Japanese and Chinese sit in the same FSI band. Only one carries an asterisk
Both are 2,200 class hours. FSI marks Japanese, and only Japanese, as harder than the rest of its group — a footnote with no second number attached. Here is what it is doing in our model and why the figure it produces is an estimate.
Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic are all in the Foreign Service Institute's hardest group: 2,200 class hours to professional working proficiency.
Of those five, FSI singles out one as usually harder still. It is Japanese, and the marking comes with no separate hour figure.
What FSI actually publishes
A band, and an asterisk. The band is 2,200 hours. The asterisk means "usually more difficult for native English speakers than other languages in the same category."
What it does not come with is a number. There is no published "Japanese = 2,500 hours" from the State Department. The footnote is qualitative, and every specific figure you have seen for it — including ours — is somebody's interpretation of a footnote.
What we do with it, and why it is marked as an estimate
Our model applies a 1.15× penalty to languages carrying that marking. That produces:
| Language | Baseline | To C1 in our model |
|---|---|---|
| Mandarin Chinese | 2,200 | 2,200 hours |
| Korean | 2,200 | 2,200 hours |
| Arabic | 2,200 | 2,200 hours |
| Japanese | 2,200 | 2,530 hours |
The 1.15 is not published anywhere. It is a coefficient we chose, and it is flagged as an estimate in the code and in the caveats attached to every Japanese estimate on this site.
Fifteen percent is deliberately modest. The alternative — treating the asterisk as decorative — would mean claiming FSI's own instructors are wrong about their own students, which is a much stronger position than anything the data supports. A conservative penalty is the least bad option, and it is labelled rather than hidden.
What the asterisk is probably about
The mechanism is not stated by FSI, so what follows is inference and should be read that way.
The obvious candidate is the writing system, and it is a real one: Japanese runs three scripts at once, and the kanji are read with multiple pronunciations depending on context, where Chinese characters are overwhelmingly one character to one syllable.
But that cannot be the whole story, because Chinese requires more characters overall and Chinese does not carry the marking.
The more plausible difference is that Japanese has more distinct systems to hold at once. Grammar that is genuinely unlike English where Chinese grammar is comparatively familiar in shape. An honorific register that changes verb forms according to social relationship, which is not optional and has no English equivalent. Plus the scripts.
Chinese concentrates its difficulty: tones and characters, both brutal, both learnable by grinding. Japanese distributes it across more fronts, and distributed difficulty resists grinding.
That is a hypothesis consistent with the marking, and it is not evidence. Anyone telling you confidently why Japanese carries the asterisk is going beyond what FSI published.
What this changes for you
Very little, honestly, and that is worth saying plainly.
The gap between 2,200 and 2,530 hours is around 15%. The gap between studying with a tutor and studying with an app is a factor of three, and above B1 the app does not arrive at all. How you study dominates which of these you pick.
If you are choosing between Japanese and Chinese, choose on what you want to do with it. The difficulty difference is real, sourced to a footnote, worth about six months of an already very long project, and smaller than the difference your first method decision will make.
Run both through the calculator at your own pace, or read the Japanese and Chinese pages for what those hours are actually spent on.
Sources
Every figure above, and where it came from. A post that traces other people's unsourced numbers does not get to have any of its own.
- Foreign Language Training — US Department of State, Foreign Service Institute
The class-hour bands every estimate on this site starts from, and the definition of the proficiency they lead to (ILR Speaking-3 / Reading-3).
- FSI Language Difficulty Ranking — fsi-language-courses.org
Which languages sit in which band. The State Department publishes the categories as an image, so per-language assignment comes from independent reproductions that agree with each other and with the official hour bands.