This is a fascinating article and really makes one stop and consider all the variables present when learning a foreign language, let alone the time it takes to reach the different levels described! Would you mind sharing the research sources from FSI you mentioned in the article? I would love to better understand! Does this schedule apply for a woman who has young kids still at home? I put in about hours a day, 5 days a week, and that is feeling like a major stretch!!
Be happy at what you have achieved. Read whatever you listen to, if possible, it is easier to acquire words, and improve comprehension that way. Once you understand it will be easier to speak. I became fluent in Tagalog by living in Metro Manila for a few years and being a part of the culture. No way!
Swahili is a very easy language, and those are difficult languages. I would place those in group 3. I think cognitive abilities are very important. A person with an excellent memory will learn vocabulary much faster. The older you get, the harder it is to learn new words due to memory problems senior moments.
I am 50 yo and it problably takes me 5 times longer to learn a new word compared to my daughter who is 8 year-old. Someone with pre-dementia or early dementia will certainly have difficulties even with the space repetition technique. If you have an average memory it should be as described above. If you have an excellent memory, then you can cut the time by half. I think motivation is the number one requirement, this can make even bad memory learn a new language provided of sufficient space repetition which works on an individual level.
I have put thousands of hours into it, listening to tapes, stays of up to three months in language schools in Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica. Plus for the past ten years I read for pleasure only in Spanish, e. The bottom line is that becoming truly fluent, i. I read an interesting study that concluded that most people, even after years living in a Spanish-speaking country, are stuck somewhere between levels 2 and 3 on the Foreign Service Institute scale.
People at this level can have conversations on most topics, but they are mutilating the language with a plethora of grammatical mistakes, strange sentence structures, and unusual word choices.
Think of the gadzillions of nuances in English that most immigrants never pick up. To correct fossilized errors is extremely difficult and takes focused training.
Use a sports metaphor, like a quarterback who keeps leaving the pocket too soon. The only fix is if the coach drills and drills and drills him. And of course no one can memorize words that fast and hold on to them. Think about it. If your goal is to communicate basic needs while traveling, that should be doable with a few hundred hours of study and quick access to an internet dictionary on your phone. I have been studying Portugues for 4 years, two months and 1 day and been to Brasil 13 times and have been excited to finally learn a second language.
I have always been able to learn things very quickly. Any ideas? Patfromamboy aol. Excellent comment all around, Rob.
We offer many tips on how to best learn a language that will surely help you to tackle even the most difficult language on this list.
Additionally, we also offer free language lessons for the most popular languages and a Top 10 language app overview with all currently available professional language products on the market with reviews by us and our readers. If you had read this carefully you would have seen that this chart is for English speakers, not Farsi speakers. BTW, slangs is not a word. Slang is a non-count noun. Yeah it is written from a native English speaker, as it says on the table in the blue sections.
How about Tamil? Only onle Oldest language till now people speaking.. Learning the basics of any language is a quick task. Programmes like Duolingo or Rosetta Stone can guide you through a few greetings and simple phrases at lightning speed.
For a more personal experience, polyglot Timothy Doner recommends reading and watching material that you already have an interest in. Learning a new language becomes much easier if you combine it with something else you enjoy — for instance, watching a football game with foreign commentary Credit: Getty Images. And which language you learn depends on your personal motivations, says Beverly Baker, an associate professor and director of language assessment at the University of Ottawa.
Once your intentions for the new language are defined, you can begin planning out a productive hourly schedule for daily practice that includes multiple learning methods. Language-learning programmes are important, but spending time with a native or skilled speaker is the most effective method Credit: Getty Images. Just like exercise or musical instruments, people recommend a shorter amount of practice time on a regular basis rather than larger chunks on a more sporadic basis.
Baker says this is because without a consistent schedule the brain fails to engage in any deep cognitive processes, like making connections between new knowledge and your previous learning. Category III contains no European languages at all though it does contain Indonesian, widely regarded as one of the objectively easiest languages to learn. Category IV offers a huge variety of languages from Amharic to Czech to Nepali to Tagalog, each demanding 44 weeks or hours of study.
Now if, like me, you consider studying foreign languages one of your main pursuits, you know that possessing a genuine interest in a language — in its mechanics, in its ongoing evolution, in the cultures that created it and the cultures it in turn creates — can do wonders to get you through even the most aggravating difficulties on the long journey to commanding it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. Follow him on Twitter at colinmarshall or on Faceboo k. We accept Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! To donate, click here. We thank you! Category IV: For your information, Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian are identical and the same languages which can be written with two alphabets; Cyrillic and Latin alphabet!
Belgium do not have a language! Australia do not have a language! Canada do not have a language! As a college language instructor in Japan, a student of the Japanese language and Welsh , I wonder if the categories work in reverse….
I notice that Korean Hangul is supposedly one of the hardest languages to learn, but this is false. Yes, it is very visually different from English and of course it sounds a lot more like Korean than English, but Hangul was specifically created to be an easy language to learn so that literacy could be easily achieved throughout Korea. Why no mention of any of the Celtic languages?
I am also curious where other African languages are ranked only saw Xhosa and Swahili , down to the clicks spoken by the San. Australian and Pacific languages missing. Native American tongues also not ranked. Can you flesh this out? French, like most other western European languages, is far easier than any of the Asian languages. I might have a unique perspective, as a Dane living in South Korea with a french girlfriend, but I have no expend almost no effort to catch a lot of french words, because there are so many that are the same as the english words, with a small change.
Is there a weekly hour cap on how many hours a person spend? Perhaps they are referring to learning all the possible variants, but for a single variant its no where near hours.
Korean should not be listed there. Korean can be seen as a simplified Chinese and Japanese. The vocabularies are derived from Chinese and grammar is very similar to Japanese but easier. Why is german, a germanic language, more difficult than e. Well i dunno details about the differences of arabic and hebrew, i just assume the grammar or the diversity is just more hard.
Identical is neither of those languages. Very similar yes. Serbian does differ from Croatian, so does Austrian. I think it is wrong to equate easiness with closeness of relation to English. German is much more closely related to English than Spanish. Spanish is just an objectively easy language to learn, and German is hard.
The color scheme of this graph is pretty off, do consider using diverging pallete or something similar. The only languages that are covered are those that the FSI teaches.
They will be teaching languages that are diplomatically useful, that is ones used by national governments that the US sends ambassadors to. Finally, the difficulty is for English-native adult learners. Spoken languages are all about equally difficult for non-verbal children to learn as a native language.
But for English-native adults, the important things are the amount of shared vocabulary, phonology and grammar with English. First, its script is notoriously hard for English speakers, because characters are always joined and there are changes in shape e. Having to learn two or three forms of the same language, with different phonology and grammar is inevitably going to take longer than just one. German might be more closely related, but English has much more Romance vocabulary than Germanic we use the Germanic words more, but there are more Romance words.
Their subjunctive and conditional moods are bona fide moods, not just composite of other moods and modal verbs…. Prepositions merge with articles, many nouns can have two different genders, adjectives must match in number and gender…. Likely because Arabic varies widely between regions. Speaking Arabic in Morocco is very different than speaking Arabic in Egypt or Saudi, so much that even native speakers of one region have significant difficulty understanding others from a different region.
Hangul is just the alphabet. Yeah, the Korean alphabet is easier to learn than most. Could it be Catalan falls in the same difficulty category as Spanish and French so that no distinguishing color is shown in Catalonia, Andorra and rest of regions? Serbian and Croatian does differ slightly in pronunciation and some of words but base is These charts look illuminating but they also hide a lot.
I should hasten to add that we were all born good language learners — hence all of us become fluent in our mother tongue in much the same time. And that poor language learners can become good language learners once they let go of disempowering beliefs, attitudes and practices. Of course it helps to take on ones that lead them to become good language learners! Alphabet is more complex most letters change shape depending on whether they are in initial, middle, or final position in a word 2.
Grammar is similar, but more complex 3. Arabic has a glottal stop, and two or more? Modern Hebrew syntax and tense structure has been influenced by European languages, Arabic, not.
The time mentioned in this list really means how long time they take in the class to get some level in the language. The difficulty depends on what you want to reach.
Probably a lot less. At the same time, none of the Romance languages belongs in that category. Hangul is the Korean alphabet, not the language. I learned the Hangul alphabet in two days, but that does not mean I can speak the language. You must also contend with forms of speech honorifics to differentiate who you are talking to.
You speak differently to someone younger, older or in a position of authority than you would to someone of equal age or status. Just a warning that the upper poster is wrong. Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian are definitely not the same language. Very similar, yes, but with many different words and some grammar rules are different! I am a native speaker of one of those languages and have trouble fully understanding the others.
There are simply many cases where we have have one word for it in one language and the other in the other language. I have friends who disagree… But it usually turns out that they were exposed to both languages as kids so they automatically learned both.
I also think this is a generational thing — older members of my family who learned and used both languages tend to view them as more similar, but us kids find many differences and it feels like different languages altogether.
In general understanding the German language is not difficult it took me a week but mastering it is almost an impossibility. To: Kris Lindbeck — Your point 3 is incorrect. The standard accent in Israel is not Ashkenazi, it is Sephardic. Hebrew also has a letter with a glottal stop, like the letter Ayin in my name in Hebrew.
It also has 2 kh sounds, one slightly softer than the other. Go study at the David Yellin Institute in Jerusalem if you really want to understand the Hebrew language.
For me French is more difficult than Kiswahili. Kiswahili Sox month and my command is good. Indonesian is much easier to learn than any other foreign language. The grammar is simplistic. There are no tenses, no conjugation, and no word genders.
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