For most people, language learning is deeply fulfilling, fun, and a bit challenging. It takes time, discipline, and a well of motivation that you’ll need to refill. That’s why knowing the language difficulty ranking in relation to your native tongue can be useful.
Language difficulty rankings exist so you can set the fluency goal posts at a realistic distance. To get started, take a look at the easiest languages and hardest languages to learn, the factors that determine language difficulty, and a complete ranking of the world’s most widely spoken languages—including how long they take to learn.
Table of Contents
What makes a language hard to learn?
Languages that don’t share vocabulary, grammar, or an alphabet with English are generally more challenging for English speakers to learn.
This includes languages that have:
- complex pronunciation nuances, like tonal languages (like Mandarin Chinese)
- non-Latin writing systems (like the Cyrillic alphabet)
- grammar systems that are in a different order than English (such as putting the verb at the end of a sentence, like Japanese)
- a different language family than English (like Arabic)
Language difficulty by category
With over 7,000 languages spoken across the globe, it’s difficult to rank them all. The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) assigns language difficulty rankings to 59 languages based on how much time the average English learner needs to become business-level proficient in the new language.
The time estimates here reflect how long it would take the average person to reach Level 3 proficiency on the ILR scale (which measures language fluency levels based on communication ability).
So, how long does it take to learn a new language? Consider the timeframe for these languages by category, based on weeks and hours of study, assuming you attend class for 23 hours per week (in addition to an uncounted 17 hours of self-study per week):
- Category I: 24-30 weeks (552-690 hours)
- Category II: 36 weeks (828 hours)
- Category III: 44 weeks (1,012 hours)
- Category IV: 88 weeks (2,200 hours)
Category I languages
It takes approximately 24-30 weeks (552-690 hours in class) to reach professional working proficiency in these languages. They share many of the same grammar rules as English, and vocabulary can be quite similar.
- Danish
- Dutch
- French
- Italian
- Norwegian
- Portuguese
- Romanian
- Spanish (Latin America or Spain)
- Swedish
Category II languages
It takes approximately 36 weeks (828 hours in class) to obtain professional working proficiency in these five languages. Although German is in the same language family as English, its nuanced pronunciation gives it a higher difficulty level than other Germanic languages.
- German
- Haitian Creole
- Indonesian
- Malay
- Swahili
Category III languages
Approximately 44 weeks (1,012 hours in class) is what you need to reach professional working proficiency in these languages. You’ll notice that many languages in this language difficulty chart do not use the Latin alphabet.
- Albanian
- Amharic
- Armenian
- Azerbaijani
- Bengali
- Bulgarian
- Burmese
- Czech
- Dari
- Estonian
- Farsi
- Finnish
- Georgian
- Greek
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Hungarian
- Kazakh
- Khmer
- Kurdish
- Kyrgyz
- Lao
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Macedonian
- Mongolian
- Nepali
- Polish
- Russian
- Serbo-Croatian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Tajiki
- Thai
- Turkish
- Turkmen
- Ukrainian
- Urdu
- Uzbek
- Vietnamese
Category IV languages
You’ll need approximately 88 weeks (2,200 hours in class) to reach professional working proficiency in these languages. While none of them is the hardest language to learn for English speakers, they all present their own unique challenges. These languages are ranked as such because they’re deeply nuanced, have complex grammar and pronunciation rules, and non-Latin writing systems.
- Arabic
- Chinese (Cantonese or Mandarin)
- Japanese
- Korean
How is language difficulty ranking determined?
Determining language difficulty requires a bird’s-eye view of how languages relate to each other. The criteria are largely tied to the average length of time it takes a student to learn a language, along with several other components that affect difficulty levels.
Linguistic distance
When we talk about linguistic distance, we’re referring to the fundamental differences between languages and how or where they’ve evolved from. Spanish, French, and Italian are all descendants of Latin and have many similarities.
For example, compare the word for “the flower” in those languages:
| Language | “The Flower” |
| Spanish | la flor |
| French | la fleur |
| Italian | il fiore |
For languages that are closely related, it helps to look at language families, or groups of languages that all stem from a common protolanguage.
In contrast to the similarities between the Romance languages (which share Latin as a protolanguage) listed above, German and Mandarin—two languages of different families with entirely unique writing systems—couldn’t be more linguistically distant.
The takeaway here is that the farther your native language is from the language you’re learning, the more challenging you may find your new language to learn.
Grammar differences
Grammar can be tricky, even in your native language. When unfamiliar grammar concepts—especially ones that don’t translate to English—are introduced, it can take some effort to readjust your approach to creating even basic sentences.
In English, you can say that you bought “five books.” However, to translate that same statement into Mandarin, you’ll need a measure word to quantify. Like a “pack” of wolves or a “tank” of gas, “books” in Mandarin requires the word běn (本) to indicate a unit of five books.
- wú běn shū（五本书）= five books
If you’re looking for ease of learning, finding a language with familiar or easy-to-master grammar rules can help you tone down the language difficulty level.
Pronunciation differences
A language’s pronunciation can have a significant impact on how difficult it is for a native English speaker to learn it. For example, the German word for “ice skating” is Schlittschuhlaufen. German is often known for its hard-to-master accent and enthusiastically long vocabulary. However, it’s also ranked as one of the easier languages to master due to its linguistic closeness to English.
The real pronunciation difficulty factor comes into play for tonal languages. These languages, which include Vietnamese and Mandarin, require correct pronunciation and inflection to create meaning for each word. Using the wrong tone can change the entire meaning.
Mandarin’s four distinct tones (plus a fifth neutral one) give one syllable five very different meanings. Check out this famous tongue-twister poem that demonstrates numerous ways to pronounce the syllable “shi”:
石室詩士史氏，嗜豕，失仕，誓食十獅。獅似嗜虱。史氏設寺，恃師勢，使施氏拾獅屍，俟食時，始識世事。史使侍逝適市，視施氏。試釋是事。
shí shì shī shì shī shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. shì shí shí shì shì shì shī. shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì. shì shí, shì shī shì shì shì shì. shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shì shì. shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shí shì. shí shì, shī, shì shǐ shì shì shí shì. shí shì shì, shì shǐ shì shí shí shī shī. shí shí, shǐ shì shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī. shì shì shì shì.
Translation: A poet named Shi lived in a stone room, fond of lions, he swore that he would eat ten lions. He constantly went to the market to look for ten lions. At ten o’clock, ten lions came to the market and Shi went to the market. Looking at the ten lions, he relied on his arrows to cause the ten lions to pass away. Shi picked up the corpses of the ten lions and took them to his stone room. The stone room was damp. Shi ordered a servant to wipe the stone room. As the stone den was being wiped, Shi began to try to eat the meat of the ten lions. At the time of the meal, he began to realize that the ten lion corpses were in fact ten stone lions. Try to explain this matter.
Writing system differences
As an English speaker, you’ll encounter three types of writing systems:
- Languages that use the same Latin alphabet as English (like Spanish).
- Languages that have their own unique alphabets (like Greek).
- Languages based on unique writing systems (like Mandarin).
Languages that fall in the first category are often the easiest languages to learn for English speakers. Because you’re already familiar with the alphabet, you have an understanding of characters and most letter sounds. If that’s the case, it takes less time to strengthen your reading and writing skills in that language.
The languages in the second category are moderately challenging. You’ll need to learn an entirely new alphabet, and memorize their corresponding letter sounds.
Still, some languages lack traditional alphabets. Mandarin, for example, has a logosyllabic writing system in which characters match distinct syllables in each word. These are the most difficult to learn, and new learners may find that learning by listening is more accessible than learning through text.
The hardest languages to learn ranked by difficulty for English speakers
Which language is the hardest to learn if you speak English? Below are 12 languages selected from Categories III and IV, ranked based on difficulty and similarity to English, along with a sample phrase to help you see the difference between the written language and English.
| Language | Writing System | “Hello” |
| Mandarin (Chinese) | Hanzi | 你好 |
| Cantonese (Chinese) | Hanzi | 你好 |
| Arabic | Arabic | اهلا و سهلا |
| Japanese | Hiragana, katakana, and kanji | こんにちは |
| Korean | Hangul | 안녕하세요 |
| Armenian | Armenian | բարև |
| Hindi | Devanagari | नमस्ते |
| Bulgarian | Bulgarian Cyrillic | Здравейте |
| Turkish | Turkish (based on Latin) | merhaba |
| Farsi | Perso-Arabic | سلام |
| Russian | Cyrillic | Здравствуйте |
| Vietnamese | Vietnamese (based on Latin) | xin chào |
1. Mandarin (Chinese)
Mandarin Chinese is one of the most spoken languages in the world, only second to English. It’s also one of the most difficult languages for non-native speakers to learn. It’s the largest Chinese macrolanguage and has the most native speakers of any other language (nearly one billion).
Attributes of Mandarin that make it difficult for English speakers include:
- Hanzi, the logogram-based writing system in which characters represent entire words
- five tones that change the meaning of a word based on the speaker’s pitch (high, rising, low, falling, and neutral)
- several dialects that change pronunciation and grammar rules
Although it can be difficult initially, choosing to learn Mandarin can be very beneficial. China and other countries that speak Chinese (like Singapore) are hubs of trade and technology, making Chinese one of the best languages to learn for business.
2. Cantonese (Chinese)
Cantonese is another dialect of Chinese, spoken by more than 75 million people. It’s primarily spoken in Hong Kong and Guangdong, a province in southern China.
Even though Cantonese is closely related to Mandarin, it has some unique challenges for new learners:
- a writing system that uses standardized Chinese Hanzi (like Mandarin), but with more complex, traditional characters rather than simplified characters
- six tonal sounds (versus the five in Mandarin), including glottal stops and the vowel sound “eoi”
- a more varied set of particles (grammatical components that add layers of meaning that don’t translate well to English)
While Cantonese and Mandarin are both Chinese languages, a Cantonese speaker can’t easily understand Mandarin (and vice versa). If an English speaker already knew Mandarin, they may be able to use standardized Chinese to write in Cantonese, but speaking and understanding it would take much longer.
3. Arabic
Arabic is the official language in 23 countries, spanning from the West African coast to Iraq. As a result, there are numerous dialects of Arabic, which can change its difficulty depending on which you learn.
Characteristics of Arabic that make it difficult for English speakers include:
- an abjad writing system, which typically uses only consonants and leaves the reader to infer vowel sounds (which may be optionally written with diacritics), and is written and read from right to left (RTL)
- a grammar system that differs from English (verb comes first, structure changes according to gender, no upper or lowercase letters)
- notable differences between written (Modern Standard Arabic, or MSA) and spoken Arabic
Once you’ve started to learn Arabic, it may be easier to learn Hebrew and other Semitic languages.
4. Japanese
Even though English uses many Japanese loanwords in everyday speech, including ramen, sushi, and futon, learning Japanese takes considerable time for English speakers.
The challenges Japanese presents to English speakers include:
- its status as an agglutinative language, which means that many of its words rely on affixes rather than word order to change meaning
- three writing systems to master: hiragana and katakana primarily represent sound and grammar, and kanji (Chinese characters) to represent main words
- a hierarchy of politeness and manners built into Japanese vocabulary and grammar that changes between formal vs. informal Japanese
For anyone who wants to learn Japanese, speaking to someone who is fluent in Japanese (like a Rosetta Stone tutor) can help you understand the language more quickly.
5. Korean
Korean is unique among the hardest languages to learn for English speakers because it’s a language isolate, which means it does not share a language family with any other language. Like Japanese, Korean is an agglutinative language that primarily changes word meaning based on affixes, rather than word order in a sentence.
When learning Korean, English speakers may have a hard time with:
- seven levels of formality, with a different set of verb endings for each one
- the Hangul alphabet, which combines several phonemes to create a single “block” of letters for each syllable
- verbal distinctions and subtleties that are difficult for English speakers to pronounce or perceive when listening
Once you’ve learned Korean, it may be easier for you to pick up Japanese. Although Korean is a language isolate and Japanese belongs to its own language family, their grammar structures and formality systems share some similarities.
Using language difficulty ranking for language learning
There’s no set timeline for how long it takes to learn a language, but language difficulty rankings serve as guides on your journey.
When you already speak a Germanic language like English, learning a language from a completely different language family may be the most challenging. Category I Romance languages (like French and Italian) are similar enough that they would only take English learners around 24-36 weeks to learn. On the other hand, Category IV languages (like Arabic and Korean) are so different from English that some aspects of the languages cannot be accurately translated, and they take considerably more time to learn.
But like every learning journey, picking up a new language—even one of the above hardest languages to learn—is worth the time it takes to master, whether that’s 552 hours or 2,200 hours.
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