difficult concept to grasp if you speak English
looks good other than that though
Umm…Japanese has a few thousand characters one has to learn, along with honorific language, and complex grammar. Thai has none of these. The tones do make it difficult though, which is why it is category 2 with a * as well
Because I’m originally from the Caribbean, I found learning and repeating Japanese and understanding the basics was easy. I’ve yet to learn the kanjis and the grammar IS complex at times but with practice (of course) I’m sure I’ll be able to master it eventually…hopefully 🙂
Chinese is so overrated IMO. There are tones which are easily overcome. The pronunciations are easy and the grammar could not be simpler. There are very few similarities though and they think differently. And the dreaded characters aren’t even that hard. Just study a few a day and they all build on each other so they get easier and easier.