The Hardest Languages for English Speakers to Learn

Some people learning English as a second language find it very difficult, while for others it's easy. How hard it is for someone usually depends on the person's first language, and how similar it is to English. But what are the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn?

The US Foreign Service Institute (FSI) was started in 1947 to teach US diplomats about the languages and cultures of other countries. At first, the FSI taught 13 languages, but today it teaches about 70. It has also found the average amount of time it takes a native English speaker to learn each language well enough to use it in a professional environment.

The FSI found that the easiest languages for English speakers to learn were those that were more similar to English, like French, Norwegian and Dutch. On average, it took people about 600 hours of classes over about 24 weeks to learn them.

German was a little harder for English speakers, usually requiring about 900 hours of classes over 36 weeks to learn. That's about the same as some of the easier Asian languages for English speakers, like Indonesian and Malay.

Languages the FSI describes as "hard" and significantly different from English included Hindi, Russian, Thai, and Vietnamese. These usually require about 1,100 hours of classes over 44 weeks to learn.

Then there are the most difficult languages for English speakers, which the FSI calls "super-hard-languages." These are Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and the two main Chinese languages, Mandarin and Cantonese. They usually require 2,200 hours of classes over 88 weeks to learn.

Credit: https://engoo.com