Foreign Service Institute language difficulty rankings are an indication of how long a native English speaker would need to reach proficiency in a number of different languages.

There five are categories ranked from easiest to the hardest based on how many classroom hours a learner would need to complete:

‘Speaking 3: General Professional Proficiency in Speaking (S3)’

‘Reading 3: General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3)’.

“Learning a language is not about being comfortable. It’s about challenging yourself and making an effort to go deeper than ‘simple’.” Errol De Jesus, Rosetta Stone

Foreign Service Institute language difficulty rankings

Return to the main article here: What are the hardest languages to learn?

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

*Japanese

Korean

Cantonese (Chinese)

Mandarin (Chinese)

* Usually more difficult than other languages in the same category.

The data is sourced from the Foreign Service Institute Language Difficulty at the US Department of State.

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