Language Difficulty Ranking

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.

* Languages preceded by asterisks are usually more difficult for native English speakers to learn than other languages in the same category.

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