Languages by Difficulty for English Speakers

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the US Department of State has compiled approximate learning expectations for a number of languages based on the length of time it takes to achieve Speaking 3: General Professional Proficiency in Speaking (S3) and Reading 3: General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3). The list is limited to languages taught at the Foreign Service Institute. Below we have a table of these languages and their difficulty for English speakers. For more information on the FSI scale, known as the ILR Scale, go to the Interagency Language Roundtable site, for an overview of the history of the ILR Language Proficiency Skill level descriptions and scale information.

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

Category I: Languages closely related to English 23-24 weeks (575-600 class hours)
Afrikaans Catalan Danish Dutch	French Italian Norwegian Portuguese	Romanian Spanish Swedish
Category I: Languages closely related to English 30-36 weeks (750-900 class hours)
German (30 weeks / 750 class hours) Indonesian (36 weeks / 900 class hours)	Javanese (36 weeks / 900 class hours) Malay (36 weeks / 900 class hours)	Swahili (36 weeks / 900 class hours)
Category II: Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English 44 weeks (1100 class hours)
Albanian Amharic Armenian Azerbaijani Belarusian Bengali Bosnian Bulgarian Burmese Cebuano Croatian Czech Dzongkha Estonian Finnish Georgian Greek Gujarati Hebrew Hindi	*Hungarian Icelandic Ilocano Irish Kannada Kazakh Kurdish Kyrgyz Khmer Lao Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Marathi Nepali Pashto Persian (Dari, Farsi, Tajik) Polish Punjabi Russian	Serbian Sinhalese Slovak Slovenian Somali Tagalog Tamil Telugu Tetum Thai Turkish Turkmen Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek Vietnamese Xhosa Zulu
Category III: Languages which are quite difficult for native English speakers 88 weeks (2200 class hours; about half that time preferably spent studying in-country)
Arabic Cantonese (Chinese) Mandarin (Chinese)	Taiwanese (Chinese) Korean Japanese	Mongolian Wu