A Fascinating Foreign Service Map Ranking Language Difficulty by Time Required to Learn

[steve2470]

https://laughingsquid.com/foreign-service-institute-language-difficulty-rankings/

?w=750


When a person enters the United States Foreign Service, it’s imperative that they learn at least one, if not many different languages. The State Department very conveniently offers their own School of Language Studies, which has put together a fascinating map that shows the time needed for an English speaker to learn specific languages, each ranked and categorized by difficulty.

[spooky3]

1. Interesting. I think they are also saying that you would have to study it for at least 40 hours

each week for the time period specified.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Arabic is harder than Estonian, Finnish or Hungarian ??

OK, you have to learn a new alphabet to write Arabic, but neither Estonian, Finnish nor Hungarian is an Indo-European language (all are Finno-Ugric), so there is almost no transfer of language skills by comparison to other IE languages.

It's pretty obvious on that map that Indo-European languages are all considered I-IV, with all but Slavic languages being I-II.

Apparently Basque, Breton, Welsh, Gaelic and Faeroese(?) are all considered by the USFS to be diplomatically relevant.

[jmowreader]

3. The Department of Defense has a slightly different language difficulty scale

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Language_Aptitude_Battery

They have four Categories:

Category I languages: French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish
Category II: German and Indonesian
Category III: Hebrew, Hindi, Persian Farsi, Dari, Punjabi, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Tagalog, Turkish, Uzbek and Urdu
Category IV: all three Arabic tracks, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Pashto

[kairos12]

4. Went to DLI and

learned Spanish. It was a great experience.

[geardaddy]

10. I speak Mandarin, and I find it to be very easy

The reading/writing is the hard part. The grammar of Chinese is so simple - No conjugation, no verb inflections.

[sarge43]

5. Interesting that German is more difficult for English speakers than

Spanish, French or Italian. One would think German would be easier as its roots are closer to English than the Latin based Romance languages.

[ailsagirl]

6. That is interesting

I found Spanish and German fairly easy, don't know Italian, but French is a very difficult language to learn. IMO

But I bet gaelic is tougher than any of them!

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

8. German grammar is a lot more complicated than English grammar.

There are a fair number of cognates but you have to learn a bunch of conjugations and declensions and which pronouns are dative and which are accusative and which nouns are masculine, feminine or neuter - a lot of stuff that you don't have to deal with in English. Also, they have this weird habit of sticking the verb at the end of the sentence.

[malthaussen]

9. You mean...

"at the end of the sentence is where the verb is stuck."

-- Mal

[NightWatcher]

7. I flunked Russian and went with German.

And the only thing I ever did in country with it was order breakfast for our entire table.

[geardaddy]

11. Of course they don't classify the Celtic languages

or Basque.

[Tipperary]

12. This is really interesting. I love languages. I think English is considered very difficult.

At least for non-English speakers it is! Although sadly, I have noticed it seems difficult even for those born to English speaking parents in English speaking countries.