Learning a new language can be difficult, but some languages can be trickier than others. For native English speakers, the difficulty level of a new language depends on a variety of factors. So which are the most difficult to learn? And which languages would you be able to master in under a year? View the infographic below to learn more.
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Warm-Up Activity
Before handing out the infographic, discuss the following questions with your students: Are some languages harder to learn than others? In your opinion, which ones are the most difficult to pick up?
Speaking & Critical Thinking Practice
Questions to ask your students after presenting the infographic:
- What is the most surprising fact that you discovered from this infographic?
- As the graphic describes, successful language learning depends on a variety of factors. Which of these have you found to be the most important for your own language learning? Can you think of any others to add to the list?
- Do you agree with the FSI’s language difficulty scale? If not, what would you change?
- The Foreign Service Institute’s language difficulty rankings reflect learning expectations for native English speakers only. How do you think these rankings would change for language learners with different L1s?
- High school and university students who are required to study a foreign language often choose the language that seems “easiest”. What arguments could you present to such students to encourage them to study a “harder” language like Arabic or Chinese?
Writing Challenge
After reviewing this infographic with your students, have them write a an essay or blog post on the topic below. In addition to using the information from the infographic, students can do independent research using the sources provided at the bottom of the graphic.
Describe your own language learning experiences. What languages have you studied, and how easy or difficult have they been to master? In your opinion, what makes them so easy or hard? Support your answer with specific examples of vocabulary, grammar, pronunciations, etc. that have either given you trouble or been a breeze to learn.
Turkish is written like “Türkçe”, with ‘Ü’ not ‘U’.
Tons of the languages are written erroneously. Crappy chart
1) Japanese uses four different writing systems.
2) You should have mentioned German somewhere, really.
There is 3 writing systems
1-Kanji(漢字)
2-Hiragana(ひらがな)
3-Katakana(カタカナ）
4-Romanji
romanji is a writing system? I don’t see the Japanese going around writing romanji in their daily lives..
I’ve seen some romaji letters in some songs and ads, but each letter takes the space of a kanji, and the words are pronounced as they would be in Katakana. So it’s just a fancier way to write foreign words.
German isn’t hard to learn (compared to most). Not for English speakers anyway, as ours is a germanic language to begin with. Even as a kid, I could understand some of the German I’d hear on movies without ever having had a lesson or known any Germans. “Was is das” for ‘what is that’ and “Bringen sie es hier” for ‘bring it here’ are just a couple of examples of how similar German is to English.
“Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German.” Mark Twain.
that´s why
Cool chart. I also noticed German isn’t on there. I suppose it would be under easy since it uses a latin-based alphabet and isn’t too far off from Dutch. Either way, I’ve had a helluva time with it. I’m going to embed this in my blog…
German is at 30 to 36 weeks in the FSI study that this chart is based on. Here’s a link:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers
This seems quite simplified. More detail would have been good. The range on the Medium category is way too broad. There must be a huge difference between Greek and Finnish for example.
The next time use wikipedia. Goole translator gave you the adjectives meaning “from country xxx”. It hurts to look at.
Chiming in – Finnish is ‘Suomi’ as a language, ‘Suomalainen’ as a nationality…
What about English?
As in, how hard is it for learners of other languages to learn English .. especially if it’s not the same as above (i.e. much easier for Spanish speakers to learn English than for Japanese ones?)
As someone who learned English as a second language, I’d probably put it in the easy level… even if it took me years to learn it :p And even if I still make silly mistakes :p Frankly, I guess it’s easier for me to learn English than it is for someone who speaks English to learn Portuguese…
it’s very easy
Learn a foreign lenguaje is difficult for all, except to learn esperanto the international language. The grammar has only 16 rules. You can learn in the web. Go to lernu.net
Great chart, but I one thing.. Same for Dutch as Xiphiase said about Finnish, Nederlandse is a woman with the Dutch nationality, Nederlands is the language on its own. Lose the “e”!
“Korean” should be “한국어,” not “한국어의.” What you have (한국어의) means “of the Korean language” and is a glaring error to anyone who speaks Korean. Others have pointed out similar errors for other languages. You should remake the chart. Someone’s suggestion of checking against Wikipedia for the names of the languages was an excellent idea. You can’t trust automatic translators 100%. They give you a general idea but include a lot of mistakes and awkward phrasing.
25 class-hours a week? Does anyone with a full-time job have that kind of time?
Please correct the incorrect words used for referring to the language for: Dutch,Norwegian,Finnish,Polish…vietnamese? Am I insane? Or do I know all of these things to be wrongly represented here?
I am certain about the Dutch one.
I feel ashamed to have visited this page… I cannot imagine the amount of shame I would feel being the author of this.
Thank you all for your feedback. We’re glad that you caught our mistakes – if anything, it means that you’re taking the time to read our posts! We’re happy to report that we have finally updated the infographic with the correct language names. Happy reading!
Too optimistic!! I know lots of English native speakers whom, after more than six months living and studying in Italy, Spain or Mexico are not still proficient on Italian or Spanish, and they’re not even able to hold an average conversation on those languages…
That’s because they haven’t really tried hard. My friend’s French is already at a decent level after three months of living in France. It’s all about motivation.
Too optimistic!! I know lots of English native speakers whom, after more than six months living and studying in Italy, Spain or Mexico are not still proficient on Italian or Spanish, and they’re not even able to hold an average conversation on those languages…
I can tell you that italians cannot pronounce good the english language(I’m living in Italy,I’m romanian).They have not some sounds presents in english language
「話す日本語？」at the top should be「日本語話す？」
But your ordinary Japanese will probably ask you「日本語できる？」or to put it more politely「日本語できますか？」.
Yes, it’s difficult
I don’t think this graphic gives the full story. For example, Japanese is one of the easier languages to learn in regards to speaking and listening. However, one of the more difficult to learn to read and write.
exactly!! redo the graph!!! separate the oral/listening and written.
I agree. Same with Mandarin, I can speak it and understand it fairly well but I have more trouble with reading and writing it.
178 million portuguese native speakers? Definetely wrong? Population of Brazil: 190 millions. Pop. of Angola: 19 millions. Pop. of Portugal: 10,6 millions. Plus, Moçambique, Cabo Verde and a few more others.
What about Irish (Gaeilge)??? It’s one of the oldest languages to still be spoken! Where does it come in this poll?
Thanks for your question! According to the FSI, Irish falls into the “Medium” category. See this article for more information:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers
German and Hungarian are not listed – and many more
Hi Frank,
We weren’t ready to win the award for the world’s largest infographic, so we chose to omit many languages. As David S. pointed out, German is in a category of its own (30-36 weeks / 750-900 class hours), while Hungarian is believed to be slightly more difficult than the “Medium” languages listed on this graphic. For the complete list of language difficulty rankings (determined by the United States Foreign Service Institute), take a look at this link:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers
Nothing is written about Hungarian, which is supposed to be a difficult language for English-speakers to learn.
I am a Romanian native speaker and I tell you, our grammar is very hard comparing to English. Romanian is not an easy language, trust me.
I’m a romanian and I can tell that for us it’s easier to learn more languages ,as english that has a few grammar comparing to romanian language.
Sorry about that, but Romanian is pretty easy. I am not a native speaker, but I learned it in no time.
Complete or not complete chart. Accurate more or less.
But at least it got us thinking, talking and researching this interesting subject. Thank you VOXY for your effort and teasing our brains 
My 1 language was Polish, then years of studying Russian, then half a lifetime (continued…) in English speaking country, not to mention a bit of exposure to German (1.5 years in Germany) and Italian, Dutch and Chinese – because my work… The more languages you know, the easier the next comes 
Thanks for reading, Barbara! There will never be a consensus on language difficulty rankings, so the best we could do was pull existing data from the FSI. As you pointed out, our goal was to get everyone thinking about and discussing this topic. Based on the number of comments on this post, we think it’s safe to say: “Mission: accomplished!”
Super interesting graphic. Very cool actually. I had heard this sort of breakdown in the past, but your graphic really brings it to life and I like the classroom hours and weeks numbers as well. Of course, what is language proficiency?
Hi Aaron,
Thanks for the kind words! In this particular case, the FSI defined language proficiency as General Professional Proficiency in Speaking and General Professional Proficiency in Reading (Level 3 on a scale of 1 – 5). Check out this link for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSI_scale
Sorry to ruin the party, but I don’t like this “infographic”, you could have done it much better.
e.g. why putting there the country maps (“no comparatively scaled”), it has no relevance to the purpose of the graphic. No added value, but diffuse focus.
Practically only the section headers contain relevant, infographical content, all the other is just some colorful thingie with numbers and words thrown together.
Oh, and you don’t even define what you mean by “language proficiency”.
You refer to ILR in the graphic, still it is not obvious which level you mean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILR_scale
Hi Erinah,
Sorry for the confusion! When the FSI compiled its language learning expectations for native English speakers, they specifically looked at the length of time that it takes to achieve Level 3 proficiency: General Professional Proficiency in Speaking (S3) and General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3). Hope this answers your question!
Apparently 5 million people were counted twice in the Netherlands.
In Vietnam the researcher forgot to count 18 million.
In Spain every citizen was counted 7.15 times.
In South Africa only one in ten was counted…
In Thailand only one in three was counted.
In Portugal every citizen was counted 17 times !!!!!!!
In India only in 6.6 people were counted !!!!!!
I’m stopping my search here, it’s obvious this article lacks the needed scientific approach to be taken serious.
A lot of people speak Dutch in Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany.
Not everybody speak Vietnamese in Vietnam
A lot of people speak Spanish outside Spain. (Mexico, South America)
There a lot of dialect and a lot of people speak english in South Africa
People in Brasil speak Portuguese
There many indian language and many people in India have english has a first language.
The number = number of Speaker, not the country population…
You should check you scientific approach!
maybe you are forgetting latinamerica
the data here is erroneous and not well researched…Hindi is spoken by atleast a billion people in India…This would be a correct learning curve for someone whose first language is English…A person whose mother tongue is Chinese will find it easier to learn Japanese than English…
Really surprised that you did not think German was important to include somewhere. It is spoken by many more people than Dutch, and should have been included. That saying, it is a fairly simple language to learn, just slightly harder than Spanish.
Hi Mona,
Thanks for reading! We chose not to include German because it falls into a separate category within the Foreign Service Institute’s language difficulty rankings. Along with Indonesian, Swahili and a few other languages, German is ranked between the “Easy” and “Medium” languages on our chart. So, your comment about it being “slightly harder than Spanish” is spot on!
For more information, take a look at this link: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers
hi everybody,
theres this website where you can learn english, romanian, spanish and portuguese for free:
http://www.linguasnet.com
just take a look if you want to learn new languages!
thank you!
This is a de- infographic
This is way off. How can anyone claim Vietnamese and Thai are easier for native English speakers than Chinese and Japanese? From first-hand experience I can say this is ridiculous.
Vietnamese uses Latin alphabet, so it’s much easier to learn to write than Chinese and Japanese
Vietnamese uses Latin alphabet, so it’s much easier to learn to write than Chinese and Japanese
Chinese is actually easier for Westerners to learn to speak, whereas Finnish is very difficult because the complex grammatical structures take longer to adapt to. This seems terribly specious. Also, I’m a bit curious what counts as “proficiency.”
ROILA is certainly the easiest language to learn: http://www.roila.org
And you’ve heard what they call people who speak more than one language as bilingual or multilingual. You know what they call people who only speak one language? Americans
there are more than americans…for example,Western European people think it’s enough to know their own language,just because these are spoken by many people all around the world..
Dutch one of the easy languages to learn? The grammar is so hard, there so many foreigners living in Holland for 40 years and are still far from fluent
Both in writing and orally, Dutch is really hard.
Ohhhhhhhhhh, Thai is hardest!!! I am Thai but I can’t use Thai best. Thai has more verb proverb noun etc.
No native person can be confident to say that they use their language best
because we are not linguists
2 things: 1) Where’s English? 2)languages are easy as pie to learn for native speakers. So NO language is intrinsically more difficult to learn than any other. After that there are many factors which mitigate the 5 you list, AGE being the most important. Others include relation of native language to target language, and reason for learning the target language.
This graphic gives a “look at which languages are easiest and most difficult for [native] English speakers to pick up.” Age is, of course, an extremely important factor. Thanks for bringing that up!
The time it takes to learn a language depends on a number of factors… – indisputably! However, if you look closer, you’ll see that in order to achieve language proficiency in Russian an English speaking person (and vice versa as I understood) needs only 44 weeks – HA-HA-HA
) Yeh, 44 weeks of day-and-night studying and cramming,drilling and practicing, and … And if you take a sober view of things and divide 1,110 class hours into 4 (the usual number of class hours per week we spend to learn a foreign language), you’ll have 277,5 weeks (or 5 years) – That’s more feasible… but less motivating ;D
The time it takes to learn a language depends on a number of factors… – indisputably! However, if you look closer, you’ll see that in order to achieve language proficiency in Russian an English speaking person (and vice versa as I understood) needs only 44 weeks – HA-HA-HA
) Yeh, 44 weeks of day-and-night studying and cramming,drilling and practicing, and … And if you take a sober view of things and divide 1,110 class hours into 4 (the usual number of class hours per week we spend to learn a foreign language), you’ll have 277,5 weeks (or 5 years) – That’s more feasible… but less motivating ;D
What about German??
German is medium level
chinese is the best languages in the world!
most stupid language in the world.
Written Korean doesn’t rely on Chinese letters!!! It’s Japanese that actually uses Chinese in their written language as well as their own writing system. Koreans use all their own characters Hangeul, a lot of which has meanings derived from Chinese language, but it doesn’t rely on their letters!
As a couple of other people have said…I think it might make more sense to lower the number of class hours/week that is assumed. I’ve been taking 30 class hours/week of Arabic, and with the homework that’s assigned it’s around 50-60 hours/week…I don’t think that’s practical for most people (not to mention you get pretty burned out).
Hindi has way more than 192m speakers. Lol.
Note that Korean very rarely uses Chinese Characters (Hanja). They are used only for short forms and names.
Nice info… I’ll get started right away!!
Regards,
Chris
http://christophercopywriter.com
These days it is completely distinct to be able to united states and i believe many people are planning to recognize in your publishing and there’s no option to forget about the application in the event he knows little bit regarding it.
Arabic is soo easy
allogha al3arabiya sahla gdan
You forgot Deutsch
I personally think that ability to learn a language has nothing to do with “easy”, “medium”, or “difficult”. It has to do with how one’s brain / thought process works, and the desire to learn a particular language.
Where’s German?! I think German is hard!
This would be fantastic if it were true – 23/24 weeks to become proficient in a language…? For anyone who has actually learnt a language they will tell you that is insane.
It’s always good to check the source and I note this comes from the US State Department from that bastion of language learners the US of A!
Enough of language, eat ham from Hamazing.com!!
I have found cetain languages to be rather easy japanese being one as well as spanish and the other romance languages. People may freak out at the sight of a kanji but in Japanese the reality is you only really have to remember 1000 kanji to ultimately be proficient enough to read a news paper. However the harder part is the fact that Japanese has three writing systems. But even though it sounds scary the “alphabet” if you will is not too crazy and once you have them down then everything becomes a lot easier. In addition to that Japanese is extremely easy to pronounce as long as you don’t let you english pronounciation spill out. Next chinese yet another scary language especially for westerners. Chinese has a bit of a trade off. Chinese (Mandarin) has a very simple grammatical structure so much so that you don’t have to conjugate those pesky characters. However it is hard because not only do you have to memorize 10,000 pictures but the tonal language is extremely difficult for English speakers because of the fact that they can’t pronounce other foreign sounds well in addition to the way you say that sound that you can hardly say also must be said in a certain tone in order for it to make sense is a donting task for really anybody. Lastly, the romance languages, some of the most elegant and beautiful of all, at least I think so are rather straight forward and if you speak English will have some cognates that you can depend on. The biggest challenge of these languages are the complex conjugating and might I add the ridiculous amount of tenses. What I mean is that there is not present, past, and future but there is also the bloody imperfect tenses which show up when you think you know how to say something. But, the plus side is the grammatical structure isn’t crazy and not too different fom English and basically if you know one you know them all. Be cafeful with this statement because the reality is that for example if you know Spanish you can probably understand Italian and Portugese and maybe not undertand spoken French but probably can read it with not too much difficulty. There you have it the profiles of the variious languages I have studied. Please any email me with comments.
Hello there,
I am learning Spanish now and wish to learn more languages.
I am an Indian.
Can i go for Arabic after spanish,,?
Romanian is easy ? Even some people born in Romania can’t speak it correctly.
Arabic native speakers was 310m back 2006, I wonder what has changed so in 2012 it became 210m.
Ah the irony!
OK, I can forgive most errors of grammar, but to BEGIN an infographic about language with one of the clumsiest grammatical goofs is just too funny.
It’s not “What Are The Hardest Languages To Learn?” but
“WHICH Are The Hardest Languages To Learn?”
And what would you say about Czech and Slovak?
Apart from the errors, the estimates on how long it can take to learn a language are a bit off, according to empirical and qualitative research on the subject.
Im dutch but i learned a bit korean, chinese and japanese are very easy to speak, prenouncing is very easy. I think german and french are way harder! i mean german has the naamvallen? and french is a whole other language if you write it. Japanese is even easyer then dutch. i hate the dutch language it stupid and it has rules where nobody cares about. i mean werkte or werkde i hear no difference. wish i was english or japanese
Georgian language is also very difficult to learn for foreigners and unfortunately nobody even mentioned it
I’m surprised it hasn’t been pointed out yet but there really is no such language as Chinese. In China most people speak Mandarin. Others speak Min, Wu, Cantonese and a few others.
Brazil’s population alone is 192 million… so how do you say the total of Portuguese speaking people in the world is 178 million? It’s certainly over 200.
This chart is based completely on FSI standards. This is how they train you to speak a foreign language if you are DoS or DoD. You get sent to the Defense Language Institute, and you spend 6-8 hours a day, 5 days a week learning this stuff for the period prescribed. Its like going to high school, but all you study is the language. The FSI classes out language into groups. You all see Category I, III, and IV languages. Most of the languages that are missing are categorized as Category II, which is approximately 32 weeks.
When I took Korean, it was 63 weeks, and I ended up with a 3/3/2 R/L/S.
Thank you for sharing this under the creative common license. I have translated your work to Arabic and published it on this link http://visual.ly/what-are-hardest-languages-learn-arabic. keep up the good work
What about Persian?!!
It’s good, love you so much.
Hi, just wanted to say, I enjoyed this post. It was inspiring. Keep on posting!
Hello, just wanted to mention, I liked this article. It was practical. Keep on posting!
I want to learn german, I come here and I dont find the german language listed? why the hell a language like german wouldnt be listed? if some1 truely knows where it should be “medium or easy” please say!!! because im pretty sure its not hard