The Hardest Languages to Learn for English Speakers
How this guide was made. The category rankings and hour estimates are quoted from the US Foreign Service Institute’s own published page, fetched directly and linked below. It explains a government benchmark and does not claim first-hand classroom testing.
For native English speakers, the hardest languages to learn are Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean, the US Foreign Service Institute’s “Category IV” languages, which take government trainees about 2,200 class hours, roughly three times longer than Spanish. The FSI trains American diplomats and has published language difficulty rankings for decades based on how long its own students take to reach working proficiency. The rest of this guide lists all four categories in full and explains what actually makes the hardest languages hard.
How difficulty is measured
The FSI’s rankings are not a vibe, they are a record of how long its students have actually taken to reach a working proficiency score on the government’s Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale, at an intensive pace of about 23 hours a week in class plus roughly 17 hours of self-study. That is a 40-hour learning week, closer to a full-time job than a hobby, so the hour counts below describe a ceiling on efficiency, not what a casual self-taught learner should expect to match. The categories are specific to native English speakers: a Russian speaker learning Ukrainian, or a Japanese speaker learning Korean, faces a completely different and generally much shorter road, since shared vocabulary, grammar and writing systems matter more than a language’s difficulty in the abstract.
The four FSI categories, in full
| Category | Time for English speakers | Languages |
|---|---|---|
| I — easiest | 24–30 weeks (552–690 class hours) | Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish |
| II | About 36 weeks (828 class hours) | German, Haitian Creole, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili |
| III — hard | About 44 weeks (1,012 class hours) | 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 |
| IV — hardest | 88 weeks (2,200 class hours) | Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean |
The FSI describes its Category III list as “not exhaustive,” so a language missing from it is not necessarily easier, just not one the school has published a specific estimate for. Within Category I, Spanish and French are the two languages that take the full 30 weeks; the rest reach the same score in 24.
Why the hardest languages are hard
Category IV’s five languages earn the label for different reasons, not one shared trait:
- Arabic. Modern Standard Arabic is written right to left in a script where short vowels are usually left out of ordinary text, so reading accurately depends on already knowing the word. Words build from three-consonant roots that combine with patterns to form related meanings, a system with no real English equivalent. On top of that, the everyday spoken language in any given country is a distinct regional dialect, not the Modern Standard Arabic taught in courses and used in writing and news.
- Mandarin. Standard Mandarin uses four tones plus a neutral tone, where the same syllable means different things depending on pitch contour, a feature English does not have at all. Its writing system is logographic: there is no alphabet to sound out, and literacy requires memorizing several thousand individual characters.
- Cantonese. Cantonese has more tones than Mandarin, commonly described as six or more depending on how they are counted, and its spoken vocabulary and grammar diverge from Mandarin enough that speakers of one cannot simply understand the other by ear. It is traditionally written with Chinese characters as well.
- Japanese. Japanese combines three writing systems in ordinary text: two phonetic syllabaries (hiragana and katakana) and thousands of Chinese-derived characters (kanji). Its sentence structure places the verb at the end, the reverse of English, and it has an extensive system of politeness levels that change verb forms and vocabulary depending on who you are speaking to.
- Korean. Korean is the outlier: its Hangul script, created in the 15th century specifically to be easy to learn, is widely considered one of the more approachable writing systems in the world. What keeps Korean in Category IV is the grammar, an agglutinative system where suffixes stack onto word stems, a verb-final sentence structure, and its own layered system of speech levels and honorifics.
Category III’s list is large and varied, but recurring difficulty drivers include grammatical case systems that change word endings based on a word’s role in a sentence (common across many Slavic languages, including Russian and Polish), and, for Thai, Hindi, Vietnamese and several others, either a tonal system, a non-Latin script, or both.
Why the easiest languages are easy
Category I’s nine languages share two advantages with English: a Latin alphabet, so reading does not require learning a new writing system, and a large amount of shared vocabulary. English absorbed a great deal of its vocabulary from French and Latin after the Norman Conquest, which is a large part of why Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese words often look familiar even to a beginner. Spanish in particular also has largely phonetic spelling, meaning written words are pronounced close to how they look, without the spelling irregularities English itself is notorious for. If you are choosing a language partly for a faster start, our guides on how to learn Spanish fast and how long it takes to learn Spanish cover the easiest end of this list in detail.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the hardest language to learn for English speakers?
Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean are tied at the top as the US Foreign Service Institute’s Category IV, its hardest bracket, each estimated at about 2,200 class hours for English speakers to reach a working proficiency score.
What is the easiest language to learn for English speakers?
Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Romanian make up Category I, the FSI’s easiest bracket, at 552 to 690 class hours. They share a Latin alphabet and substantial vocabulary overlap with English.
Is Mandarin or Arabic harder to learn?
The FSI rates them the same, both Category IV at about 2,200 class hours. They are difficult for different reasons: Mandarin for its tones and its character-based writing system, Arabic for its script, its root-and-pattern grammar, and the gap between written Modern Standard Arabic and spoken regional dialects.
Is Korean really as hard as Japanese and Chinese?
By class hours, the FSI rates it the same, Category IV. Its writing system, Hangul, is genuinely easier to learn than Japanese’s three-script system or Chinese characters, but its grammar, sentence structure and honorific system are still a significant, sustained challenge for English speakers.
How long does it take to learn Japanese, Mandarin or Arabic?
The FSI estimates about 88 weeks, roughly 2,200 class hours, for English speakers to reach a working proficiency score in any Category IV language, at an intensive full-time pace. Part-time self-study takes proportionally longer, often several years.
Why is Spanish considered an easy language?
Spanish shares a Latin alphabet with English, has a large amount of Latin- and French-derived vocabulary in common with English, mostly phonetic spelling, and a subject-verb-object sentence structure similar to English’s own. See how long it takes to learn Spanish for a level-by-level breakdown.
Do these difficulty rankings apply to everyone?
No. They are specific to native English speakers with no prior experience in the target language or a related one. Someone who already speaks a related language, such as a Russian speaker learning Polish, will generally progress much faster than these estimates suggest, because shared vocabulary and grammar shortcut a large part of the work.
Is English hard for other people to learn?
It depends heavily on the learner’s own first language, the same way these rankings depend on English as the starting point. English has irregular spelling and a large, mixed vocabulary from Germanic and Latin sources, which can make it inconsistent to read and write even though its grammar has relatively few verb forms compared with many other languages.
Sources and how this was researched
This guide quotes category rankings and hour estimates from a single government source and does not claim first-hand classroom testing.
- US Foreign Service Institute: foreign language training, categories and hours, fetched directly for this guide
- Cambridge English: guided learning hours by CEFR level, for the cross-language CEFR comparisons linked from this guide