The time it takes to learn a language is something every learner takes into account before deciding to learn a certain language. To help you make a time-efficient decision, The Foreign Service Institute sorted major languages around the world into 5 categories of difficulty according to their differences from English. Let’s see some maps first and then jump right to the categories.
CATEGORY I: 23-24 WEEKS (575-600 HOURS)
- Afrikaans
- Danish
- Dutch
- French
- Italian
- Norwegian
- Spanish
- Swedish
- Portuguese
- Romanian
CATEGORY II: 30 WEEKS (750 HOURS)
- German
CATEGORY III: 36 WEEKS (900 HOURS)
- Indonesian
- Swahili
- Malaysian
CATEGORY IV: 44 WEEKS (1100 HOURS)
- 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)
- Arabic
- Cantonese (Chinese)
- Mandarin (Chinese)
- *Japanese
- Korean
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