FluencyClock

Tools

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.

Hold ⌘ or Ctrl to select several — up to 5.

Beyond English. A related language can cut the total by a third.

The single biggest factor after the language itself — the spread between methods is wider than the spread between difficulty bands.

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 faces a cheaper Portuguese than the published figure, and the table reorders accordingly.

It will not rank inside an FSI band

Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean and Arabic share one figure because FSI 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 FSI publishes four hour bands rather than a ranked list, and everything inside a band carries the same figure. Russian and Greek are both 1,100 hours; that is not the tool rounding, it is what the source says. Any page that ranks them against each other has added an ordering the data does not contain.
Why does Portuguese sometimes beat Spanish?
If you told it you speak Spanish. The two share an FSI band at 600 hours, and the related-language discount applies to Portuguese and not to the language you already have — so Portuguese comes out cheaper for you specifically. This is the case the static ranking pages cannot show, and the reason this tool exists alongside them.
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 at once. If you are choosing between eight languages you are not comparing, you are browsing.

Sources

Everything this tool rests on. The FSI baseline is published; the factors applied on top of it are ours and are marked as estimates.

  1. 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).

  2. 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.

  3. Guided learning hours — Cambridge English

    The shape of the curve between CEFR levels. Cambridge publishes cumulative hours per level (A2 180–200, B1 350–400, B2 500–600, C1 700–800, C2 1,000–1,200); our level factors are normalised against the C1 band and every one lands inside its published range.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

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.