The 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)’ and ‘Reading 3: General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3)’.
- Want to put your foreign language skills to the test? Browse our list of remote jobs that will let you work from anywhere
| 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 |
| * Usually more difficult than other languages in the same category. | |
