How long each language takes

The Foreign Service Institute's published class-hour figures for reaching professional working proficiency, and what those hours actually go on. Ordered by difficulty, not by popularity.

• How long does it take to learn Spanish?

  FSI puts Spanish at 600 class hours to professional proficiency — its easiest band. What that means at 30 minutes a day, and the three places English speakers actually get stuck.

• How long does it take to learn Italian?

  FSI puts Italian at 600 class hours — tied with Spanish at the bottom of its easiest band. Why the pronunciation is a gift and the input is the constraint.

• How long does it take to learn Portuguese?

  FSI puts Portuguese at 600 class hours — its easiest band. But the choice between Brazilian and European Portuguese changes the difficulty more than any other decision on this site.

• How long does it take to learn Dutch?

  FSI puts Dutch at 600 class hours — tied with Spanish at the easiest end. The grammar is the friendliest in Europe for an English speaker; getting anyone to speak it back to you is the hard part.

• How long does it take to learn Swedish?

  FSI puts Swedish at 600 class hours — tied with Spanish. Learning it also gives you most of written Norwegian and Danish for free, which no other language on this site does.

• How long does it take to learn Norwegian?

  FSI puts Norwegian at 600 class hours, tied with Spanish. It is arguably the easiest way into Scandinavian — and it is the only one of the three that asks you to pick between two official written standards.

• How long does it take to learn Danish?

  FSI puts Danish at 600 class hours, tied with Spanish. Reading it is the easiest thing on this site if you know any Germanic language. Hearing it is the hardest thing in its band, and the gap between those two is the whole story.

• How long does it take to learn Romanian?

  FSI puts Romanian at 600 class hours, tied with Spanish. It is a Romance language that kept a case system, took a quarter of its vocabulary from Slavic neighbours, and attaches its articles to the end of the noun.

• How long does it take to learn French?

  FSI puts French at 750 class hours — the top of its easiest band, and longer than Spanish. Why the vocabulary is nearly free and the listening is not.

• How long does it take to learn German?

  FSI puts German at 900 class hours — a band of its own between the Romance languages and the hard ones. Why the words feel familiar and the sentences do not.

• How long does it take to learn Indonesian?

  No tones, no cases, no gender, no verb conjugation, no plurals, and a Latin alphabet with regular spelling. FSI still puts Indonesian at 900 hours — half again what Spanish costs, for reasons that only appear later.

• How long does it take to learn Swahili?

  FSI puts Swahili at 900 hours — the easiest African language it teaches, and the only one in its middle band. No tones, Latin alphabet, perfectly regular spelling, and a noun-class system that reaches into every word in the sentence.

• How long does it take to learn Russian?

  FSI puts Russian at 1,100 class hours — roughly twice Spanish, half of Mandarin. The alphabet takes a week; verbal aspect takes years.

• How long does it take to learn Greek?

  FSI puts Greek at 1,100 class hours — the same band as Russian, roughly twice Spanish. You already know hundreds of Greek words; almost none of them are the ones you need.

• How long does it take to learn Polish?

  FSI puts Polish at 1,100 class hours — same band as Russian, but with a Latin alphabet you can read on day one and a sound system that takes far longer than the reading does.

• How long does it take to learn Turkish?

  FSI puts Turkish at 1,100 class hours. It is almost perfectly regular, has no grammatical gender and no irregular verbs to speak of — and it is still twice Spanish, because regularity is not the same as familiarity.

• How long does it take to learn Hebrew?

  FSI puts Hebrew at 1,100 class hours. The script runs right to left and mostly leaves the vowels out — but the harder cost is a vocabulary built from three-letter roots rather than from words you can look up as units.

• How long does it take to learn Vietnamese?

  Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet and has no verb conjugation, no cases and no plurals. It is still marked harder than the rest of its FSI band, and the reason is entirely in the sounds.

• How long does it take to learn Thai?

  Thai has no conjugation, no plurals, no cases and no gender. It also has five tones, its own alphabet, and no spaces between words — and FSI marks it harder than others in its band.

• How long does it take to learn Hindi?

  FSI puts Hindi at 1,100 class hours. It is a distant relative of English, which shows up in the grammar and almost never in the vocabulary — and the language you learn is not quite the one people speak.

• How long does it take to learn Finnish?

  Fifteen cases, no gender, no articles, no future tense, and no relation to any language you are likely to know. FSI marks Finnish harder than others in its 1,100-hour band.

• How long does it take to learn Hungarian?

  Hungarian is surrounded by Indo-European languages and related to none of them. FSI marks it harder than others in its 1,100-hour band, and the difficulty is almost entirely in how a sentence is built.

• How long does it take to learn Czech?

  FSI puts Czech at 1,100 class hours. Seven cases and a sound English has no name for are the famous obstacles — the underrated one is that the language everyone speaks is not the language textbooks teach.

• How long does it take to learn Ukrainian?

  FSI puts Ukrainian at 1,100 class hours, the same as Russian. It is a separate language with its own alphabet variant, seven cases, and a vocabulary that overlaps Russian in some registers and Polish in others.

• How long does it take to learn Persian?

  Persian is Indo-European, has no grammatical gender, no cases and largely regular verbs — and FSI still puts it at 1,100 hours, because it is written in an Arabic-derived script that leaves out the short vowels.

• How long does it take to learn Tagalog?

  FSI puts Tagalog at 1,100 class hours. The alphabet is Latin, the spelling is regular, and a third of the vocabulary is recognisable from Spanish and English — and its verb system reorganises the sentence in a way nothing in Europe does.

• How long does it take to learn Chinese (Mandarin)?

  FSI puts Mandarin Chinese at 2,200 class hours to professional proficiency — the top band, alongside Arabic, Japanese and Korean. What that means at 30 minutes a day, and where learners actually stall.

• How long does it take to learn Japanese?

  FSI puts Japanese in its hardest band and singles it out as harder still than the rest of it. What 2,200+ class hours means in practice, and the three walls learners actually hit.

• How long does it take to learn Korean?

  FSI puts Korean at 2,200 class hours — its hardest band. The alphabet takes an afternoon; almost everything after that is where the time goes.

• How long does it take to learn Arabic?

  FSI puts Arabic at 2,200 class hours — its hardest band. But the figure assumes a choice most guides never mention: which Arabic you are actually learning.

• How long does it take to learn Cantonese?

  FSI puts Cantonese at 2,200 class hours — the same as Mandarin, listed separately. Six tones, no standard written form for the spoken language, and far fewer learning materials than its difficulty deserves.

Looking at this the other way round? The hardest languages and the easiest, across all thirty we model.

These are FSI's figures for full-time classroom study, which is almost certainly not how you plan to learn. The calculator adjusts them for your target level, the languages you already speak, and how you actually study — and covers thirty languages, not just the six written up here.