Which Language Takes the Longest to Learn?
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Ever wonder why some languages take so much longer to learn than others? The American State Department has ranked the languages they teach to diplomats into groups: an English speaker should be able to learn these languages with between 24 and 30 weeks of full-time study. For German, Haitian, Creole, Indonesian and Swahili, you’re looking at 36 weeks of lessons – that’s about 900 hours.The biggest category of languages will take around 44 weeks to learn: from Hebrew to Hindi, Slovenian to Somali, Uzbek to Ukrainian, or Turkish to Thai.And finally, we have the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn, including Korean, Japanese, Arabic and Chinese. These will take around 88 weeks of study or around 2,200 hours.What makes these languages so tricky to learn? It’s commonly said that an English speaker needs to learn about 2,000 characters to be able to read a newspaper in Chinese. But even this is an underestimate. With 2,000 characters under your belt, you’ll still run across an unfamiliar one every couple of lines or so.Arabic looks easier. It’s got only a couple of dozen letters, but they change shape depending on whether they appear at the beginning, middle or end of a word, or alone. And its verb system is fantastically complex.Most European languages share a common ancestor called proto-Indo-European, that means if you learn that water in Spanish is “agua”, you’ll easily be able to recognize the Italian “acqua” and they’re related to the English “aquatic”.European languages also share vocabulary for another reason: centuries of borrowing from one another. Culturally distant languages, on the other hand, have far fewer borrowed European words. All of which means that when learning a language, you must choose between easier but not so impressive or a bit of a slog, but bigger bragging rights, too.
