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 |
Very interesting! Being my native language Spanish, I studied German, Arabic and Japanese. I agree with the difficulty degree, but I might just add an asterisk to the Arabic language as well. The grammar (irregular past verbs), vocabulary, and pronunciation(!) makes it as difficult as Japanese.
Hi there,
I am a native speaker of the Greek language.I really liked your website-it was what exactly I was looking-and I’d like to remark that Greek is not as difficullt as rumours have it to be.Making an effort from anyone who is interested worths the try, it is one of the most historical and significant languages of the humanity.
Thank you
Ethnocentric to suggest the Japanese switch to Romaji ? No, I am practical and anti-elitist. Japanese sounds are ideally suited to Roman letters.My language is Swahili and I’m glad we switched from Arabic script as did the Turks and that Oromo and Somali have adopted Roman script too instead of Ge’ez script. The Vietnamese education system has benefited from abandoning Chinese characters. I support the wonderful Korean alphabet. Japanese script is just inefficient.
i am a greek australian and speak english ,greek,italian’
and am learning chinese mandarin (pu tong hua)
i can easily say thaT GREEK is a notoriously difficult language
i am finding mandarin easier than greek and i have been
speaking greek for 35 years
greek words are long,gender specific, and extremely
hard on the tonque
mandarin, i am finding is monosyllabic, with very simple grammatical rules.
yes, perhaps the character system is a big minus
but for everyday conversation i would bet if you got 500 students and gave them 6 months at both, they would progress more in mandarin than greek
also greek has the worlds largest vocabulary with a staggering 5 million words
Can anyone direct me to find out the number of hours required to learn English from various other languages. Most of the available information focuses on the difficulty for English speakers learning other languages. I’m interested in finding out the number of hours needed for foreign speakers to learn English.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers
Hey John,
According to this link attached above, Irish is: “Category II: Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English
44 weeks (1100 class hours)”
Good list but I’m also wondering where Irish (Gaeilge) would fit into this. I have pretty good Irish and I love the language. It is so unique and bears almost no similarities to English or the romance languages. It is closely related to Scot’s Gaelic and at a stretch you can find some similarities with Norwegian (viking influence maybe). I’d love to see how you’d categorize it.
Japanese script is beautiful and it would be tragic for them to ever change it (which they won’t). The fact is that all languages have complicated aspects to them and while making them frustrating for non-natives to learn they enrich their respective languages. Iz Einglish realy az good wen you spel it fonetikly? Should the Romance languages drop grammatical gender? Why don’t we just all speak in computer code? There’s only two characters, 1 and 0.