Sorrel
Guides · Language difficulty
How long does it take to learn each language? The FSI ranking
The short answer: the US Foreign Service Institute (FSI), which trains American diplomats, estimates that its students need about 24–30 weeks (600–750 class hours) to reach professional working proficiency in Spanish, French or Italian, and 88 weeks (2,200 class hours) for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese or Korean. Most other languages fall in between.
The FSI language difficulty table
FSI sorts languages into four categories by how long its students take to reach its target level. The figures are for native English speakers.
| Category | Time in class | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| I | 24–30 weeks, 600–750 hours | Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish |
| II | 36 weeks, 900 hours | German, Haitian Creole, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili |
| III | 44 weeks, 1,100 hours | Most others, including Russian, Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, Thai and Vietnamese |
| IV | 88 weeks, 2,200 hours | Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Japanese, Korean |
Within Category IV, FSI marks Japanese as usually harder for English speakers than the other languages in the group. Older versions of the list, still copied around the web, put German at 30 weeks. The current FSI page has it in Category II at 36 weeks.
What the hours actually measure
The target is “professional working proficiency” in speaking and reading: level 3 on the scale US government agencies use. That is the level where you can take part in work meetings and read professional material, well beyond a tourist level.
The conditions are also unusual. FSI students study full time. Six hundred hours over 24 weeks works out to about 25 hours of class a week, in small groups with experienced teachers, plus homework.
What it means for you
- Treat the categories as relative, not absolute. The table is most useful for comparing: Japanese takes roughly three times as long as Spanish for an English speaker.
- Your first language changes the picture. The ranking is for English speakers. A Polish speaker learning Russian, or a Spanish speaker learning Italian, starts much closer.
- Do the arithmetic for your own pace. At one focused hour a day, 600 hours is about 20 months and 2,200 hours about six years. At three hours a day, the same goals take about seven months and two years.
- Class hours are only part of it. If you study on your own, count everything: lessons, reading, podcasts and conversations.
For hour estimates by CEFR level (A1 to C2) rather than for one target level, see how many hours it takes to learn a language.
Sources
- U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Institute. Foreign Language Training (archived copy, 2021).
Count your own hours
Sorrel is a free language learning diary for iOS. Log real practice in seconds and watch it add up toward your next level.