These are the hardest languages to learn if you're an English speaker

Want to learn Burmese? Just set aside 1100 hours and you’ll be there...  
qimono/Pixabay
Alice Howarth1 December 2017

The Foreign Service Institute, who teach languages to diplomats, has released a major study stating which are the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers. The findings are based on how long it would take someone to learn each one.

The institute decided on the difficulty level of the languages based on the complexity of them, the resources available to the learner, the student's motivation and how many hours they’d devote to study each week.

Spanning the globe, the language map includes countries from Romania to Lao, Azerbaijan to Korea.

The easiest languages - taking 23-24 weeks to learn - were found to be the likes of Spanish, Italian and French. Scandinavian languages were also included in this category which was surprising. Danish, Norwegian and Swedish tend to have a reputation of being notoriously tricky to pick up due to the required speaking patterns.

Finnish was actually placed in a harder category, found to take almost double the amount of time to learn as the other Scandinavian languages, but that’s nothing on the hardest in the world.

Arabic, Cantonese (Chinese), Mandarin (Chinese), Japanese and Korean take 88 weeks or 2200 hours. Worth keeping up the practice if you do conquer them then...

Below is the full list of the hardest languages in the world for English speakers. Which challenge would you take on?

Category 1: 23-24 weeks (575-600 hours)

Afrikaans

Danish

Dutch

French

Italian

Norwegian

Portuguese

Romanian

Spanish

Swedish

Category 2: 30 weeks (750 hours)

German

Category 3: 36 weeks (900 hours)

Indonesian

Malaysian

Swahili

Category 4: 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 5: 88 weeks (2200 hours)

Arabic

Cantonese (Chinese)

Mandarin (Chinese)

*Japanese

Korean

* Usually more difficult than other languages in the same category.

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