These Are The Hardest Languages For English Speakers To Learn

For English speakers, learning Spanish or Italian can take less than a year. Reaching the same level of proficiency in Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, or Arabic may require nearly four times as much study.

This wide gap reflects how closely a language resembles English in its vocabulary, grammar, sounds, and writing system.

This visualization, created by Julie R. Peasley via Visual Capitalist, ranks languages by difficulty using categories and study-time estimates from Effective Language Learning and Rosetta Stone, which reference Foreign Service Institute-style benchmarks.

Which Languages Are Easiest to Learn for English Speakers?

Languages are generally easier to learn when they share familiar grammar, vocabulary, sounds, or writing systems. That’s why many Category I languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, and Swedish, are considered relatively approachable.

The data table below shows the difficulty rankings and estimated learning time for 70 different languages:

Language	Category	Time to learn
Afrikaans	I	24-30 weeks
Danish	I	24-30 weeks
Dutch	I	24-30 weeks
French	I	24-30 weeks
Italian	I	24-30 weeks
Norwegian	I	24-30 weeks
Portuguese	I	24-30 weeks
Romanian	I	24-30 weeks
Spanish	I	24-30 weeks
Swedish	I	24-30 weeks
German	II	36 weeks
Haitian Creole	II	36 weeks
Indonesian	II	36 weeks
Malay	II	36 weeks
Swahili	II	36 weeks
Albanian	III	44 weeks
Amharic	III	44 weeks
Armenian	III	44 weeks
Azerbaijani	III	44 weeks
Bengali	III	44 weeks
Bulgarian	III	44 weeks
Burmese	III	44 weeks
Czech	III	44 weeks
Dari	III	44 weeks
Estonian	III	44 weeks
Farsi	III	44 weeks
Finnish	III	44 weeks
Georgian	III	44 weeks
Greek	III	44 weeks
Hebrew	III	44 weeks
Hindi	III	44 weeks
Hungarian	III	44 weeks
Icelandic	III	44 weeks
Kazakh	III	44 weeks
Khmer	III	44 weeks
Kurdish	III	44 weeks
Kyrgyz	III	44 weeks
Lao	III	44 weeks
Latvian	III	44 weeks
Lithuanian	III	44 weeks
Macedonian	III	44 weeks
Mongolian	III	44 weeks
Nepali	III	44 weeks
Pashto	III	44 weeks
Polish	III	44 weeks
Russian	III	44 weeks
Serbo-Croatian	III	44 weeks
Sinhala	III	44 weeks
Slovak	III	44 weeks
Slovenian	III	44 weeks
Somali	III	44 weeks
Telugu	III	44 weeks
Tibetan	III	44 weeks
Tamil	III	44 weeks
Tajiki	III	44 weeks
Tagalog	III	44 weeks
Thai	III	44 weeks
Turkish	III	44 weeks
Turkmen	III	44 weeks
Ukrainian	III	44 weeks
Urdu	III	44 weeks
Uzbek	III	44 weeks
Vietnamese	III	44 weeks
Xhosa	III	44 weeks
Zulu	III	44 weeks
Arabic	IV	88 weeks
Cantonese Chinese	IV	88 weeks
Mandarin Chinese	IV	88 weeks
Japanese	IV	88 weeks
Korean	IV	88 weeks

One of the most striking findings is the size of the gap between the easiest and hardest languages. While Spanish or French can often be learned in 24–30 weeks, mastering Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, or Arabic may require roughly 88 weeks of study.

Many Category I languages use the Latin alphabet and share vocabulary roots with English through Germanic or Romance-language connections.

This may also help explain why European languages often rank highly in language-learning apps and why Duolingo’s most popular languages globally include several widely taught European options.

What Makes a Language Harder to Learn?

Category III languages tend to have greater linguistic distance from English. This can include unfamiliar grammar structures, new alphabets, or pronunciation patterns that require more time to master.

For example, languages like Russian, Greek, Hindi, Turkish, and Vietnamese all fall into this category. Some use different scripts, while others introduce grammatical systems that are less intuitive for native English speakers.

The “Super-Hard” Languages

Category IV languages are considered exceptionally difficult for English speakers. This group includes Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean.

Many of these languages present multiple learning hurdles simultaneously. Mandarin and Cantonese require mastery of tones, Japanese combines several writing systems, Korean introduces a unique alphabet and grammar structure, and Arabic uses an entirely different script. Together, these differences significantly increase the time needed to reach professional proficiency.

To learn more about language use across the U.S., check out Mapped: America’s Most-Spoken Languages After English and Spanish on the Voronoi app.