Which language should you learn?
Easiest to hardest for English speakers.
For a native English speaker, the easiest languages to learn are the Category I Romance languages — Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French — at roughly 600–750 hours to professional proficiency, per the US Foreign Service Institute. German is a step up (Category II), Russian harder still (Category III), and Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, and Arabic are the hardest (Category IV, ~2,200 hours). But “hardest” is about time, not whether you should: the right language is the one you have a real reason to use.
Category I — Easiest
About 600–750 hours to professional working proficiency.
Spanish
~600–750 hoursLatin alphabet, near-phonetic spelling, and thousands of English cognates.
Italian
~600 hoursHighly phonetic spelling and Latin-rooted cognates; the work is verbs and gender.
Portuguese
~600–750 hoursEasy to read, harder to hear — nasal vowels and (European) vowel reduction.
French
~750 hoursA huge cognate head-start, but pronunciation and listening are the real hurdle.
Category II — Moderate
About 750 hours to professional working proficiency.
German
~750 hoursGermanic cognates help, but four cases, three genders, and word order are the work.
Category III — Hard
About 1,100 hours to professional working proficiency.
Russian
~1,100 hoursCyrillic is a quick win; the six cases and verb aspect are the multi-month core.
Category IV — Super-hard
About 2,200 hours to professional working proficiency.
Arabic
~2,200 hoursA right-to-left abjad, no short vowels, and the MSA-vs-dialect (diglossia) choice.
Chinese (Mandarin)
~2,200 hoursTones are part of every word, and characters must be learned in context.
How to learn Chinese (Mandarin)Learn Chinese (Mandarin) free
Japanese
~2,200 hoursTwo kana scripts plus kanji, and grammar that works back-to-front from English.
Korean
~2,200 hoursHangul reads in a week; the honorific speech levels and grammar are the real work.
Compare two languages head-to-head
Torn between two? These side-by-side guides weigh writing system, difficulty, and what each is best for.