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.
