What is the easiest language to learn?
The easiest languages for an English speaker are the ones closest to English, and the published figures put a tight cluster of them at the top. The interesting question is not which is easiest — they are within a hundred hours of each other — but what actually separates them.
The short answer
Spanish, by a nose, and mostly for a reason that has nothing to do with the language. FSI puts Spanish and Italian together at 600 class hours, with Portuguese, Romanian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish in the same band up to 750 — a spread of weeks, not years. What separates Spanish is everything around it: half a billion speakers, more courses, more tutors, more television, more chance of meeting someone to practise with. The easiest language to learn is the one you can most easily accumulate hours in.
| Language | FSI hours | Band |
|---|---|---|
| Danish | 600 | similar |
| Dutch | 600 | similar |
| Italian | 600 | similar |
| Norwegian | 600 | similar |
| Portuguese | 600 | similar |
| Romanian | 600 | similar |
| Spanish | 600 | similar |
| Swedish | 600 | similar |
| French | 750 | similar |
| German | 900 | moderate |
| Indonesian | 900 | moderate |
| Malay | 900 | moderate |
| Swahili | 900 | moderate |
| Czech | 1100 | hard |
| Finnish | 1100 | hard+ flagged harder |
| Greek | 1100 | hard |
| Hebrew | 1100 | hard |
| Hindi | 1100 | hard |
| Hungarian | 1100 | hard+ flagged harder |
| Persian | 1100 | hard |
| Polish | 1100 | hard |
| Russian | 1100 | hard |
| Tagalog | 1100 | hard |
| Thai | 1100 | hard+ flagged harder |
| Turkish | 1100 | hard |
| Ukrainian | 1100 | hard |
| Vietnamese | 1100 | hard+ flagged harder |
| Arabic | 2200 | super hard |
| Cantonese | 2200 | super hard |
| Japanese | 2200 | super hard+ flagged harder |
| Korean | 2200 | super hard |
| Mandarin Chinese | 2200 | super hard |
Linked languages have a full write-up of where the hours actually go. The rest are in the calculator.
The bands, and what they mean
| Band | Four-category | Five-category | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| similar | Category I | Category I | 600 |
| moderate | Category II | Category III | 900 |
| hard | Category III | Category IV | 1100 |
| super hard | Category IV | Category V | 2200 |
This ranking is not yours
FSI measured English speakers starting from nothing. If you already speak a second language, the order changes — sometimes drastically. A Portuguese speaker learning Spanish is doing a fraction of the work this table implies. A Japanese speaker learning Korean is doing about three quarters of it, despite Korean sitting in the hardest band.
The study method matters more than the ranking does. Thirty minutes a day on an app puts the easiest language on this list at over five years, which is longer than the hardest language takes with a tutor and real hours.
Common questions
- How much easier is the easiest than the second easiest?
- Barely at all. FSI groups Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish in one band spanning roughly 600 to 750 class hours. Choosing between them on difficulty is optimising a difference of weeks; choose on whether you will actually use it, which decides whether you finish.
- Why is French listed higher than Spanish?
- Both are in the easiest band, but French sits at the top of it at 750 hours while Spanish sits at the 600 floor. The gap is mostly sound: French spelling and speech have drifted much further apart, so listening lags reading for a long time. Spanish spelling is close to phonetic, and that is worth about 150 class hours.
- Does easy mean quick?
- Six hundred hours is still six hundred hours. At thirty minutes a day it is over five years. The easiest language on this list is easy relative to Mandarin, not easy in absolute terms, and underestimating that is the most common reason people quit at the intermediate plateau.
- Is any language easy enough to learn from an app alone?
- For a start, yes; for a usable level, no. Our model caps app-only study around B1 regardless of language, because the gap above it is made of things an app does not provide — correction of what you produce, and unpredictable input. That ceiling does not move because the language is easy.
Once you have picked one
The hours tell you what a language costs. They do not tell you how to spend them, and the method you choose moves the total by more than the gap between two neighbouring difficulty bands.
- Run your own numbers — target level, method and languages you already speak, which between them change the answer by a factor of three.
- What to actually study with — every option we track, including the two that cost nothing and earn us nothing.
- Head-to-head comparisons — ten pairings people genuinely weigh against each other, each with a case for picking neither.
Hours are FSI's published figures for full-time classroom study. How we adjust them for the level you want and the way you actually study.