Compare languages side by side
Pick up to five. The ranking pages answer which language is hardest in general; this answers which of these is hardest for you, at the level you actually want.
Nothing selected yet. The comparison is adjusted for the languages you already speak, which is where the order sometimes changes — Portuguese is not the same project for a Spanish speaker as for anyone else.
How this is worked out
Each language you pick is run through the same estimate at the same target level, method and background, so the only thing varying between rows is the language itself. Then they are sorted by hours and shown as a multiple of the cheapest.
The multiples are the robust part. Whatever you make of the absolute figures — and they rest on assumptions about class hours, endpoints and method coefficients that are all arguable — those assumptions apply identically to every row. So the ratio between two languages survives disagreements the individual numbers do not.
What you already speak is applied per row, which is where the order can change: a Spanish speaker receives a lower modelled Portuguese estimate than the source-backed baseline, and the table reorders accordingly.
It will not rank inside an FSI band
Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic share one figure because the current NFATC page publishes one figure for them. Where two languages tie, they tie — inventing an order would mean adding a personal judgement to public data and presenting the result as the data.
Every tool here can decline to answer, and that is the most useful thing they do.
Common questions
- Why do several languages show identical hours?
- Because the current NFATC timeline often assigns the same schedule to many languages rather than ranking them. Russian and Greek are both 1,012 class hours; that is not the tool rounding, it is what the source says. Category I is the exception: its named languages have 24- or 30-week schedules, so one category does not always mean one figure.
- Why does Portuguese sometimes beat Spanish?
- Portuguese already has a lower current baseline than Spanish: 552 class hours versus 690. If you also speak Spanish, the model applies a related-language discount to Portuguese, so the gap grows for you specifically. This is the case a static ranking cannot show, and the reason this tool exists alongside it.
- Can I compare more than five?
- No, and the cap is deliberate rather than technical. Past about five rows the table stops being a comparison and becomes a ranking, which is what the difficulty pages already do for all thirty-one at once. If you are choosing between eight languages you are not comparing, you are browsing.
Sources
Everything this tool rests on. The current NFATC programme baseline is printed or transparently derived from the same page; the factors applied on top are ours and are marked as estimates.
- Foreign Language Training — US Department of State, National Foreign Affairs Training Center
The current NFATC training timelines: a typical week is 23 class hours plus 17 hours of self-study, aimed at an integrated ILR 3 in Speaking and Listening. Category I lists 24–30 weeks; using the page's typical class week, this site derives 552–690 class hours. Categories II–IV print 828, 1,012 and 2,200.
- 3 FAM 3910 — Language Incentive Pay Program — US Department of State, Foreign Affairs Manual
The separate current S-3/R-3 normal-course table: Spanish is 24 weeks, French 30, Category II 36, Category III 44 and Category IV 88. Its endpoint differs from the current NFATC integrated Speaking + Listening score, so the two tables must not be merged.
- Guided learning hours — Cambridge English
The cumulative shape between CEFR levels. Cambridge publishes guided-learning-hour bands for its English qualifications (A2 180–200, B1 350–400, B2 500–600, C1 700–800, C2 1,000–1,200). Our factors are normalised against C1 rather than fitted to every band; for example, 0.27 × the 750-hour C1 midpoint is 202.5, just above the A2 band.
- ILR scale — Wikipedia
That no official ILR-to-CEFR crosswalk exists. Published academic tables place ILR 3/3+ at C1; others put C1 nearer ILR 4. We take the lower reading, which makes our estimates the more conservative of the two.
- Zhongwen Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) — Wikipedia
That Hanban's claimed one-to-one HSK-to-CEFR equivalence was rejected by CEFR bodies and is disputed by the German and French associations of Chinese-language teachers, who place old HSK 6 nearer B2–C1 than C2.
- The effect of previously acquired languages on third language acquisition — Heliyon 10(4), original research (2024)
Empirical evidence that previously acquired languages can influence third-language processing, and that structural similarity mattered more than broad typological proximity in the tested tasks. It does not publish an hours-saved coefficient for any pair, so it supports the existence and complexity of transfer but not this site's 30% estimate.
This tool is free and carries no ads or affiliate links. It is funded by commission on some course links elsewhere on the site — which pages, and how that is kept out of the recommendations.
If you got something out of this and are not going to buy a course, you can buy me a coffee instead. Entirely optional, and it changes nothing about what the calculator tells you.