English speakers may find Mandarin, Arabic, and Japanese up to four times harder to become proficient in than Spanish or FrenMastering any new language is a challenge, but some take much more time and effort to reach proficiency.
The ability to learn a certain foreign language depends on a number of factors. These include how similar the foreign language is to an individual’s native language (or any other foreign language they might speak), how immersed a person is into the language (studying from books at home versus conversing with the locals), and cultural differences, as well as the complexity of the language itself, in terms of grammar, writing system, and linguistic conceptsch.For English-speaking students, the hardest foreign languages to learn include Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. On the other hand, some of the easiest foreign languages to become proficient in include Spanish and PortugueseThere is no official consensus as to what foreign language is widely regarded as the most difficult for an English speaker to learn. However, there is some research undertaken by the United States Foreign Service Institute and the Defense Language Institute that ranked foreign language acquisition by the number of hours students have required, on average, to become proficient in them.After 70 years of experiencing teaching languages to American diplomats, the U.S. Foreign Service has grouped foreign languages into four categories of difficulty. The easiest require 575-600 hours of study (23-24 weeks of classroom study) for students to achieve sufficient competence to be posted overseas, whereas the hardest group requires at least 2,200 hours of study (88 weeks of full-time classroom study) to achieve the same level of proficiency. In other words, some languages can be 3-4 times harder to master than others.Category I Languages: 24-30 weeks (600-750 class hours)
Danish (24 weeks) Dutch (24 weeks) French (30 weeks)
Italian (24 weeks) Norwegian (24 weeks) Portuguese (24 weeks)
Romanian (24 weeks) Spanish (24 weeks) Swedish (24 weeks)
Category II Languages: Approximately 36 weeks (900 class hours)
German Haitian Creole Indonesian
Malay Swahili
Category III Languages: Approximately 44 weeks (1100 class hours)Albanian Amharic Armenian
Azerbaijani Bengali Bulgarian
Burmese Czech Dari
Estonian Farsi Finnish
Georgian Greek Hebrew
Hindi Hungar
Tamil language word first language
Why some languages are harder to learn than others
Although the degree to which an individual manages to master a foreign language can depend a lot on their motivation, almost everything else comes down to how similar your native language is to the one you’re trying to learn.According to Dr. Cindy Blanco, Senior Learning Scientist at Duolingo, “what makes a language easy or hard is all about what languages you already know — so your native language is really important, but so are any other languages you know or have studied.”
“Adults studying a new language have to suppress the language(s) they know best in order to learn the new system: they have already learned first language conceptual categories for vocabulary and grammar, intricate articulatory motions to pronounce sounds with precise acoustic targets (or manual targets, in signed languages), and maddeningly arbitrary connections between written squiggles and sounds, syllables, or words,” Blanco told ZME Science.
One obvious way that a language can be radically different from another is in the writing system. French uses the same writing system as English, apart from a few extra symbols, so it is much easier to learn than Japanese or Hindi, which have completely different writing systems. Japanese uses three different writing systems, the imported Chinese characters (Kanji), as well as two syllabaries — Hiragana and Katakana. Each writing system has its time and place so you must learn all three.
A vocabulary and syntax that is similar to that of your native language can also make it easier to pick up a new language. If you’re an English speaker you’re quite fortunate, since other languages tend to borrow words from it due to it being spoken across the world.
“We’re apt to transfer properties of our first language to the new language, and that could be helpful if the properties are the same across the languages and more challenging if they differ. Properties include things like first language sounds, concepts and meanings (what counts as “blue” isn’t universal!), patterns for what order to put words in, and rules about politeness,” Blanco said.
However, a common vocabulary isn’t always helpful. In fact, it can sometimes work against you. For instance, a French “préservatif” is not something you add to your food, but a condom.
Languages can also differ substantially through the use of different tones. There are four tones in Mandarin high pitch (say G in a musical scale), rising pitch (like from C to G), falling (from G to C) and falling low then rising (C to B to G). So the same word can have totally different meanings based on its pronunciation. There’s a famous poem in Mandarin by Chinese-American linguist Yuen Ren Chao calledThe Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den, which translated into English sounds like:
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