The short answer is: it depends on the language you choose and how close it is to your native language. Other factors are:
- How complex is your new language?
- How many hours a week can you devote to learning the language?
- Your Motivation
- Your language learning resources
Here’s a list of common languages that are easiest and hardest to learn for English speakers with the population of native speakers .
| Easy – 23-24 weeks 575-600 class hours: Spanish 329 million Portuguese 178 million French 67.8 million Italian 61.7 million Romanian 23.4 million Dutch 21.7 million Swedish 8.3 million Afrikaans 4.9 million Norwegian 4.6 million |
Medium 44 weeks 1,110 class hours Hindi 182 million Russian 144 million Vietnamese 68.6 million Turkish 50.8 million Polish 40 million Thai 20.4 million Serbian 16.4 million Greek 13.1 million Hebrew 5.3 million Finnish 5 million |
Hard – 88 weeks 2,200 class hours Arabic 221 million Chinese 1.2 billion Japanese 122 million Korean 66.3 million |
At Luminoso Language Services we make learning Spanish and beginners Italian fun and easy. To get started, fill out our form. We look forward to hearing from you!
All data from U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Institute
