Now if, like me, you consider studying foreign languages one of your main pursuits, you know that possessing a genuine interest in a language — in its mechanics, in its ongoing evolution, in the cultures that created it and the cultures it in turn creates — can do wonders to get you through even the most aggravating difficulties on the long journey to commanding it. The map also shows how much easier colonialism has made things for speakers of Western languages.Here is the full list of FSI languages, and their difficulty rankings:After that are 50 merely “hard” Category-3 languages, including Czech, Hindi, Russian, and Thai.
As the U.S. government’s premier foreign affairs training provider, the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is dedicated to ensuring the career-long learning opportunities required for success in today’s global arena.
Share. These estimates, like 24 weeks for Spanish, assume the learner is in one of the FSI’s intensive courses. Then again, I’m also a native English speaker who chose to move to Korea, where I study not just the Category-V Korean but the Category-V* Japanese through Korean; you might want to take with a grain of salt the words, in any language, of so obvious a masochist. FSI promotes substantive, regional, and linguistic expertise, leadership finesse, personal resilience and innovative problem-solving.
The darkest countries on the map represent Category 4 languages, those that take the longest for Americans to learn: Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. And some people find pronunciation in a tonal language like Vietnamese difficult, while others adapt easily.
Note that this only states the views of The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the US Department of State, and many language learners and experts would disagree with the ranking. Category IV offers a huge variety of languages from Amharic to Czech to Nepali to Tagalog, each demanding 44 weeks (or 1100 hours) of study.
)News for the next era, not just the next hourThere is no absolute answer to which language is the “easiest” or “most difficult,” because every learner is different. For the hardest languages, like Chinese, the course may even include several months of immersive study abroad. Category I: Languages closely related to English. A native English speaker will have a harder time learning Italian than a native Spanish speaker, since the two Romance languages are closely related. FSI language-learning categories are numbered like hurricanes—higher number, scarier language. T he School of Language Studies provides training in over 70 languages. - … 3 = You can have political conversations and high-level discussions on the subject with little to no mistakes.
Then, at the very summit of the linguistic mountain, we find the switched-up grammar, highly unfamiliar scripts, and potentially mystifying cultural assumptions of Category V, “languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers.”* If I want you to shut up, I will send you lots of money* I am not easily offended, I understand that I can stop reading any timeTo that most formidable group belong Arabic, Chinese both Mandarin and Cantonese, Korean, and — this with an asterisk meaning “usually more difficult than other languages in the same category” — Japanese. Sure, as Sally Struthers used to say so often, we all do.But the requirements of attaining proficiency in any foreign tongue, no doubt unlike those correspondence courses pitched by that All in the Family star turned daytime TV icon, can seem frustratingly demanding and unclear. The map below shows how long it takes to learn almost 70 different languages, estimated by the Foreign Service Institute, which teaches these languages to would-be or current diplomats. But according to US diplomatic training guides, there are many languages that Americans should be able to learn in under a year.Countries on the map are colored according to how much time it takes to learn the local language: The darker-colored the country, the longer it takes.The CIA Factbook was used to identify a dominant language for each country. The Foreign Service Institute's School of Language Studies also maintains a network of language field schools in Taipei, Yokohama, Seoul, and other regional programs in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia where a further 44 weeks of instruction is offered overseas in …
Luckily, landing such a job goes in one package with a fully-fledged language training, like one for diplomats in the US Foreign Service Institute. What’s more, the FSI sets out to hire smart, worldly people, and its estimates assume the student has “very good or better aptitude for classroom learning of foreign languages.” So the idea that it “takes 44 weeks to learn Finnish” is not very meaningful to most people.Learning a new language takes time. * I am OK with references to the A word, B word, C word ….Z word and their equivalents in all global languages and dialects* I shall not break into a sweat if you talk about priests, mullahs, rabbis, swamis, gurus, preachers ... and/or altar boys. Do you want to speak more languages? The final two categories include languages that are more closely related to English. The FSI difficulty measurements are also a bit confusing based on the “speak/read” requirement.