What Is the Hardest Language to Learn? The FSI Ranking for English Speakers

Last updated: 8 October 2026. FSI figures read on the State Department’s language-training page that day. Written by Josh Hutcheson, OnlineCourseing editor. See our review methodology.

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The hardest languages for English speakers to learn are Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese Chinese, Japanese and Korean. That is the verdict of the US Foreign Service Institute (FSI), which trains American diplomats and has published how long its students take to become proficient in each language. These five took about 88 weeks of full-time study, nearly three times as long as Spanish.

This guide sets out the full FSI ranking, explains what makes each of the hardest languages difficult, and turns FSI’s classroom hours into the calendar time a self-learner should expect. It also covers the easiest languages, because the same data answers both questions.

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The FSI language difficulty ranking

The ranking most guides quote comes from the Foreign Service Institute, part of the US Department of State, which trains American diplomats. Its timelines show the time usually expected for a student to reach an integrated score of 3 in speaking and listening on the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale. In plain terms, that is a professional working level: you can hold meetings, follow the news and handle most conversations without help.

Two details matter when you read this table. First, the hours count only time in class. FSI describes a typical week as 23 hours in class plus 17 hours of self-study, so the real workload is well above the class hours: about 500 extra hours of self-study for a 30-week language. Second, FSI notes the actual time varies with “natural ability, prior language-learning experience, and time spent in the classroom.” The categories are averages for English speakers, not a law of nature.

The 5 hardest languages for English speakers

All five sit in FSI’s Category IV, and FSI does not rank them against each other. What they share is distance from English on several fronts at once: a different writing system, sounds or grammar English does not have, and almost no shared vocabulary to lean on.

1. Japanese

Japanese is written with three scripts used together: hiragana and katakana, two sets of about 46 basic characters each that represent sounds, and kanji, characters borrowed from Chinese. Japan’s official list of everyday kanji (the jōyō list) has 2,136 characters, and most kanji have more than one reading depending on the word. The grammar puts the verb at the end of the sentence, uses particles instead of word order to mark meaning, and changes form with the level of politeness the situation calls for.

Pronunciation, on the other hand, is relatively easy for English speakers. Japanese has no tones and a small set of vowel sounds, so many learners can speak intelligibly long before they can read a newspaper.

2. Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin is a tonal language. It has four tones plus a neutral tone, and the tone changes the meaning of a syllable, so ma can mean “mother,” “horse” or “to scold” depending on pitch. Written Chinese uses characters rather than an alphabet, and you need a few thousand of them to read everyday text comfortably.

Mandarin grammar is easier than its reputation suggests. Verbs do not change for tense or person, nouns have no gender or plural endings, and the basic word order (subject, verb, object) matches English. Most learners find speaking comes faster than reading.

3. Cantonese

Cantonese, spoken in Hong Kong, Macau and much of southern China, shares the Chinese writing system but has more tones than Mandarin: usually counted as six, and up to nine in some analyses. It also has far fewer courses, apps and textbooks for English speakers than Mandarin, which makes the climb steeper in practice. Written Cantonese in everyday use mixes standard characters with some characters specific to Cantonese.

4. Korean

Korean has the easiest writing system of the five. Hangul is an alphabet with 14 basic consonants and 10 basic vowels, designed in the 15th century to be learned quickly, and most learners can sound out words within days. The difficulty is in the grammar and vocabulary. Verbs come at the end and take a long chain of endings. Speech levels shift with the age and status of the person you are talking to, and much of the vocabulary has no connection to English.

5. Arabic

Arabic is written right to left in a 28-letter alphabet whose letters change shape depending on where they fall in a word. Short vowels are usually left out of everyday writing, so you learn to read words partly from context. Several sounds made in the throat have no English equivalent.

The biggest practical challenge is diglossia. Modern Standard Arabic is used in writing, news and formal speech across the Arab world. At home, people speak regional varieties such as Egyptian, Levantine or Gulf Arabic, and these differ from the standard in vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar. Serious learners often end up studying Modern Standard Arabic and one spoken variety.

Other hard languages: Russian, Hungarian, Finnish and more

FSI’s Category III, at about 44 weeks, is the “hard” group. It is large, and FSI notes the list is not exhaustive. These are the languages people most often ask about:

• Russian. The Cyrillic alphabet takes a week or two to learn. The harder part is grammar: six cases change the endings of nouns and adjectives, and verbs come in pairs that mark whether an action is complete.
• Hungarian. Often named as the hardest European language. It is unrelated to the Indo-European languages around it and has around 18 noun cases, depending on how you count them, built by adding endings to words.
• Finnish. A cousin of Hungarian and Estonian with 15 noun cases and long words built from many parts. Pronunciation and spelling, though, are very regular.
• Polish and Czech. Seven cases each and clusters of consonants that are hard for English speakers to pronounce.
• Vietnamese and Thai. Both are tonal. Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet with accent marks, which helps; Thai has its own script.
• Hindi, Greek and Hebrew. Each has its own writing system. Hindi and Greek are distant relatives of English, which gives you some familiar grammar but little shared everyday vocabulary.

Is Hungarian harder than Japanese? By FSI’s measure, no: Hungarian takes about half as long. Its grammar is complex, but it uses the Latin alphabet and has more familiar sentence patterns than any Category IV language.

What makes a language hard to learn?

Difficulty depends on the distance between the language you are learning and the one you already speak. For English speakers, five factors account for most of that distance:

• Writing system. A new alphabet adds a few weeks. A character system such as Chinese or Japanese kanji adds years of steady memorization.
• Sounds and tones. Tonal languages ask you to hear and produce pitch differences English does not use for meaning. Sounds English lacks, such as Arabic’s throat consonants, take practice too.
• Grammar. Case endings, verb-final word order, honorific speech levels and noun genders all add rules English speakers have never had to think about.
• Shared vocabulary. Spanish and French share thousands of related words with English, so you start with a large passive vocabulary. Japanese, Korean and Arabic give you almost none.
• Resources and exposure. A language with plenty of courses, tutors, podcasts and TV is easier to learn in practice than one where materials are scarce. Cantonese is harder than Mandarin partly for this reason.

That is also why the hardest language for you depends on where you start. A native Spanish speaker finds Portuguese easy and Japanese hard; a native Korean speaker finds Japanese grammar familiar. FSI’s list measures difficulty only for native English speakers.

How long will it take you? FSI hours in real life

FSI’s students spend about 23 hours a week in class with a teacher and another 17 on self-study. Most adults learn on their own, in far less time each day. The table converts each category’s class hours into years at three daily study rates, so you can see the order of magnitude.

Read this as a rough guide in both directions. FSI’s target, professional working proficiency, is well above the level most learners need: holding a basic conversation or getting around on a trip takes a fraction of these hours. On the other hand, the table counts class hours only, while FSI students add 17 hours of self-study a week, and an hour with an app is worth less than an hour in class with a teacher correcting you. A self-learner aiming for real fluency may need longer than the table suggests.

For a Category IV language, set goals in years and milestones in months. Reading kana in a few weeks, holding a simple conversation in a year and reading a novel in several years is a realistic arc for Japanese. Our guide to how long it takes to learn Japanese turns that into hours for each JLPT level.

How to learn a hard language (and which tools cover them)

The methods that work for Spanish work for Japanese too, but the hardest languages punish shortcuts. Three habits help most: practice listening and speaking from the first week, so tones and sounds settle early; study the writing system steadily rather than in bursts; and get regular feedback from a teacher or native speaker, because errors in tones and particles are hard to spot on your own.

Tool choice matters more for hard languages, because several popular apps do not teach them at all.

For language-by-language picks, see our guides to the best apps to learn Japanese, Korean and Chinese. If you want a human teacher, our italki review and Preply review compare the two biggest tutor marketplaces.

Try Pimsleur free → Find a tutor on italki →

The easiest languages for English speakers

The same FSI data answers the opposite question. Category I, at 24 to 30 weeks, is the group FSI describes as “languages similar to English.” Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian and Swedish take about 24 weeks; Spanish and French about 30.

• Spanish. Spelling matches pronunciation closely, there is a huge supply of courses and tutors, and it is the most widely spoken language in the US after English. Our guide to how long it takes to learn Spanish breaks the hours down by level. See the best apps to learn Spanish.
• Italian and Portuguese. Close relatives of Spanish with regular pronunciation and many words English shares through Latin.
• Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. Germanic languages close to English in vocabulary and word order. Danish pronunciation is the hardest of the group.
• French. Familiar vocabulary but less regular spelling and pronunciation. See the best apps to learn French.

German sits one step up, in Category II at about 36 weeks, because of its noun genders, four cases and word order. Our German app guide covers the tools that teach it best.

Is Spanish or French easier? FSI gives both about 30 weeks. Most learners find Spanish easier to speak early on because it is spelled the way it sounds, while French spelling and silent letters take longer to master.

Is English the hardest language to learn?

No ranking can answer this objectively, and FSI’s list cannot help, because it only measures difficulty for native English speakers. Difficulty always depends on the learner’s first language.

English does have real hurdles: spelling that often does not match pronunciation (through, though, tough), many irregular verbs and a very large vocabulary. It also has advantages. It has no noun genders, few word endings and no tones, and learners can find more English courses, media and practice partners than for any other language. For a speaker of Dutch or Norwegian, English is relatively easy; for a speaker of Japanese or Arabic, it can be as hard as their language is for English speakers.

Should you avoid a hard language?

Not if you have a reason to learn it. Motivation predicts success better than any difficulty category: a learner who wants to talk with family in Korean or read manga in Japanese will outlast one who chose Spanish because it was quick. The hard languages also reward effort. Speakers of Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and Arabic who are also fluent in English are in demand, partly because so few English speakers reach a working level.

If you have no particular language in mind and want results fast, start with a Category I language. If you already know which language you want, the category tells you how long to plan for. Our guide to the best language learning apps compares the main options across languages.

Frequently asked questions

What is the hardest language to learn for English speakers?

By the US Foreign Service Institute’s measure, five languages tie as the hardest: Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese Chinese, Japanese and Korean. FSI found its students needed about 88 weeks, or 2,200 class hours, to reach professional working proficiency in them, compared with 24 to 30 weeks for Spanish, French or Italian.

Is Japanese harder than Korean?

FSI puts them in the same category, at about 88 weeks each. Korean is quicker to start reading because its alphabet, Hangul, has 24 basic letters. Japanese uses three scripts, including roughly 2,000 kanji, so reading takes longer. Grammar is similar in shape, and both use speech levels that change with who you are talking to.

Is Mandarin harder than Japanese?

They are equally hard on paper: both are FSI Category IV. Mandarin’s main hurdle is tones, since the same syllable means different things in different tones. Japanese has no tones but has a harder writing system. Which feels harder depends on whether you struggle more with hearing and producing sounds or with memorizing characters.

What is the second hardest language to learn?

FSI does not rank languages within a category, so there is no official second place. After the five Category IV languages comes Category III, about 44 weeks, which includes Russian, Hungarian, Finnish, Polish, Greek, Hindi, Vietnamese, Thai, Turkish and about 30 others.

What is the easiest language for English speakers to learn?

The FSI’s fastest group, at about 24 weeks, is Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian and Swedish. Spanish and French take slightly longer, about 30 weeks, but are usually the most practical choices because of how many learning resources and native speakers are available.

Is German hard to learn?

German is a step harder than Spanish or French but well short of the hardest languages. FSI puts it in Category II at about 36 weeks, mainly because of its noun genders, four cases and word order.

Is English the hardest language to learn?

There is no single ranking, because difficulty depends on the language you already speak. FSI’s list only measures difficulty for English speakers, so it cannot rate English itself. English is known for irregular spelling, but it also has more learning material than any other language.

How long does it take to learn a hard language?

To reach professional working proficiency, FSI students needed about 2,200 class hours for Japanese, Mandarin, Korean, Arabic or Cantonese. At one hour a day, that is about six years. Basic conversation comes much sooner, but it is still a multi-year commitment.

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