Croatian is one of the hardest languages to learn

IT TAKES AROUND 44 WEEKS TO REACH PROFESSIONAL WORKING PROFICIENCY
Photo: Unsplash (Sincerely Media)

As a beginner hoping to discover a relatively painless language, you might be wondering which are the easiest for novice learners. Alternatively, you may already be versed in several languages and now you’re looking for your next challenge, reports fsi-language-courses.org.

While there is no definitive answer to the question of the easiest or most difficult languages, one frequently cited source is the FSI language ranking system that rates languages in terms of how long it usually takes English speakers to learn them.

What are the FSI rankings?

Every learner is unique, and difficulty is tough to quantify, so trying to establish the relative difficulty levels of languages is a largely subjective exercise. However, the Foreign Service Institute’s experience teaching a wide range of languages to thousands of students during a period of around 70 years provides us with a unique source of empirical data on the subject.

Based on almost three-quarters of a century of classes, FSI has been able to categorize languages according to the average amount of time it takes students to reach “Professional Working Proficiency”.

  •  Category I – Languages that usually require around 24-30 weeks.
  •  Category II – Language that requires around 30 weeks.
  •  Category III – Languages that usually require around 36 weeks.
  •  Category IV – Students usually need around 44 weeks.
  •  Category V – It usually takes 88 weeks.

The easiest languagest to learn are Spanish, Portugese, Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian and Swedesh.

The hardest to learn are Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean and Mandarin.

Croatian falls in category IV.

Read the full article HERE.

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