9/19/23, 4:09 PM Which languages take the longest to learn?

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Which languages take the longest to learn?

A lesson by Johnson, our language columnist

Sep 18th 2023

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T he difficulty in learning a foreign language lies not only in its inherent

complexity. Languages are complex in different ways (though all are
learnable by infants). The main reason a language is hard is that it is different
from your own.

America’s State Department places the languages it teaches diplomats into four
categories (see chart), with estimates of how long they take to learn them
ranging from 24 to 88 weeks. What underlies the difficulty of such languages for
an English-speaker?

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9/19/23, 4:09 PM Which languages take the longest to learn?

La plume de ma tante
Average time for an English speaker in full-time learning to reach “General Professional Proficiency”*
Top ten spoken languages†

24-30 weeks

Danish Dutch French Italian Norwegian

Portuguese Romanian Spanish Swedish

36 weeks

German Haitian Creole Indonesian

Malay Swahili

44 weeks

Albanian Amharic Armenian Azerbaijani Bengali Bulgarian

Burmese Czech Dari Estonian Farsi Finnish Georgia

Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Kazakh

Khmer Kurdish Kyrgyz Lao Latvian Lithuanian Macedon

Mongolian Nepali Polish Russian Serbo-Croatian Sinhala

Slovak Slovenian Somali Tagalog Tajiki Tamil Telugu

Thai Tibetan Turkish Turkmen Ukrainian Urdu

Uzbek Vietnamese

88 weeks

Arabic Cantonese Japanese

Korean Mandarin

*Or a score of “Speaking 3/Reading 3” on the Interagency Language Roundtable scale †Excludes English

The first thing many learners will think of is the writing system Indeed none of
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 The first thing many learners will think
9/19/23, 4:09 PM
of is the writing system. Indeed none of
Which languages take the longest to learn?

the State Department’s hardest languages is written with the Latin alphabet used
by most European languages. Chinese stands out for its difficulty. It is
commonly said that a learner must memorise around 2,000 characters to be able

to read a newspaper. But even this estimate is criticised; someone with 2,000
characters will still have to look up unfamiliar ones in every few lines of text.
Japanese is (mostly) written with a subset of the Chinese characters, but most
characters can be given either a Japanese or Chinese pronunciation, making the
task mind-tangling in that language too.

But foreign writing systems need not be difficult. The other writing systems in
the “hard” category are all quite learnable. Arabic is alphabetic, with just a couple
of dozen letters. Its two complications are that letters change shape depending
on where they appear in a word (beginning, middle, end or alone) and that short
vowels are not written. And Korean’s hangul system is technically a syllabary, in
that every character stands for a syllable not a single sound. But hangul is widely
admired for being simple and logical.

A second way languages can be hard is with sounds and distinctions that do not
exist in the learner’s language. To an English-speaker, the novelties include the
clicks of many African languages and the ejective sounds (made by a sudden
release of pressure in the mouth) in some Caucasian ones. But just as hard is the
problem of languages that make distinctions your language does not. In Hindi,
the t- and d-sounds can be “retroflex” (with the tongue curled back) or not,
making two different letters that can distinguish two different words (moti with
a retroflex t means “fat, thick” and with a non-retroflex t means “pearl”).
Mandarin and Cantonese have tones, meaning ma with an even pitch and ma
with a falling one are different words. (Mandarin has four tones; Cantonese has
more, though the number is disputed.)

The lexicon obviously matters too. Most European languages share an ancestor
(called proto-Indo-European) and so their words, too, often come in related
pairs. If you know water in Spanish is agua it is easy to figure out Italian acqua
and English aquatic. But the European languages share vocabulary for another
reason: they have freely borrowed from one another over the centuries.
Languages unrelated to the European ones (Arabic from the Semitic family, or
Chinese from the Sino-Tibetan one) will not only lack the “genetic” overlap in
vocabulary. They are culturally distant, and so have far less borrowed European
vocabulary too
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9/19/23, 4:09 PM Which languages take the longest to learn?
vocabulary too.

Finally there is grammar. Many people associate tricky grammar with long lists
of endings that change according to a word’s use in a sentence. This crops up all
over Arabic, in which those changes can also be prefixes, suffixes, or vowels and
consonants inserted in the middle of a word. This more than anything else
accounts for the difficulty of the language. Mandarin, though, almost entirely
lacks such inflection, as linguists call it. Foreign grammar is also difficult to the
extent that it makes distinctions your language does not; for example, Arabic has
a dual number (where verbs conjugate differently when the subject is two people
or things), alongside singular and plural. Many languages even feature an ending
on verbs indicating how the speaker knows the information to be true.

The overall hardness of a language can be seen as the sum of the difficulty of its
writing system, sounds, words and grammar. These come in different
proportions: one professor of Chinese has called it the most difficult language
he has ever learned to write and the easiest he has learned to speak.

If you want to learn a language just for fun, start with Swedish. If you want to
rack up an impressive number, stay in Europe. But if you really want to impress,
bulking up your brain to master Cantonese or Korean is the sign of the true
linguistic Ironman. 7

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