DIFFICULTY OF LEARNING LANGUAGES
FOREIGN SERVICE INSTITUTE, US DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Closely related to English
‱575-600 class hours
Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese,
Romanian, Spanish, Swedish
Significant linguistic and/or
cultural differences
1100 class hours
Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian,
Burmese, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Finish, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew,
Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Khmer, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian,
Macedonian, Mongolian, Nepali, Pashto, Persian (Dari, Farsi, Tajik),
Polish, Russian, Serbian, Sinhalese, Slovak, Slovenian, Tagalog, Thai,
Turkish, Ukranian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Xhosa, Zulu
Exceptionally difficult for
native English speakers
2200 class hours
Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean